Who’s on First…Person
I’ve alternated both short stories and novels in POVs from Third Person Limited to First Person Singular, most often due to the number of POV characters or, sometimes, what I wanted my reader to know. Consequently, I wrote my most recent novel—a cozy mystery—in Third Person: ’Lily said…’ or ‘Lily nodded back’ and so on. But in the back of my mind I felt like something was off… the novel didn’t feel as intimate as I wanted it to read. And in Third Person any clues the protagonist was aware of is all the reader knew. So, after 9 major edits, I decided to swap Third for First. It took 8 hours over a couple of days. To change the POV, I had to change “Lily” to “I” and “her” to “my.” Some—but not all—“She” had to change, too. And, of course, any possessives. Because even ‘Lily’ was sometimes not Third Person narration, but a character addressing or talking about the protagonist, I couldn’t just auto-change the POV.
I read it out loud afterwards, and it feels much better. It seems like such a little thing, but the decision reverberates through the story, It looked fine as Third Person in stories with multiple POVs and/or lots of action. POV does more than involve the reader more intimately with the protagonist, but does POV make a difference in having a story accepted by an agent or publisher? WritersDigest.com notes “You’re almost never going to get asked by an editor or an agent to change your novel from third-person to first-person,” explaining that the writer should trust their creative gut. Novels as disparate as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘The Hunger Games’ were written (or at least published) in First Person.
Part of the answer lies in what the protagonist sees or can know. Since the reader only knows what Lily—my protagonist—knows, First Person was an easy choice. But is that the best POV for a cozy mystery? Opinions vary. On GoodReads, author Lorna explained she wrote in First Person because “The reader only knows what our protagonist knows as he knows it. That allows the reader to solve the mystery right along with the detective.” But Michaela wrote “For cozies, I actually like third person better. I kind of like being separate from everything and just sort of looking in.”
On the Maine Crime Writers blog, author Kaitlyn Dunnett wrote “The majority of cozy mysteries are written in first person point of view and use a single narrator, usually a female… She’s essentially talking to the reader, telling us what happened to her.” While Agatha Christie wrote many of her mysteries in Third Person, she and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in First Person sometimes, so, Cozies can be either POV, I guess.
Well, um, good to know. Essentially, it’s up to the author and what he or she wants the reader to know. I like my Narrowboat Murders novel in First Person. I hope my readers do, too.
