Point of View: An Oh, Sh*t Moment

I have a confession to make: I like to write in the first person point of view.

So, now that I have been stoned to death…

All I have read lately in that it is WRONG, Wrong, WRONG to write in this POV.

Crap. Maybe it is all the years of journal writing (as in diaries) that makes this form feel the most comfortable and natural to me.

So what is a chick lit writing girl to do? Do I cave? Is it really that bad? Am I really screwing up? Is it okay? What do I do?

Do I REALLY have to go through FOUR frickin’ manuscripts and change the point of view? I don’t even know how to do that. I looked through some of my most loved books–the ones where I really got into the heroine and *gasp* they are NOT in the first person POV. How the heck did they do that? It felt like I was in their head!

But if it means sitting on this getting-to-be-threadbare couch day in and day out and in the end selling a manuscript, I am in. I’ll do it. I’ll lick the broken glass.

But this is really going to hurt, isn’t it?

The First Five Pages: Showing Versus Telling

Although I have heard this one before, it is one that needs repeating in my ear fairly often. In fact, it is something that came out of the first chapter that I had critiqued by another writer. I was trying to get on to the good stuff by breezing over and telling instead of showing.

That gets tricky. You have to totally be mindful of your characters and their motivations all the time and what you are trying to show in every interaction and scene. I’m not that thoughtful when I write. I’m not even sure who my characters are when I first start out. I just blab on and see where it takes me and the characters. This, it appears, leads to a fair amount of editing.

This chapter made me think of a real life example from many, many moons ago. We were on our way to Mexico and we left in the middle of a snow storm. We got as far as Montana when we came up against a barricaded road. The guy at the roadblock told my dad that the road was closed and that we couldn’t get through. From where we were, the road looked fine. The interaction between the road guy and my dad went something like this:

“Sorry, this road is closed. You’ll have to turn around.”
“Is there any other route from X to Y?”
“Nope. You have to turn around.”
“Are you sure the road is closed”
“I’m sure. It’s closed.”
“How closed? It looks good. I’m sure I could get through.”
“Nobody is getting through.”
“I’m from Canada and I’m driving a truck.”
“Look, the drifts are over 20 feet high and even our snowplows aren’t getting through.”
“Oh, where can we stay around here?”

So basically, the guy went from simply telling my dad the road was closed to showing him. Not literally showing him, but giving him concrete visuals. Still telling my dad, but showing him at the same time.