Changing One’s Perspective

// Creative Commons photo by Jim Makos. //

I remember when I first read The Hunger Games, I liked almost everything: the action, the dystopian world-building, the character development.

What I didn’t enjoy was the use of first person, present tense point of view. It seemed silly to me.

Well, guess what? Several years later, I find myself employing the same POV as Suzanne Collins, and many YA authors who followed her, for my suspense novel.

I suppose that makes me the silly one.

Actually, I realized that the immediacy that both the writer and the reader feel when “I” am telling the story is powerful. You are able to get inside the head of the protagonist and follow him or her on a compelling journey in which all other distractions are cast by the wayside.

When I wrote Fool’s Luck, I would sit for hours on end, banging away on the keyboard as I tried to capture the words flooding out of my head. I lost track of time and external reality as the story itself became the world I was living in.

I only hope by using the first person (and the present tense in the first and last chapters) that readers will get as lost in the story as I did.

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