“Should I write my book in the first person? Third person? Historical tense? Present tense? There are so many options.”

I continue my new fall writing tips series; advice from an award-winning novelist

This fall I’m starting a NEW SERIES of writing prompts and advice to get you writing in these cosy colder months. Each post will answer a real question I’ve been asked recently, by a real person, about writing. Todays’ question is: “How should I write my book? 1st person? 3rd? Historical? Present? There are so many options.” This question was asked of me by my handyman, M. He has a difficult personal story to tell about his childhood, and he would like to write about it and try to get it published. Anyone can ask a question—I have a few to answer already, but I’ll do my best to answer yours—feel free to comment on any paid or unpaid post with your question. I’ll see it. If you’d like to read my answers, sign up for a paid subscription here. Minimum sub is for one month at $5, and all are welcome!

Let’s get on to answering this interesting and, indeed, very worthy question. I’ve left the first few paragraphs of my answer free to read to all subscribers, so you can get the gist of what my advice might be like before you sign up for a paid subscription.

Love, AJ xo

Much of truth is written in fiction.

The role of the novelist may seem as if it is to make up every word on every page of a novel.

But so much of the story you intend to write, has already been written.

The experiences which you will draw from have already happened to you and others; unique only in the specificity of their detail. The current limits of your knowledge, and of logic, exist. Parts of the novel already whisper to you in your mind.

Write them down.

We have to begin where we are. But there is reason to envision that place as something other than a blank page. That can make the experience of beginning less intimidating, but it also indicates what choices we should make going forward.

This series of advice columns is all about answering YOUR questions. So, please, feel free, to ask them in the comments below. If you are not a paid subscriber, I will still respond, and if I respond in an essay, I will send you the link to read it for free.

Thank you to H, who asked this week’s question of me. This is somebody I met when the warehouse I live in hired him to do some work on the building. As I’m self-employed, I often work from home and so I would let H in to the apartment each day of the work.

Through cups of tea and chatting, we shared stories of the difficulties in our lives: for me, coping with the grief of baby loss and the question of how to carry my children with me into the future; for them, the pain of childhood trauma and a contemporary court case, in which they are participating as witness and survivor.

We discussed how writing can be therapeutic, and a way to process traumatic events, promote awareness, and prevent the trauma happening to anyone else.

My practice as an editor and mentor for writing clients is trauma-informed—that means that I have taken steps to inform myself about how trauma impacts us as storytellers and people, and work sensitively with clients who have experience hardship and pain to support them in developing their work.

I speak at length about the benefits and challenges of writing from and about trauma in my podcast WRITING COERCIVE CONTROL, where I interview writers Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Sahar Delijani, Winnie M Li, Chimene Suleyman, Carla Jenkins, and poet Kim Moore, about their experiences writing on coercive control.

You might want to check it out, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, when you have read this article.

H was in the process of writing a witness statement, and was considering beginning to collate their experiences into a book. But they didn’t know where to start, as they are in their 50s and had not engaged with writing for a long time. Particularly, they were struggling with how many options there seem to be for writing their story.

“I’m struggling with choosing between first person narrator, third person narrator, historical, present tense,” they said. “It keeps me from putting words on the page at all. I know it’s going to be emotionally hard for me to write about it. I don’t want to start and spend time in that world, only to have to go back to the beginning and change everything, for example, the third person. I’m also worried about how difficult it will be for people to read. Is it better to write it from the point of view of a child, or from the perspective of the adult I am now?”

They were also debating on genre. “I wonder how much I should reveal, and how persuasive fiction is compared to non-fiction. Do I write a memoir? Or a novel?”

I’ve distilled this down into the title of this piece: ““Should I write my book in the first person? Third person? Historical tense? Present tense? There are so many options.”

I’m going to assume you are quite familiar with these terms, but, just in case anybody isn’t, here’s a quick glossary.

A first person narrative is written from the “I” point of view. I saw this, I went there, etcetera.

A second person narrative, is written from the “you” point of view. You saw this, you went there.

A third person narrative, is written from the “they/she/he” point of view. She saw this… They went there…

In a present tense novel, everything is happening now. I am in the shop, wondering what to get.

In a past tense novel, the story happened then, at some point in the past. I was in the shop, wondering what to get.

When we talk about fiction versus memoir, things get a little blurrier, but here are my simple explanations, which should suffice for this conversation.

Fiction or novels are books marketed as being made up by the author, not belonging to reality. They may have lots of truth in them, but there was probably a lot of imaginative creation involved in creating the work.

Memoir is a book that the author says is completely true—but obviously, might also contain dialogue and details that are partially invented, due to the impossibility of remembering the absolute truth of specifics over time.

There is a third option, if one is writing a story, which is Autofiction. This is what I am currently working on (although in the past, I wrote fiction). It’s a blend of memoir and fiction, and it allows us to be playful with the truth.

So, H is right. There are several different options for how you can write your book, which you might want to think about before you begin. In my early fiction, I did just what H is worrying about and occasionally wrote something in third person and then had to go back and change the whole section to first person, or wrote something in the past and had to then change it so that it was in the present.

Let me help you avoid that, with four exercises that support you to start writing and make some important decisions…

Upgrade here for questions to ask yourself, writing exercises, and more advice from a full-time, award-winning, working writer.

Firstly, let me say it is so important to remember that there is no right answer to these questions, except that you should at some point trust yourself ~ and, also, trust yourself if you feel that you’ve made a mistake and have to go back and undo it.

When I first began writing, I worked with an agent who informed me that they thought all the books should be written in the present tense. When I was working on a later manuscript, the same agent didn’t remember making this statement, and in fact lots of the books that they had put out since had been in the past tense, as it is more traditional tense for novels to be written in.

The same agent had opinions on whether I should use the first or the third person. You might be lucky enough to be working with an agent or a publisher, or to have friends who will give you notes on your work, but remember that ~ as successful as these people are ~ they don’t write books. And if your friends write books, they don’t write your books.

You should make decisions you feel comfortable and happy with. You know best what serves your story. That is what makes you the author ~ and gives that authorial voice so necessary to writing a book, that I spoke about in Part 1 of this series.

Be careful, too, about listening to offhand comments from people not prepared to do the years-long work of novel writing. When I wrote GOLDEN BOY, I ignored the advice of several famous, successful, and much older industry professionals, to write a book about an intersex person. It has won awards, sold in 10 languages, and earned six figure advances on both sides of the Atlantic ~ 20% of which went to the professionals who said I shouldn’t write it.

Of course, trusting yourself is an easier task when you have some experience and knowledge, and are confident with why you are making your choices. But a hot take, in case you need it—it’s totally fine to go with your gut.

But for now, let’s get to know a little more about why we might choose one over the other. How do working writers pick from the above options?

Authors tend to have individual preferences and often repeat them in multiple books. This isn’t a rule, but you may find a style that suits you and stick to it.

I write in the first person, only, which I think suits my personal style, introspective characters, and the fact that the message of my books is often empathy—I want readers to know what’s going on inside my characters and feel compassion for a perspective they may not have considered. I also write in the present tense, as it helps the reader to put themselves in the shoes of my protagonist. So, I can justify my style, but it also came to me naturally.

Here are some exercises to help you find your style, and maybe answer these questions for your current writing work.

Return to those whispers I mentioned above. They are the beginnings of your novel, itching to get on the page, calling to you to listen. Are they an inkling of a plot? A particular relationship? A short piece of dialogue? A character? A situation? An image?

If you haven’t written them down yet, begin. If you are writing in a scrolling document, like Pages or Words, envision if you can where each whisper would land in the arc of a story, and place them in relation to one another.

If the image feels like it opens the book, paste or type it into the top of the document. If a relationship begins a third of the way in, skip a few pages and drop that text there. If a dialogue between characters helps conclude the story, pop it at the end of the document.

This is how I begin a novel. I now use the app Scrivener, which allows me to create chapter files and move them around. This isn’t an ad, but I really recommend it. With my current novel, I really quickly created a skeleton for the book by dropping in those whispers into different chapter files and moving them around to create the arc of the book’s story.

When I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s BIG MAGIC, I was pleasantly surprised to find that she thinks about writing novels in a very similar way to how I did, when I was just writing fiction. I believed the stories existed in the ether, and it was my job to listen to the characters and write down what they said.

This was certainly how I felt about writing GOLDEN BOY. So much of writing is listening to the story in your head as it unfolds, and trusting that it will unfold (actually, I’ve said so much on trust already here that I wanted to remind you ~ see my last post for more on trusting yourself).

If you’re like me, you can repeat this exercise over and over again until there is enough information on the page to begin making choices. Don’t worry yet about whether they’re in the past or present, first or third person, etcetera. That’s what we’re here to think about.

Once you have written down all the little morsels in your mind, read them back.

This is your story. All the choices we make as novelists should serve our story.

(That’s my belief, anyway. And I think I’d write MUCH longer, completely unpublishable books if it wasn’t.)

So, now, another exercise: while you’re reading all that writing back to yourself (sometimes it helps to do so out loud), notice what comes most naturally to you.

Does it feel natural to speak in the first person? Are your characters people who talk colloquially? Does each character or narrator, if you have more than one, sound different from the others? Or, do you have a more formal voice? Does your voice have less character in it, and possibly more of a detached feel?

Does it feel natural to tell us a story that happened in the past or present? If you’re writing something set in the past, is it easy for you to speak like the people of the time? If not, perhaps go for third person. What kind of atmosphere is your voice creating? Do you have a wistful, nostalgic voice that sounds like it’s looking back?

Do you inhabit your characters when you write, or do you watch them and describe what you’re doing? Do you sound young? (All three of my published novels feature adolescent protagonists, because I preferred, then, writing in character.) What kind of energy does your writing have? Does it feel immediate? Does it feel unrushed?

Now, think about your story. Remember, everything in a novel must serve the story. Does your story seek to thrill or scare us? If so, it might need to feel more immediate ~ does it work for you to switch to the present tense? Is a child narrating? Because children live in the present, it might work to write in present tense.

Is the story about something that happened a long time ago? It doesn’t, then, necessarily need to be in the past, but what perspective do you want to show the reader? Do you want them to empathise with how it was to live in, for instance, the 1930s? Or to understand the narrator to see events more objectively now, or in a different way, than they did when those events were happening? Someone looking back now at the ‘30s may note how the war developed from the politics of the age. But someone living at the time might have a much more limited perspective. Does hindsight serve your story?

When it comes to memoir versus fiction versus autofiction ~ how much do you want people to know? is many a writer’s first consideration, and one of the reasons my earlier books are works of fiction.

With my latest book, ORDINARY WOMAN TURNS 30, which I’m working on now with funding by Arts Council England, one question I asked myself was, do these events tie up neatly into an arc with a beginning, middle, and end, if I tell the story with complete veracity? Do I need to pull in other true events, that didn’t happen in the timeline of the novel, to serve the story?

There are infinite questions a writer can ask themselves about their own story ~ actually, that’s how I discern a story that can be a novel. Is this world infinite? Am I going to be cutting down more than I’m adding in filler, to get to roughly 100,000?

(Noting that novels can be 30k to 150k words ~ this is just the average length of my novels. And it’s not really planned ~ I do aim for 30/30/25 but 100 ~ 110 total is just how they come out!)

But keep asking yourself questions along the lines of ~ of what am I trying to persuade the reader? What atmosphere best serves the story? What’s going to happen and who’s going to see it happen?

For our third exercise, I want you to think about how your own life experiences make these choices for you, or limit the choices you can make. All writers, whether fiction or non-fiction, use their own experiences to inform their work. A common piece of advice given to writers, is to write from experience, because then the work sounds more true and a truer work impacts readers more deeply.

It’s very important to me to write from experience, because in a contemporary world that in some ways is so anti-truth, I don’t want to add to that problem, and I want to fight against it. That’s actually a big theme of my latest work. So, in a sense, I didn’t have any choice but to write my work as autofiction.

What constraints does your own experience hand the work? Did the story in the book happen to you? If it didn’t happen to you, is it right that you use the first person? Do you know enough to write it in the present tense? Do you have a way into this character? Or is it overheard? Seen from afar? Are you writing about what it’s like to go through a particular experience, or what it’s like to watch someone going through a particular experience?

Similarly, do you have enough verifiable information to write this story as memoir? Do you need to have some fiction fill in the gaps, and, therefore, could or fiction be a good option?

If you are writing about a traumatic experience that you went through, will it be too difficult to write in the first person? Would it be too difficult to write in the present?

I sometimes think, when writing about trauma, about my writing is looking slightly off to the left of the trauma. One doesn’t need to feature traumatic scenes to write about trauma. One could write about the person who is going through the trauma and what’s happening in their life at that time.

Remember that anything that is difficult for you to write is difficult for a reader to read. If you would like me to talk more about writing from trauma, please let me know in the comments.

In our last exercise, let’s talk for a moment about the limits of logic and knowledge. When you are sitting there with that blank page, thinking that the story could go anywhere, it does feel intimidating. But now, after completing the first two exercises, you have a document full of snippets from your impending work.

Go back into your document and start at the beginning. Read each small piece of writing. Can you add anything to them? as in, what happens next? One thing I love about writing often, when I’m sitting in front of a scene, there is something very obvious that has to happen to get my characters to the scene after that. Whatever comes to mind, whether it be dialogue, or another scene that has to go in between events, write it down into the document.

There are only certain things that can happen logically, within a realistic novel or a memoir or autofiction. This does not preclude magic realism, but it does mean that if somebody is going to take a bite of cake, they have to first open their mouth. If a character is going to confront another character, they might have to get the bus to go meet them.

As we’ve touched on, if you have a specific narrator, there are only certain things that they can logically know. So think about that, when choosing whether to write in the first or third person, or whether to have multiple narrators.

I hope these exercises have helped you to get started. Remember always, that your choices should serve your story. What do you want to say? Who and how to best say it? Hopefully you have more of an idea of the answers to these questions, now.

I want to ask you one last, very important question: what do you like doing? Joy shines through in your work, and joy makes a long career as a writer, or just a long period writing a book, sustainable.

I really enjoy writing in the first person, present tense, and I’m thrilled by the challenge and what I think of as the “mischief” of writing autofiction. I hope you are excited to write, too.

Good luck with your work, and I’ll be back next week to answer another reader question.