I have 97 pages in my book draft. Is it too late to swap to third person from first?
I've been writing a One Piece fan fiction to improve my writing.
I foolishly decided to write it in first person and now I kinda want to change it to third person - but I'm already 97 pages into the book. Should I do it? This is the first piece of long-ish writing that I've done so i may just be crazy or something.
During a break I took from from that book, I worked on a different story, written in third person, and I think I liked it better. Now I want to redo pretty much the entire beginning and change the POV.
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That's a substantial bit of revision. It can definitely be done, but the question is if that's what you want to prioritize right now.
During a first draft, there will be a lot of things you'll want to go back and fix. The problem is, go back for enough of them, and you'll stop making any progress at all.
So my first suggestion would be: don't go back yet. Save the revision for later, when you've got a first draft, and you can do all the revising at once. You might wind up needing to rewrite 10 or 20 pages or more, and then any time spent revising those will have been a total waste!
Instead, soldier on. In first person or in third? Well, my second suggestion is make a decision by trying it out.
First, write the next 5-10 pages in third person; see how that works for this story, and if you're getting the effect you want. Second, revise 5-10 older pages from first person to third, to get a sense of how much effort that is.
This will give you a good sampling of what you're choosing between. Once you've done that, make a decision (one way or another) and stick to that going forward. If you choose to make the switch, that's absolutely fine; keep writing in third person from here on, and after you're done go back and revise the earlier pages.
Writing means revision. Lots and lots of revision. Accept it; embrace it; and manage it as wisely as you can :)
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I am always reminded of Anais Nin's line: "We are not writers. We are re-writers."
My experience has been that one should stay with the flow. If changing to TP is disruptive to ideas that are coming through, by no means change until the next draft.
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It is never too late to change from first person to third. Writing in first person is almost always a bad idea. It is a confining suffocating point of view. When it does work, it is usually as a frame or a covert form or omniscient. But those are not techniques for beginners to mess with.
Change it. Change it now. Thank your stars you have come to your senses before you did more damage.
And don't listen to the people saying that now is the wrong time to change, that you should finish your story first. A story is a rising arc of tension. That tension is created by the manner of telling every bit as much as it is created by the incidents of the plot. There are seven plots in all of fiction (the numbers vary, but they are all small). Everything lies in the telling. And third person is the right voice for telling the vast majority of stories.
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