Today I am super excited to have Amanda Flower as a guest blogger! This is the first stop on her Plain Scandal book tour presented by Cozy Mystery Book Tours. Hmm…what else was I supposed to announce? Oh yes…I have FIVE copies of A Plain Scandal up for grabs! You do not want to miss your chance to win a copy because this is a superb book. Contest rules are below…Good Luck!
A Certain Point of View
By Amanda Flower
Before my first Amish mystery, A Plain Death, released I had published cozy mysteries in the general market. Not all of the time, but most often, cozies are written in the first person point of view (POV). When I decided that I wanted to write Christian fiction too, I read many inspirational novels and found that most of those were written in the third person POV. That gave me a dilemma because I am very much a first person writer. Did I write my way or write the way that I thought an inspirational publisher would want?
After a lot of debate, I wrote a third person manuscript with two points of views. It was a disaster. In fact, my agent read but we don’t talk about it. It was that bad. I like to pretend it never happened.
Some authors write in third person beautifully, Shelley Shepard Gray comes to mind, but I can’t. The head jumping gave me a headache, and I felt like I couldn’t understand my protagonist as well as I wanted to. All of my protagonists have a distinct voice and when I write, they tell their story. When they “talk” to me they use “I” and “me.” To change it to “she” and “her” was a mental twister, and it showed in the manuscript.
Also, for a cozy mystery where the amateur sleuth is trying to solve the crime, first person is a better fit. I can discover the clues right along with her. I feel like I’m there, and we experience each new discovery together. I lost the feeling of being the sleuth myself when I changed the point of view.
Frustrated, I scrapped that third person manuscript, thinking maybe I wasn’t going to cut it in Christian fiction. Then my agent asked for an Amish mystery proposal. The first thing I asked her was if it could be in first person. She had no problem with that—perhaps she even remembered the other third person failure. With her blessing, I was able to write an Amish mystery my way in first person and with a cast of quirky characters both Amish and English.
My experiment as a third person author was a valuable lesson, which every writer has to learn. You can’t instantaneously change your author voice, no more than you can change your own personality. I tried to make myself write something that felt wrong. I should have listened to the little voice in my head and ran away screaming.
I’m not saying that I will never write a novel in third person. Maybe as I evolve as an author, I’ll be able to tackle that pesky third person POV. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the POV meant for me.
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Contest starts today Monday, February 11th and ends on Sunday, February 17th. Winners will be announced on Monday.