Initially, when I was eight years old, I started writing in the third person point of view and all my characters were animals. Did I mention that Black Beauty was one of my favorite books? A few years later, I composed slightly more complex tales in first person POV as told by me. Imagining that I was the main character is a task easy for a bookworm and avid reader to do. My next step? Basing the protagonist on someone that definitely was not me. I began identifying with complex multifaceted characters, even the ones that were not so nice. I am also imperfect and not always pleasant, so I felt sorry for Frankenstein’s monster.

Exhibiting realistic motivations was a kind of tipping point for me to identify with a fictional character.  I disliked reading about people who had it all together and knew the answers to deal with any problem. At the time these characters had no specific epithet. Today, we call them Mary Sue or Marty Stu.  So, I started reading “depressing” stories by classic authors because I admired the way they developed characters. Rukmani, of Nectar in the Sieve, is a woman in India who lives in a farming village and marries young. Yet, she struggles to adapt as industry takes over her world. She is one of my favorite characters, despite have a life and goals that are nothing like mine.

As my reading habits changed, so did my style of writing. I would alternate between realism and fantasy in short stories, and between first person and third person omniscient POV in attempt to imitating novels written in that difficult to master point of view. Finally, I realized it was easier for me to create a third person POV work in which the reader only got to see into the mind of one or two characters. For my first novel that I actually completed I chose a third-person limited POV for my main character as he experiences new locales. He is not at all like me, but a person with rare talents that I don’t possess such as fluency in a foreign languages. He is still clueless in many ways and often, he struggles to decipher what’s going on in other people’s minds.  

Second person POV is the weird one, using the viewpoint of you, the reader. During the downtime of COVID I experimented with it and found that it was the key to a fictional memoir based on the phone dialogue between two people. Then, I began to write stories that were not based in this real world but in alternate universes. World building required creating multiple viewpoints in my third person POV. Alternate worlds may differ from ours, but each character finds their homeland familiar while this same place is strange and terrifying to others. I even returned to my original characters from my childhood and wrote scenes told from the viewpoint of an animal.

So any debate about which POV is best is a waste of time. The same tale may be told using different ones, and still work just as well.