First person or third person?

I used to find third person quite challenging. Describing the inner thoughts of characters from a detached, omniscient position seemed complicated, and it was hard to keep the style mature rather than bossy. Then I edited and published a novel another author had written in the first person, and I wished I had started my own book that way. That novel was full of insight into the protagonist’s mind, and it flowed with a grace that looked effortless. ‘I’ is a door. The reader walks through it and is suddenly inside.

The restrictions are the price. First person may not suit every story, and it would not have let me tell the story I wanted to tell. A single perspective, held for a whole novel, adds a layer of complication to the plotting. You can only know what that person can know. You can only be in the room they are in. Scenes you need, happening elsewhere, have to be reported, overheard, or abandoned. It is easy to paint yourself into a corner and discover, at chapter twenty, that the truth of the book happened out of sight.

Only choose the first person if you can see a route to the ending that does not require a hole — a fact the narrator could not possess, a scene they could not have witnessed, a mind they cannot honestly enter. If you need several windows, write in the third person, limited to one character at a time so the reader still feels a mind rather than a camera on a crane. Write the opening paragraph both ways. Keep the version a stranger would not put down, and that the rest of the book can actually sustain.