Which POV to write from?

Staring at a blank page isn’t fun. But neither is writing a story and midway through you realize it’s garbage, because it’s not as good as what you were expecting. All because you need to change your point of view. This happens to me quite often because I like to dabble in third person, but typically write in first person. All of my life when I’ve written a story its always been in first person. This means I make a lot of mistakes along the way while I try to write something new from a different perspective. And for a perfectionist, this is extremely difficult.

I usually always write in first person because it helps me get the reader into the head of my main character. That to me is the most important part. The reader should love my character as much as I do. Or hate another character as much as my main character hates them. You know… solidarity! But I also love the idea that I can grow that one character and have the readers grow with him/her as well. The only issue with this is sometimes I get a little bored writing from the same perspective. So it would be nice to dabble in the third person to expand the story.

I’ve tried doing third person point of view for a story… and apparently I head hop. Like a lot! I didn’t mean to, it kinda just happened. I wanted to explore third person so I could trail multiple characters in my story. It’s always fun to take detours and see what the secondary characters are up to and not just the main one. However, the one story that I tried doing this with, I ended up head hopping. When I say head hop, it means that I kept going into each character’s individual thoughts. This can be confusing at times. I need to work on that. To help better myself, I am trying to read more stories from the third person point of view. I honestly didn’t think it was going to be that difficult to do, but apparently it is. I have a lot of work to do, but I welcome the process because it’ll only make me better in the end.

For now I will continue to write in first person, but I will try to write in third person as I find the time to play around with different points of view.

So what kind of point of view do you write in? First, third? Or is it another type? And why? Do you have a favorite? I’d love to know.