Perspective is a tricky thing. The original draft of the The Ridge Runner was in 3rd person, but never worked quite right, so I rewrote it in first. That made the story much better, but introduced a new set of challenges.

Now I’m knee deep in Velocity and a light bulb went on that begged a whole new question. Is perspective always a matter of either or? Or could perspective be a case of both? What if the scenes that involved Mike Brody were in first person, cause he’s a first person kind of guy, and everything else was in 3rd person. Sounds crazy huh?

Until I found a book James Patterson that did just that. And it sold big time. So it can’t be impossible. Perhaps a little unusual, but not impossible.

I decided to keep what I have in first person so far, about 170 pages, and go back and write some new material in 3rd person. It’s a little experiment. And if I like how it works out, I’ll do more of it.

So it begs the question – is perspective relative or absolute?

UPDATE: 4/14/2004 – Editor person just called to remind me that they told me to consider doing this about 6 months ago.