Me, me, me, It's all about me...or is it?
S ome people have the idea that publishers see the first person point of view (POV) as a bad thing. Literary agent Chip MacGregor says that he doesn’t believe this is the case, but he does go on to say why authors—particularly new authors—struggle with it: Many first-person novels from beginning writers suffer from an overuse of the "I-verb" syndrome ("I started... I walked... I ate... I moved... I handed... I answered..."). That endless parade of I-verbs creates a really dull novel. First-person fiction can be great, but in my view it's harder to master than third person. – Chip MacGregor’s Blog What is an author to do? Conversationally, we use first person all the time. “I went to the store and I bought milk, bread and jelly beans. I ate the jelly beans on the way home.” Three uses of the word I in two sentences. You can imagine that a reader will tire of seeing this if a whole novel is written this way. We could rewrite this as, “I went to the store and boug...