As publishers – we have no hard and fast rule on this – we just want the book to read easily and well and to take the reader smoothly from start to finish. What we have noticed, however, is that writers often find it easier to step back from their own story and conflicts to write as if the hero or heroine is someone else. It de-personalises some of the spoken comments in the book and distances them from some of the deeply emotional or personal parts.
Our advice is write it the way that comes naturally to you and allows you the greatest creative freedom.
I have proofed autobiographical novels written in the third person. Authors often forget and the odd ‘I’ or ‘me’ slips in. This irritation might well have resulted in the MSS being rejected, owing to the fear that the author had not edited the work well enough before submitting.
It must be more difficult to write as if uninvolved, and I think it makes the resulting story seem less sincere. Actually, when a life story is being told, I like to feel that the author is speaking to me personally, as it does when written in the first person.
I wrote my true story in the third person. I started in first person but when I got to the very personal bits I couldn´t go on. I needed to distance myself slightly and get involved in the story more and the emotions less. Yet of course this person was very much me so I chose the first two letters of my middle name and the third letter of my first name to come up with the name of the narrator – me! Once I took this step back it flowed better but still I never strayed from the path of memory and my feeling at the moment of the event versus the moment of writing. The down side of doing this is that I overstepped the mark from honesty to full disclosure. Perhaps if I had kept it in first person I would have been more aware of these boundaries. On the other hand I also changed the names of all the other players in the story to safe-guard their privacy, so it felt right that all the names were different, including mine. I am however in the process of re-editing my book to bring it back from full disclosure to something that I can be more comfortable with!
You will obviously be unable to write a disclaimer saying that none of the characters relate to any actual person living or dead… Are you happy (or will they be happy) if they recognise themselves as they read?