NaNo Day Nine and a New Point of View

Up until last night, I've been writing my NaNoNovel in third person omniscient point of view. The real problem that I've been having is that a couple of my characters, namely Analeah, my female main character, has not sounded at all like herself. She has been living with me for about ten years so I have a very good idea of how she speaks but when writing her dialog, she has sounded very stilted and not at all like she does when she talks to me.

Before going to bed, my daughter came out into my office and watched a movie on her portable DVD player. Since I knew there would be constant interruptions, I didn't even try to open my MS document on my computer but instead picked up a notebook and pen and started writing. About half-way through the page, I realized that I was writing the scene in first person from Analeah's point of view and the words were pouring out. Between the "Mom, did you see that?s" I managed to write a couple of pages.

After she went to bed, I got busy typing up what I had written so far then was able to easily finish the scene. Not wishing to jinx the word flow (I needed 1,500 words before I went to bed) I wrote the second scene from the point of view of my male main character, Rann. Again, the same experience of hearing his voice, not the voice I had been trying to give him when writing dialog.

I ended the night with a word count of 15,239, 1,700 up from the day before without having felt I had been trying to herd cats. (Please note that in our household, this is a literal daily occurrence so I know of whence I speak).

I've read a lot of fantasy novels, but I could only recall Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy using a first person POV so I posted a question on the Fantasy forum on the NaNo site. I got some wonderful responses, all extremely encouraging as to continuing to use 1POV as well as the names of several other authors who have used 1POV in their fantasy novels.

I was especially thrilled to receive a reply from Brandon Sanderson, a very well known fantasy author whose first novel, Elantris, won the Romantic Times award for best epic fantasy of 2005 and was chosen by Barnes and Noble.com editors as the best fantasy or sf book of the year. Wow! His books have been on my wishlist forever. Looks like I'm going to have to grab one, now :)

We are now into the dreaded Week Two of NaNo and I'm still in it for the long haul.