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I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

Voices have always been my way into a character. I usually approach the voice first.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

The voice is always the starting place for me with a character.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.