The books I had to rewrite because I couldn’t hear my heroine
On Adi, Spirit Elfen, and the difference between third person and first
What’s wrong with the books?!?
Spirit Hunger came out in 2017. It was my first novel. I wrote it in third person because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do, and I wrote the two books after it the same way for the same reason.
Over the years, I wrote many more books, but always in first person. It never seemed worth the trouble revisiting my first three books, cause they were moderately successful and nobody ever complained about the point of view.
Except this year I did decide to go back. I’ve grown so much as a writer, that first trilogy has been niggling at me for nearly a decade.
So now I’m rewriting the whole Spirit Walker series from scratch, in first person, almost nine years later. Spirit Elfen is the one on my desk right now, and I’m most of the way through the edit.
The third-person Spirit Hunger is a real book, with real readers and reviews, some of them very kind. I’m standing over a finished thing and saying, as politely as I can, that I got the narrator wrong. This is not a comfortable thing to admit in public.
Nine years of first-person novels is how I found out.
I started the rewrite of *Spirit Hunger* a few months back, thinking it would be a tidy polish and would take me about six weeks. It took about a page of the new first-person version to figure out what the old one had been hiding from me.
Third person let me describe Adi from the outside. I was trying to be fair to her, which is possibly the most dangerous thing a writer can do with a protagonist. I thought I was being generous, but I was actually drowning her out.
Adi does not want you to understand her. She wants you to think she’s fine.
Her whole personality runs on lies she tells herself before she even opens her mouth. Third person, by design, keeps pulling back to tell you the truth. It knows things she doesn’t. It knows what her face is doing. It can’t help noticing the way her jaw sets a fraction of a second before she smiles.
Adi doesn’t want her jaw to set. Adi wants to smile first, and fast, and hope you didn’t catch it.
In first person, she finally gets to lie. She gets to say *”I’m fine”* and have that be the entire sentence on the page, with no quiet narrator standing behind her to mention that her jaw has done the thing again. What holds the whole shape of her character together is what she won’t admit. Third person kept tattling on her.
Not a simple rewrite
The rewrite isn’t a find-and-replace from “she” to “I.” I had to unlearn things I didn’t know I’d learned. The Spirit Walker books are the only third-person novels I’ve ever written. My first three, and the ones that taught me lots. Every page of the new draft has little ghost sentences where I catch myself being the author instead of being Adi.
*”I noticed my hand was shaking.”* Adi wouldn’t NOTICE her hand was shaking. She’d pretend it wasn’t, and the whole sentence would never have existed in her voice. Out it goes.
*”I realised then that I was afraid.”* Adi does not realise she’s afraid. She changes the subject, and that is the only sentence you’re getting out of her. Deleted.
*”A flicker of something passed behind her eyes.”* Nothing passes behind Adi’s own eyes from her own point of view. She can’t see her own face. Gone.
So who is Adi?
She is much funnier than I am, as it turns out. Drier and meaner when she’s scared, softer in the exact places I kept trying to give her armor. A lot of the “work” of rewriting has actually been deleting my careful authorial sentences and leaving the thing she would have said in their place, which is usually shorter and never what I would have chosen.
The plot was fine. But rewriting the prose meant getting rid of the narrator.
I don’t recommend rewriting a whole book in a new POV unless you genuinely can’t hear your protagonist any other way. It’s expensive, painful, and my back is not what it used to be. But I’d rather spend six extra months finding Adi’s voice than leave her locked inside the version I could write in 2017.
I’m not actually mad at the 2017 book. I did the best job I could at the time. It’s the reason the Spirit Walker series exists at all. And it turns out what it was really doing, all that time, was teaching me exactly what Adi is NOT, so I’d recognise her when I finally shut up.
Until then.
xo Ella
*Want more of this? I send a weekly letter with the stuff I don’t post publicly — deleted scenes, character asides, the occasional emotional wreckage. You can join the inner circle here and I’ll throw in a free copy of Spirit Hunger on the way in.
Originally published on Writing Through the Veil on 2026-04-16.