The main character of my novel is suffering from depression which resulted in shock and she has attempted suicide twice already. All of this has made her unbalanced mentally. I was wondering if I can write from her point of view.
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2 Answers
I believe you are really asking how to write from the POV of a mentally disturbed individual.
The most important thing for you as the author to do is settle on the specific details of how this character perceives and reacts the events of the world around them. With regard to their mental illness, this means researching the subject to build your own understanding of how the illness presents, specifically detailing for yourself a precise set of symptoms or impairments. Attributed to the character's condition.
This is because that information will help you formulate how the character acts and reacts to her environment. This kind of approach helps make the character's behavior more imaginable by the reader as the reader grows to understand and sympathize with the character. Not that isn't not good for characters to surprise us, they should. But, the surprises are best when they things we feel we could have foreseen or anticipated. Creating a sense of a enjoyment at being surprised is an important element of creating engaging characters.
The POV you select for the story will also impact how you share the character's experience.
In a third person POV, you have a presumably stable narrator sharing the character's inner state. This means you have an avenue for comparing and contrasting the character's reactions against some nominal interpretation of actual events. This can be a very effective way to expose your character's affliction without it seeming like a crutch or flattened and two dimensional because the narrator can bridge any gap in sympathy.
I think first person POVs will be the hardest. Because your narrator doesn't unnecessarily comprehend why they feel the way the door what the correct and accurate interpretation of events in your story ought to be. The absence of a neutral arbitrator complicates sharing the internal state of an individual that is disturbed. This isn't insurmountable because you can have other characters in your story that help your POV character and expose these kinds of details to the reader. It is more challenging since this tactic can too easily feel like that support character is just there to provide exposition for the reader.
"One Flew Over the Coocoo's Nest" and "Cask of Amontillado" both have the POV in mentally unstable characters (In the case of the former, the protagonist "Chief" is a patient committed to a mental asylum, while in the later, the unnamed first person narrator is established as an unreliable narrator and behaves in a manner that could easily be established as mentally unwell (whether he claims he is burying the other character alive out of revenge and is justified, he never elaborates on the inciting incident to provoke his desire for revenge, nor does his victim seem aware of any ill will between himself and the narrator that would cause him to worry about being alone in a crypt with the narrator, which suggests that whatever happened in the past, the narrator takes it as a far greater slight than his victim, if it even happened at all. The narrator and the victim do have a conversation about revenge in general prior to the narrator's attack, so he wasn't really hiding the ball about what was on his mind).
