With almost every reasonably large project, whether it’s trying to fix the backyard irrigation system or writing a collection of short stories, I get to a point where I ask myself a searching question: Is this really a good idea?

In this case, it was a matter of creating a collection of short stories, all in the first person. For people who don’t spend a lot of time pondering point-of-view problems, this may seem like a strange, perhaps silly objective. Who really cares whether the story is first person, third person, omniscient, or whatever, so long as the story is engaging and doesn’t put the reader to sleep?

However, writers are a strange lot. If you don’t believe me, just go to one of the writers’ sites and read the postings. There are people jousting in a nearly violent fashion about comma placement, or whether it is better to be showing or telling, or how much “head hopping” is allowed before you’ve violated some law. There are also some heated discussions about the relative benefits of the various points of view, essentially, how you choose to tell the story.

For the most part, I’m a POV agnostic. Almost everything I write is either in the third-person or first-person point of view. The story, I think, should dictate the structure, and POV is part of that structure.

I don’t feel sufficiently Godly to write in the omniscient POV, and I’m often amazed at authors (such as Leon Uris) who do it well. And I have severe religious objections to the second-person point of view. (You hear a shot ring out. You duck behind a wall.) However, it takes some serious masochism to tell yourself, “OK, I’m going to write some 60,000 or so words, and they’ll all be in the first person.

This particular exercise had its origins in two parts. One was my son’s suggestion that at my advanced age, I should limit myself to shorter forms, like short stories. I think he was joking. 

The other was that I had a story that I was particularly fond of that seemed to fit no known genre, and in these days when Amazon rules the book-selling world, you need to fit a genre to belong. The story is told from the point of view of a college student.

My solution was to create an ad hoc genre, short stories in the first person, and include my orphan story in the collection. Since I am loathe to include stories already published, this meant writing at least five new stories, each from an “I” point of view.

The problems are obvious. First-person POV means that you can never peek inside anyone’s head but your main character’s. It means that you can’t skip to far-off locations. And, of course, it means that you have to create one character who can carry the story.

Limiting yourself to the first person creates some very tight boundaries.

But on the other hand, it lets you inhabit a number of different characters. In this book, I’m a college student, a 67-year-old teacher who is about to sever the last tie to what he has always considered a normal life, a jazz musician who has lost his best friend, a husband who has been wronged, a 13-year-old boy, a middle-aged writer, and a retired ad executive.

Despite the differences in the main characters, a single element runs through all of the stories. Each story asks and attempts to answer the question, “What do we do about loss?”

I think that’s a worthy question, perhaps important enough to ponder. One of the few things that we’re absolutely guaranteed in this world is that we will, at times, suffer loss. The college student loses his girlfriend; the husband loses trust in his wife; and the high school English teacher loses his wife, his position, and his vision of his future.

I’m sure that some readers will disagree with the solutions my characters find as they deal with their loss. Others may consider the endings too pat or “on the nose.” That’s fine. Just as we face loss and grieve in different ways, we find different roads out of our grief. At least part of the way out.

There is another thing that occurred to me while I was writing these stories: there is a certain joy even in loss, because we can’t lose something we never had. The fact that I grieve for another friend who is no longer with us is—to some degree—balanced by the fact that I had that friend, enjoyed his company, and affected his life as he did mine. The same thing is true when we grieve for our loss of passion; once we had that passion and celebrated it. Our lives are better for it.

With that in mind, my wish for those who read this is that your memories of what you’ve had compensate in some degree for the grief of your loss. As my 13-year-old character says, “You have to go on living, anyway.”