Hi, I’m glad you like it! I’m happy to help. 🙂
Ohh, that can be a tough transition indeed!
What might help is to write something short in your usual first-person and then to change it afterward, like this:
“I wiped the sweat from my brow. This was going to be the hardest test I had ever taken. Number 1: Find x. Crap. Why did it have to start with algebra? Why couldn’t vocabulary be at the beginning?”
“Maddie wiped the sweat from her brow. This was going to be the hardest test she had ever taken. ‘Number 1: Find x. Crap,’ she thought to herself. Why did it have to start with algebra? Why couldn’t vocabulary be at the beginning?”
See how it’s just slight changes?
The more you edit your work into third-person, the easier it will be to write it in third-person initially. It definitely takes practice!
Since you’re wanting to write a college romance, it might help to read some romance books and to do some research about what typical relationships in college are like. They have to deal with a lot more schoolwork and jobs than high-school students!
It honestly really depends on what kind of fanfiction you’ve been writing. If you’re already writing college settings and romances, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to make that transition.
If you’re not familiar with romances or college, then it can be a real struggle to change everything about your writing to that.
Write some short pieces about college life and some short romance pieces. You can write them in first-person and then change them to third-person afterward. Note to yourself what kinds of sentences you’re writing and what kinds need to be changed.
Do you have a lot of sentences like the ones in the example above? “This was going to be the hardest test I had ever taken” transitions easily to “This was going to be the hardest test she had ever taken.” It’s still a bit tell-y (as in the writing adage “show; don’t tell”), but it’s an easy way to get your feet wet, so to speak.
Practice writing the kinds of descriptions that a person wouldn’t have in their internal monologue. A lot of first-person writers make the mistake of fluffing their writing up with flowery descriptions, but nobody actually thinks like that.
Try picking up a book like Twilight or The Hunger Games–they’re written in the first-person–and rewriting a scene as if it were being moved to third-person. That’s a good way to stretch your brain and come up with better ways of wording things!
The majority of books are in third-person, so you can pick up any typical book and compare the narration of it to a first-person book.
It’s also kind of difficult to transition from present-tense to past-tense, but you can use the above techniques to work on that as well. If it’s going to be third-person, you’ll want to stick with past-tense. Present-tense works for first-person because it makes you feel like you’re right there with them in their heads. But third-person lends itself far better to past-tense than to present-tense.
Writing is a craft, so you have to take the time to stop and think about your decisions as you go. Why did you choose to write your sentences like you have? Why are your paragraphs all the same length? Why would the character know this without being informed of it directly?
Honestly, a lot of it comes from disciplining yourself. You have to make conscious choices in your writing. Train yourself to pay attention to what you’re doing and question what you’re doing/why you’re doing it that way.
Here are a couple of relevant posts:
http://writeinspiration.tumblr.com/post/128206205434/hi-hope-youre-doing-well-i-had-a-question-about
http://writeinspiration.tumblr.com/post/76237982492/102-resources-for-fiction-writers
I think this takes care of the majority of the things I could say on the subject! Best of luck!
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