First Person or Third Person?

Write the exact same scene twice — a character walking into a room full of people who stop talking when they enter — once starting with "I walked in, and the room went quiet," and once with "She walked in, and the room went quiet." The events are identical. What changes is how close the reader stands to the character's own thoughts as it happens.

In first person, the reader only ever knows what that one character knows, in the exact words that character would use to think it. There's no way to step outside their head, even for a second, to check whether their read on the room is actually accurate. In third person, a writer gets to choose how much distance to keep — close enough to still feel a character's thoughts, or pulled back enough to describe the room itself, the other people in it, details the character might not even notice.

Why this isn't just a style preference

The choice matters most when a character is wrong about something. First person makes an unreliable narrator easy — the reader is trapped inside a read on the situation that might be mistaken, and only finds out later, the same way the character does. Third person makes it easier to let the reader see something the character has missed, which builds a different kind of tension: watching someone walk toward a mistake you can already see coming.

Neither point of view is the correct one. The real question is what kind of tension the scene needs — the claustrophobia of being stuck inside one person's read on things, or the ache of watching someone miss what's right in front of them.