Sunday, October 19, 2008

Lemme Ask You Something...

Does first person do it for you? In romance, I mean. I just posted my review of Michele Lang's NETHERWOOD over at Enduring Romance (link on sidebar, awesome book BTW) and I believe I made some snarky comment about how reading first person POV in love scenes made me feel like I was trapped in a booth at Denny's with the other girls from the office who were totally oversharing.

I don't know why, but third person interests me. First person embarrasses me. I guess I'm okay with spying on you, just don't call me and tell me about it, 'kay?

I tend not to like first person all that much anyway, so maybe it's just an extension of that particular prejudice. I like to be in as many heads as the story has; the whole Nora Roberts head-hopping thing has never bothered me. But I have read some first person stories that were done really well. I just don't like the bouncy-bouncy with "I shivered as he stroked my protuberances."

What say you?

4 comments:

Stacia said...

I strongly dislike first-person sex scenes. They squick me out. This is why I don't write first-person.

Robyn said...

Ha! I'm not alone!

Kimber Li said...

I think First Person POV is very difficult to do well. I shunned all novels written in First Person until a year or so ago. Now, I take it on a case-by-case basis.
;)

writtenwyrdd said...

I don't care what pov the writer uses so long as it's written well. If the style calls attention to itself, then it annoys the crap out of me, though. Present tense can be a bit annoying, but then I wrote a story in it and found it gave a certain stylistic sense that can work nicely. Wouldn't want it for everything, though.

Personally, I felt like 2nd person was the most annoying style of writing I'd ever read. Haven't yet run across that written well!