Today’s topic for the Marketing for Romance Writer’s blog hop is Point of View: Choices and Preferences. Join the blog hop here to meet new romance writers and to share your (sorry, can’t be helped) point of view on this topic. https://mfrw52week.blogspot.com/
A few years back, it came to my attention that some readers really don’t like first-person point of view, to the point where they won’t even open a book with a that POV. I don’t get it. I’ve read some deeply moving, thoroughly entertaining stories written in 1st POV. Girl Gone, anyone? And how about the whole Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich? First-person POV done well heightens immediacy and makes me feel really connected to the protagonist. My as-yet-unpublished cozy mystery series with romantic elements is written in 1st POV, and Book Two was a finalist in last year’s Daphne competition for romantic suspense.
Since I’m a newbie to the romance genre (currently writing Book Three in a contemporary series), I’m using the POV that’s most popular with today’s romance authors, close third-person POV, alternating between his and hers. Turns out writing from a male perspective wasn’t as difficult as I feared. Guys are people, after all.
What is challenging is eliminating all those filter words (she thought, he noticed) and feeding in backstory via dialogue and internal dialogue/monologue. I don’t agree with those who say an author must never pull back the camera to deliver a bit of narrative summary, but I try to keep such bits to a minimum.
Having just finished my assigned stack of entries for a romance writing competition, I was struck by how intrusive those narrative bits can be. When an author pauses the forward motion, again and again, to deliver several paragraphs of backstory, I get a little seasick, and pretty impatient too. Lesson learned—well, reinforced.
What’s your favorite POV as a writer? As a reader, are you allergic to 1st-person POV? If so, why?
See you at next week’s blog hop. Happy writing!
