A Writer Questions: First Person or Not

Today my guest is Jan Scarbrough, a longtime friend. We were both published by Kensington in "another lifetime."

Jan is a professional technical writer by day, but by night, she is a romance author. She's a member of Novelist, Inc., Romance Writers of America, and the Kentucky Romance Writers, where she manages their award-winning web site.

Jan is the mother of two grown children and is, as she describes it, a very "young" grandmother. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and rides American Saddlebred horses for fun and recreation.

You can find Jan on Facebook and Jan on Twitter @romancerider. Now, she's going to discuss the "person" one uses to write a book. Writers, you'll find this discussion relevant, and, Readers, you'll find it interesting to discover how a writer goes about determining how a story will be told.

First or Not to First: A Writer’s Question
by Jan Scarbrough

While first person is regularly used in mysteries and "chicklit," it's not the most common POV in the romance genre. Point of View, or POV, is the perspective from which the story is told. As Christine Danse pointed out in a Carina Press blog called The Challenges of Writing Romance in First Person, "A lot of tension in love stories is built around experiencing both characters' feelings."

So if you’re writing from the heroine's POV in a first person romance, you lose the perspective of the hero. This means that the heroine will have to be present in every scene. Hailey Edwards commented on Christine Danse's blog, "Now that I think about it, my favorite heroes are the ones I’ve read in first person novels, where the heroine’s observations are all I have to build my own impression of the hero."

What Do You Think?

How about you? Do you like to read first person romance?

I’ve enjoyed reading it because of my attraction to the Gothic romance of the 1960's popularized by Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. As noted on Infoplease.com: "Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts."

Today Phillipa Gregory uses first person, present tense, to write her popular historical novels about English queens.

As Christie Craig and Faye Hughes note (http://www.netplaces.com/): "First-person POV creates an intimate bond between the reader and the character. This bond is definitely seen as an advantage. Most first-person writers also find their ability to get into deep characterization easier than some third-person writers."

I like writing in first person, and with the explosion of eBooks, I have enjoyed the freedom to indulge my POV preference. Are you a writer? Have you ever written in first person? [Joan asks: If you're a reader, what do you think about stories in first person?]

Jan's first person, Gothic romance Tangled Memories is on sale until August at Smashwords for the promotional price of $2.24 when purchased with Coupon Code: XJ73J. This offer expires August 6, 2012. So get it today.

Takeaway Truth

Thanks, Jan, for stopping by SlingWords today. You're given writers and readers alike a good analysis of using first person as a narrative technique.