First Person

[Kumquatqueen]

Completely agree with this. Further, if a story is first person POV, as a reader I really need to know fairly quickly just WHO is this person is, otherwise the confusion becomes aggravating. And then if it ends up taking a while to be surprised (hey, I thought this was a college guy talking here!) it is pretty much end of reading for me. Please make your narrator's qualities clear and vivid from the start.

Well, some qualities - we don't need an infodump! Maybe a name, or their sex and some detail about them. My other pet hate is "Let me tell you about myself. I'm 38, 160 pounds, divorced but try to keep in shape." Clearly your acceptable waistline is more important to you than a name, location, profession, any ambition in life... Count me out.

Maybe some people really do read stories and hit Back in the middle of the first page, if they don't have assurance that they're not reading about fat people?

 

[yowser]

Well, some qualities - we don't need an infodump! Maybe a name, or their sex and some detail about them. My other pet hate is "Let me tell you about myself. I'm 38, 160 pounds, divorced but try to keep in shape." Clearly your acceptable waistline is more important to you than a name, location, profession, any ambition in life... Count me out.

Maybe some people really do read stories and hit Back in the middle of the first page, if they don't have assurance that they're not reading about fat people?

I don't think we're in different regions. 'Clear and vivid' can, and should be, done concisely. I do agree that any measurement business, unless it somehow has direct connection to the story's focus, is generally a bad sign.

 

[Melon_Morph]

Well, some qualities - we don't need an infodump! Maybe a name, or their sex and some detail about them.

That is quite common on here and I can see the temptation. Like yowser said, its definitely important to establish the character. I think where people go wrong is that they try to do all that in a paragraph, instead of doing it in a few pages (novel pages, not super long literotica pages).

Ive always made an effort to try to describe the characters organically, but its a challenge. My most recent, still pending, story has a buxom main character but I really didnt want to just shoehorn that in. Instead it comes up later when shes flirting with the main guy. I am concerned that enough time will have gone by that the reader may already be picturing the main character differently, so when they have to change their perception of her to have large breasts, that may be jarring. Im not sure that will be a real problem but I think its worth thinking about these things.

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

If it's well written I don't mind it being either first or third person. First person, at least for me, feels more personal, though. I write all my stuff first person, because I can more accurately describe the sensations of sex as a guy than I could trying to describe how a woman feels having a dick in her.

I will straight up quit if it's written in present tense, though. Something about that style always turns me off.

 

[Britva415]

I've recently learnt that some refuse to read anything in the first person

Hm, you sure they didn't mean second person?

 

[Britva415]

I started off my multi-part stories in first person but now do a mix of first and third person to move the plots along

How so? How would the plot fail to move along if you were to just stick to the original POV, whichever it was?

 

[NuclearFairy]

Hm, you sure they didn't mean second person?

Those that refuse to read second person are just less vocal about it. I've also seen people posting on other sites going on and on about how awful first person is and how they'll never read it because it's just the worst.

 

[Britva415]

Sometimes "right exactly now" is what you want for your story. Particularly if there's a big twist, it's more immersive if the reader experiences it in real time, so to speak, together with the narrator.

This is one of the things I generally dislike about 1p: Stories like this, where the author is going for a "right exactly now," real-time-narration kind of feeling, usually fail to include any sort of frame around how it is that I'm there and I'm hearing the narration.

It comes across as telepathic.

This is what bugs me about most 1p stories, even without the "I'm in the universe right there being narrated to by the character" bit. Even without the telepathy, I still think a 1p story suffers from credibility and from uncertainties and doubts around "why tell me, why me, how am I hearing this."

When I say "frame," I mean something in the story narration which explains who the hearer is to the narrator, how the story is being conveyed, and why the narrator has a motivation to tell these events to this person.

As far as twists go, I think they're just as effective from a distance. The success and surprise of a twist depend on storytelling beats and the pace with which information is conveyed, not on the grammatical voice or the ostensible immediacy.

 

[Britva415]

if a story is first person POV, as a reader I really need to know fairly quickly just WHO is this person is, otherwise the confusion becomes aggravating

My "favorite" is when you're a full Lit page in and you still don't know the narrator's gender - because "I" is genderless in English and no other suggestive, explicit, or remotely helpful details were included to help the reader not be surprised when it's finally revealed.

I've literally read (partway through) stories here where you don't have any idea what's in the 1p narrator's pants until they take them off.

I'm talking about the cases where it's just been overlooked by the author, not those cases where deliberately concealing it is necessary to the story.

Like it just doesn't even occur to them that the reader doesn't already know what kind of person the author had in mind when they started writing.

Often this is even worse than those stories which just clumsily blurt "I was a 173cm-tall, 23 year old peroxide blonde DD girl driving my uber with fuckme red lipstick like you have never seen, applied over supplemental collagen I knew what to do with, when..."

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

How so? How would the plot fail to move along if you were to just stick to the original POV, whichever it was?

It's hard to explain it, short of saying 'read and find out,' lol, but the main thing was the first person POV was just too constraining - I wanted other characters to get a chance to be the focus, and it made sense to go third person to do that. There were whole character arcs for supporting characters that we'd never see because they'd all happen outside the MC's knowledge, and I thought that would have made the story very hard to get.