Publish and Be Damned

I like this particular topic, from a selfish perspective, since point of view is one of those things I’ve most consciously experimented with in my writing. Long before I cared about craft or other aspects of writing and style, I was interested in different viewing geometries of the protagonist or narrator POV of a story. I’ve written in first, second, and third person, and from male and female points of view, and it’s hard to say if any one is a favorite or preferred. Second person is probably the least, since there are, for me, only a few occasions where I feel the writing really requires it. Most of my full-blown stories are, I believe, third person limited, ‘over the shoulder’ of the protagonist, in most cases female.

A great deal of my erotica writing stems from wanting to truly experience the scene from the eyes of the protagonist, so a lot of my stories and vignettes are written in first person. All of the flash pieces in Nightmares and Visions, for example, are written first person for that reason – the immediacy and intimacy of the action, and the mystery/horror and off-balance nature of the situations all work better, I think with that perspective. The stories in the Lens collections out so far are an almost even mix of first and third person. One of my conceits, which I was somewhat nervous about early on, was that most of my first person writing was from the female POV. Being male, I worried then that it was goddamned presumptuous to write that way, and now only think it’s gosh darned presumptuous, because I’ve been told I’m good at it.

More recently, I’ve been writing more first person male perspectives, which could be saying I’m coming closer to writing pieces of myself, if we wanted to get all psychological about it.  But that’s what POV is for me, in some ways, more than a writing device; it’s an avenue inward, to explore different parts of myself. Writing erotica has been, until recently, largely a turned-inward thing for me. The emergence into a more conscious, literary perspective about writing is still relatively new.  A lot of writers who I admire and learn from are storytellers – they’ll describe themselves that way, and you’ll see it in their body of work. I can tell stories, sometimes reasonably well, but reflexively I’m a sensualist; I like the physicality, emotion, and immediacy of the erotic scene, and the perspective of the actors in that scene is a huge part of that. I think storytelling is adaptable, but lends itself to third person and first person POV more strongly. Short vignettes and flash fiction, I find, are the places where first person – and second – are most likely to shine, and to be appropriate.

I recently experimented on a few older stories I had written in first person, converting them to third. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t . Both Fog and The Cliff (both in Through a Tinted Lens) had multiple perspectives in their writing.  POV shifted in Fog from first to third a couple times as I wrote it, which suggests I wasn’t certain about the feel of the story at first, but I concluded in the end I liked the first person better – again from the sensualist perspective. The Cliff actually started off in third person, but I found my perspective shifting to first early in the story. Sometimes I think the characters want to narrate the story their own way.

As much as the first/second/third/limited/omnipotent perspectives, I think gender, and by extension sexuality (het/hom/bi/tg) are equally important aspects of point of view in erotica. I’ve explored that space some – certainly the male and female hetero aspects, and female bi/hom aspects. I have not written male bi/hom, mostly because it doesn’t turn me on, and I haven’t felt experimental enough to do it for its own sake. That’s not to say, however that I haven’t found writing in those points of view that I like.

No matter what perspectives you choose, though, there are a million ways to fuck with it. In my story titled “POV” (in Through an Ethereal Lens) I do that literally and intentionally, with a science fictional virtual reality toy – camera/glasses that give the narrator the visual perspective of her sex-partner. In some of the Nightmares, perspective is changed – turned inward or outward on the characters by limiting sight with blindfolds, or other sensory tricks. These are all POV games that put the writer and reader in different places, and I know that there are still endless aspects and combinations to explore.

-Monocle

April 2nd, 2010 | Monocle | Discussion Topics, Point of View | 3 Comments »