I’m sure I can come up with more if I try, but there are three specific things I’m of thinking here, formats or styles that annoy me almost every single time. I’ll take them in ascending irritation order.
First, we have second person perspective. It’s worse in present tense than it is in past, but it’s not good either way. The problem with second person perspective isn’t that it’s unusual. Unusual doesn’t bother me and it can be very interesting if done well. But second person isn’t really sustainable for more than a few paragraphs at the beginning and/or end of a story. At least not for me. And the reason for that is because of the pronoun in use for the POV character: you. When I read a story written in the second person, on some level the story is telling me, the reader, how to think, how to feel, what to do. And I find that extremely off-putting. If a story starts in second person, it needs to be finished with it fast. Long before I get to the point where I’m ready to put the story down, I skim ahead to see if the whole story is going to be told that way. If it is, I’m done.
Can second person be used effectively? Absolutely, but it’s tough. I think the author needs to be careful about how long it goes on for and how forceful it is. I also think it’s a one-trick pony. I’ve only ever used it myself once for more than a sentence or two. And even then, most of the story was written in the first person. Plus, there were only two characters in the story, one of them a non-sentient computer. The second person was just for a little space at the beginning and a little at the end. Context matters.
Next up, the framing story, which I’ll sometimes refer to as, “Ugh, it’s a story with a story again.” I can forgive this in older, more literary work. Frankenstein, for example, was done this way. A lot of things in the 18th and 19th were if we look at literary fiction. But I will be honest, when I finally read the original Frankenstein a decade or so ago, I already found the idea tiresome.
A framing story basically starts out with one character telling the reader or telling another character, “Well, let me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to me.” It’s stolen all sense of immediacy. all sense of peril from anything that’s going to happen to the main character. If we’re having a fireside chat about it after the fact, everything worked out just fine for you, didn’t it? It can get worse, though.
In Frankenstein it actually did get worse at one point. We had a story within a story within a story. The narrator was telling the story of what had happened to him and at one point inside that story in the middle of the book, another character was telling the narrator what had happened to that character. Drives me crazy. And I can’t do it anymore.
Finally, epistolary format. A story and especially a novel that is essentially an epistolary work is an almost impossible sell for me anymore. An epistolary work, just to clear things up, means that the story is being told essentially as a series of journal entries or newspaper articles or letters written back and forth (originally, this last provided the definition of the form). In a more modern setting this can be texts and emails, stuff like that.
To a certain degree, a story told this way does the same thing to me mentally as having a framing story around the actual story. It steals any immediacy from the stuff going on in it, because the character was just fine to write about it afterwards. I can only think of a couple of instances where the idea of reading a character’s diary in which that character is relating events each day worked for me, and they worked because I read them when I was still a teenager and hadn’t seen it very many times yet. One of those stories still has a nostalgic place in my memory, but I am afraid to go back and read it as a far more mature (at least in terms of years) adult. I put down a recent award winner, not all that long ago, because it was told that way. I loved the setting. The character was coming through very well. The events were entertaining. But every few pages, sometimes more often, I got a reminder that this was a diary I was reading. I persevered to get a third of the way into the book, but that was the best I could do. And I’m not saying that the characters can’t send emails or texts or write letters or keep a diary, but I don’t think for me that can be the way the whole story is told. It just doesn’t work.
The thing that all three of these styles have in common, is that to me, to the way my mind works, I have no reason to believe that the main character is in any real peril of things not working out well for them, whatever that means in the context of the story. In the second person perspective that’s because I feel like I’m being told I’m the main character and this stuff clearly isn’t happening to me. When there’s a framing story, it’s because I’m being told about events at some point after they’re all over. For an epistolary, I’m reading what somebody has written about events and obviously the diary or journal or newspaper articles or whatever are complete, even if there are cliffhangers and a back and forth between more than one letter writer, and so everything’s fine. Everything might not actually be fine, but that’s how it feels.
But as always, this is just my opinion. And as a reader or a writer, your mileage may vary. Enjoy what you enjoy. Love what you love.
Be well, everyone.
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