Point-of-view preference?

[konstantya]

As will sometimes happen, my inner Hopeless Romantic works its way around the Angsty Cynic, and I've had a hankering for some romance novels.  Sex in stories is often superfluous to me, so I tend to gravitate toward YA romance simply because they can't put all that sex in, and it's more about romantic/sexual tension and plot.  (Well, I want to believe the plot would have to pick up the slack, but often times that's not the case, and I become a sad, jaded reader who goes back to her angst and cynicism.  Anyway.)  I've been browsing amazon and whatnot, reading excerpts and such, and I've realized that, on the whole, I don't think I like stories written in first-person.

I guess the problem I have with them is that they so often read like someone's diary.  And unless you've managed to make that diary awesome/funny like Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, or even The Princess Diaries (which I did read, years ago, yes), it comes off as very...it's like narratorial masturbation, I guess.  And when the narrator is a proxy/fantasy for the author (ahem, Twilight?), this goes, in turn, from narratorial masturbation to authorial masturbation.  Putting it in third-person limited would at least let me pretend that you have some distance from this character.  Maybe this just has to do with bad authors vs. good authors when it comes down to it.  And perhaps in first-person stories the flaws are more noticeable?  Or maybe I'm just super-picky with my romances?  (Note:  I am.  I admit it.)  Maybe it has something to do with first-person romances reminding me of my 13-14-year-old self who wrote really bad Mary-Sue first-person romances.  (I actually found some of those while cleaning last summer.  I tried reading them and went, "Wow, that's a weird, icky feeling.")

Not that I haven't enjoyed any stories/books in first-person.  The Great Gatsby and...this other one by this popular YA author...forget his name, but I think the book was called Carl?  I read it a long time ago, but it stuck with me for some reason...[/memory fail]  Anyway, those two come to mind immediately.  And I think what does it for me with those examples is that the story is not really about the narrator, even though he/she is an actual character in the story.  In The Great Gatsby, Nick is, essentially, a secondary character--he exists mostly so we can see things through his lens of sight.  And now that I think about it, the one first-person fic I wrote is much the same thing; it's more about the Turks, than Reno.  Arguably the real focus in that one is Vincent.

I think I write in third-person less because of the omnipresence, and more for the distance it allows.  My style does tend to be on the detached side.  Sort of a "here are the facts; think what you will" way of doing things.  Not that omnipresence (or the limiting of it) doesn't have its draw--indeed, many of my longer stories which will maybe one day see the light of the internet? maybe? play with that very idea--limiting the perspective to one or two characters for effect and/or story-telling purposes.  Like, you don't need first-person to have an unreliable narrator, you know?

So, maybe all that wasn't as cohesive or concise as it could have been, but I've wasted enough time on this already today.  ^^'  My question is, do you have a preference for third- or first-person point-of-view?  If so (or not), why is that?  Just what exactly about them do you prefer?  And does this preference vary depending on whether you're reading or writing?  I'm sure there are other reasons beyond my personal ones (and no doubt my personal reasons at this moment are tainted by amateur-ish romance novels), so I'm curious.

Comments

[konstantya.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, don't even get me started on second-person. And second-person smut--whoa, just a little too weird for me, thanks. (If first-person is masturbatory, does that make second-person voyeuristic?) I remember back in one of my college lit. classes, the prof was talking about second-person, particularly this one full-length novel, and he said something along the lines of, "It's really good, but it sometimes throws you out of the story a bit. Like when I found out I was a short Latino woman." It's a very tricky thing to pull off, and it often seems that the shorter the piece, the more chance it has for success. One of the most memorable short stories I've ever read was a second-person piece of flash-fiction called "How To Set a House on Fire" (by...I forget the author, whoops).

Regarding FFX, I agree--I really liked the romance between Tidus and Yuna, and it had a main plot beyond that and a supporting cast that was well-developed and intriguing in their own rights. One thing that often pisses me off in romance novels is that it often seems that the hero and the heroine end up together simply because they're the hero and the heroine, because that's how things work, even though it might be painfully obvious that she gets along much better with the older brother. With FFX, I could honestly see how these two characters could be drawn to each other, and for that reason, it was very sweet and fulfilling for me.

Bottom line: Why can't romance novels be written more like video games? XD