Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
You are the second person
Influential point of view
Speech, voice, and point of view
Writing a narrative employing you is called second person point of view. Using this viewpoint, you control all the information, and you give the reader whatever you want.
DEFINITION
Second person is a point of view in which the narrator tells the story to another character using you. The story is told through the addressee’s point of view.
Very little creative writing is written in second person, with the exception of choose-your-own-adventure types of books, or poems and prose that usually involve psychosis in some way. Yet it is a popular vehicle for many nonfiction self-help books (such as this one!) as well as tourism ads.
Second person POV can be a bit jarring in creative writing and, thus, it’s the least popular viewpoint. Your reader picks up a book to escape into another character for a while, and using you disintegrates this illusion. Moreover, depending on the writer, it can simply feel weird, as though you’re being bossed around and programmed with someone always telling you what you’re doing and feeling.
As a result of these considerations, second person point of view is certainly the most rare viewpoint, and the most difficult to use, but there are instances when you might find it beneficial to your narrative.
Often writers use second person to address the audience directly, and especially unexpectedly, in the middle of a narrative. Here’s an example in which a creative nonfiction piece (which might seem first person at the beginning) that’s narrated by a younger version of the writer is interrupted by an older version of himself who eventually comes to identify with his fellow inhabitants, addressing the reader (and all outsiders as you, in contrast to us):
Here I feel the necessity of pausing, a bit intrusively perhaps, and unveiling my older voice for an interval in the interests of context, for wanting as my behavior may have been during the prideful adolescent time I have just evoked (and rest assured I wince to record it as faithfully as I have on account of the doubtful light it places me in), it was not without its broader causes, most of which stemmed from that particular place and time.
By that point in my high school career I had long known Appomattox County—its disparate people and geography: the different sorts of white and black inhabitants and the manner in which the scenic hilly northern part of the county bumped up against the foothills of the Blue Ridge and the serpentine curve of the James River, while the rolling tobacco fields of the district’s most southern reaches crossed unbroken over into Charlotte County and onward toward the Carolina border, the ground becoming ever flatter, its soil ever redder. The county seat in those days was a provincial settlement of no great size clinging to a largely defunct stretch of railroad, and remains so today. As there is little to do or see in the county, it is a pleasant enough place to linger—a fitting spot to hole up if your accommodations and traveling companion are attractive enough. It is also a place where you can lose yourself. There remain bridgeless gravel backroads in the remotest areas on which one is forced to ford creeks and where you can spend the better part of a day parked along the shady, tree-lined shoulder without glimpsing a single passerby.
As is the case in most sections and villages of the American South, the county is defined largely by its many Protestant churches. The largest of them naturally is Baptist and, to this day, remains perhaps the ugliest of all churches I have encountered. It is a long graceless brick structure which parallels a well-traveled street in the town, the walls rising abruptly just before the road as though the church would have liked to have continued on across the thoroughfare but instead was forced to halt as if the street’s makeup constituted some magical barrier the building lacked the power to breach. The abruptness of the structure’s architecture in conjunction with the nearby road affords one the impression the building has been struck on its side and flattened with a great board, pancaked backward as it were, so as to observe the necessary distance from the road’s nearmost shoulder. Yet the church’s most heinous ugliness stems from the parapets pretentiously mounted atop its unnaturally steep sudden walls. When I was a boy I was quite fond of these faux battlements and liked to envision archers launching storm clouds of arrows from them at some vast marauding siege army approaching from below. But as such gentle fancies of boyhood melted away, these parapets came merely to look out of place—like the gaudy points of a crown sitting atop some sad, unattractive, flat-faced despot who long ago realized the narrow, wanting confines of his kingdom.
Though rising no more than three stories all told, the church is massive by the architectural standards of the sleepy southern village in which it dwells. The building is reckoned magnificent by some inhabitants on account of its size alone, but its extreme ugliness again comes to the fore when one compares it to the town’s more venerable eighteenth century colonial homes or those meticulously maintained in accordance with their mid-nineteenth century architecture by the employees of the county’s Civil War park. It is difficult for me to believe that a religious construction anywhere has sunk much lower than it has in the form of this particular church and that the deity in whose honor it was erected did not long ago level it via natural disaster, as the old desert legends of the Good Book might lead us to expect, or by other, more modern, means. Perhaps it is a testament to his infinite patience and love for even the most misguided and unbecoming of his creatures that he has not … yet.
The dominating power of religion in the county notwithstanding, I must here confess to the reader I am making no attempt to afford an exhaustive perspective of the nature and appearance of Virginia’s Appomattox County. As quiet and provincial as the place may appear, such an undertaking would require a greater erudition than I possess and demand a life’s exhausting dedication on the order of what Yoknapatawpha County exacted of Faulkner. Yet I do not feel as though I can deal properly with my “hero’s”—that is, my petulant younger self’s—peregrinations and conflicts without having provided some sketch, however rough and incomplete, of the culture in which he/I was functioning. And that culture ultimately was evident not in the place’s more hallowed buildings (however wanting they may have been) or its almost nonexistent arts (an impromptu musical “picking” or an assortment of student compositions hung along the walls of the public library accounting for the high water mark in that regard), but in its people, who were not overly given to art or thought; often bigoted; fiscally and politically conservative; passionately religious; more or less dutiful in and defined by their work; generally lazy, conventional, and given to routine in their personal lives; kind to strangers almost without fail (even if they privately thought ill of them); and intimately attached to and involved with their families (whether in the interests of love or abuse or both). And mark well that I render these descriptions myself with love rather than abuse, disgust, or disownment, for these people were and are, after all, my people and I remain loyal to them even now, despite their—despite our—many faults and shortcomings.
Consider then these broad descriptive strokes, inadequate as they admittedly are, against the faithful juvenile academic tale offered to this point with its petty teacher (who was unhappy and probably felt herself destined for a better job in a better school system somewhere far away), its brainy student characters (their intellectualism rendered all the more freakish to most everyone else by the poor public school system and decidedly anti-intellectual classmates and county surrounding them), the absent heroine (whose name in truth was not Bree but has been altered so as to echo Briseis from the old Greek tale), and the arrogant protagonist (who likely constitutes myself at my self-important, adolescent worst).
One thing more before I abandon my mature voice and deliver us back to those events of an earlier time which I have left temporarily incomplete. I should like to admit to the reader that in writing this piece I have come to be a little afraid of this earlier version of myself. He was, after all, quicker in mind and possessed of a body finely-tuned to inflict pain upon or run away from the bodies of others. Everything was in working order for him/me in those days, and work well it did—sometimes not for the best of purposes. The mature me might give him a run for his money in a scrap on account of a trick or two I have learned via hard-earned experience, but I have little doubt he would get the better of me in the end, and probably not without some smug pleasure and taunting words at having bested his elder, fading self.
It may interest readers as well to know that as a writer I am very wary of what he stands for. Such beings of vivid personality and action have a tendency to overpower their authors, bearing us along paths we have no wish to tread. And perhaps this obnoxious younger version of me has done so already in this narrative, stiff-arming me aside as he might some opponent on a football field. Such fellows, I have observed (and recall firsthand with significant shame), dare do as they wish and take what they want. And perhaps already he has done so here to the detriment of us all, including this weaker, older self grasping nonetheless and perhaps in vain for the greater meaning of ourselves.
Depending on the reader, this use of second person will either prove helpful in understanding the overall narrative or feel disingenuous for butting in and allowing the elder author to have his say. Perhaps it achieves a little of both.
Some creative writing teachers maintain you should never use second person. So if it is risky, unpopular, and rare, why would anyone want to write in second person point of view? My answer, as a writer who has used it, is that instances do arise when you need to make a certain impression on the reader for which second person is the best technique. A writer friend of mine used it in the opening chapter of her book to forcefully place the reader in the protagonist’s shoes. It resulted in significant drama and narrative power.
I certainly would urge you to be careful with second person POV as a beginning creative writer, but if you feel your narrative calling for it, don’t you hesitate to use it.