Fic in the Second Person
You see a character you like, whom everyone else hates, and you want to redeem them. You have a weakness for second-person fic, though you’ve never dared to write any of your own. Put the two together and you get fic in the second person, present tense.
You’re amazed at the immediacy of this new perspective. You hope that being addressed as the character will give your reader some sympathy for this misunderstood soul. No one hates themselves; people are quite forgiving of their own perversions. You’re hoping that they’ll forgive one little mutinous love affair, or better yet, understand it.
You become discouraged when every paragraph begins with “you,” and you wonder what the maximum tolerable length of a 2nd-person POV fic is. It can’t be much. You begin to chat in the second person, and that inspires a blog entry but it doesn’t solve your problems.
You decide to hope for the best.
May 6th, 2003 at 3:40 am
I love second person, but it’s a pain. There’s no grammatically correct second person plural in English. Or rather, there is, but it’s identical to the singular form.
May 6th, 2003 at 11:01 am
Read “Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInnerney, which is a novel in second-person and largely very effective. It drags alot towards the end, but that’s more the plot’s fault. The opening, however, is tour de force. If you can find the audio book, read by Mark Linn Baker, it’s also great.
June 8th, 2004 at 12:04 pm
There is no such word as ‘alot’.
June 8th, 2004 at 12:28 pm
Thanks for the newsflash, Bob.