Someone wrote in [personal profile] rionaleonhart 2020-04-22 02:28 pm (UTC)

I think with second person it can very easily outstay its welcome, and you have to treat it very differently to how you'd write regular narrative. I think that, with purpose for it being there, it can be good.

To use two examples: So, like I said, Karin wrote about 30-40 pages of second person. That is part 1 of the first book of Warchild. It is entirely second person except for the last line: "That was all that I remembered about Falcone. It was enough." (Is it bad when I can do all of these quotes without looking them up?) It gives a very purposeful distance to a story of a boy who experiences all the adults he knows dying, all the kids getting kidnapped, and his time there, as well as his escape. He's about eight years old at this point, as I recall. Even when you get out of the second person later, there is a clear reluctance to speak about any of it and a need to totally distance himself from that past. So it works very, very well because second person creates that distance, and a kind of dream-like quality.

I wrote a second person story for uni, as well - it's the highest mark I received for any of my creative pieces. What I was doing at the time was playing about with the complaints about second person fiction: that need to fight, say, "You got up? No, I didn't". So I wrote about a person who was being possessed and experiencing that degree of their body being puppeteered against their will; so in that sense, the second person aligned the reader along with the narrator quite nicely. Was really good fun, but very hard to sustain.

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