Talking of voice, as I did in
my previous blog, one of the lesser used techniques is second person.
Second person relies on the
pronouns you, your, and yours and is more often used to address the audience in
technical writing, advertising, songs and speeches.
In fiction it would allow
lines like ‘You feel uneasy the moment you turn into the street.‘
It differs from first person,
which uses pronouns including I and me, and third person, which uses pronouns
such as he and she.
It’s odd that it
is not used more in fiction; it is a direct way of addressing the reader,
putting them in the middle of the action and challenging them with every word.
John Dean
Very occasionally you come across an
author telling their story through a second person viewpoint.
We are all familiar with first person (I
have had a really good day) and third person (she had had a really good day)
but many writers will be unaware about second person.
In short, in second person point of view,
the narrator tells the story using ‘you‘ as in ‘You pick up the phone because
you feel scared‘. Footballers, those great bastions of language, tend to use it
quite a lot (‘In games like this, you go out on the field and leap like a
salmon sandwich and nod the ball into the old onion bag.’) If that’s not a
mixed metaphor.
So which one to choose? Well, often the
first-person narrative is used as a way to directly convey deeply internal,
otherwise unspoken, thoughts. It allows story to directly revolve round one
person and can allow the character to be further developed through his/her own
style in telling the story. That style is often chatty and informal, always
deeply personal.
There are drawbacks: in third person you
can tell the reader what is round the corner to create tension; you can’t do
that in first person because the character simply does not know. That is third
person’s biggest advantage; the way it allows the narrator to be all-seeing.
And yes, it can also be used to delve deep into the character’s mind but many
writers feel happier doing that with first person.
So where does second person fit in? Well,
it is rarely used but, as shown in the story submitted overnight, can be very
effective in that it directly challenges the reader to step into the story by
use of the word’ you’. If they feel so challenged then that will make the story
so much more real.
John Dean
