Writing Second Person Fiction
I BECAME QUITE KEEN on second person stories when reading The Fall by Albert Camus awhile back. There was something about the intimacy of the second person format that kept me glued to that book until the end. I especially enjoyed that I, the reader, had become an integral part of the story and I eventually started to feel like I was residing within the pages.
Writing a story in the second person format usually means that you are making the reader a character in the story. In other words, you speak to the reader directly as you are writing. As the writer, you decide whether the reader’s character has specifically identifiable characteristics (e.g. career, age, gender), or you can opt to make the reader’s character vague. Second person fiction is a lost art of sorts, and I have not discovered many worthwhile second person books since reading The Fall.
When I was starting out as a writer, I completed a few second person short stories. The Apostrophe Enforcer is a tale about an unstable gentleman who confesses to his attorney (the reader’s character) that he takes the law into his own hands when it comes to storefronts displaying signs containing misplaced apostrophes:
I had some serious fun writing The Apostrophe Enforcer, and I found that writing in the second person format was a free-flowing experience and did not present any particular difficulties or challenges. I suppose the only real challenge is that the entire second person format involves a monologue of sorts, where the reader’s character can never sneak a word in edgewise. Also, similar to first person narration, the narrator in second person fiction must be present during every scene throughout the story or book.
The next second person story I wrote was entitled Hitchhiker on a Rainy Night. This story was inspired by one of my favorite horror movies from the 1980s — The Hitcher. In my tale, a dad driving his family to Las Vegas for a vacation gets more than he bargained for when he picks up an escaped mental patient along the side of a desolate highway:
Again, the second person narrator just keeps babbling on and on and there is not any breathing room for dialogue by anyone else. This is a unique form of fiction which grabs the reader by the neck and refuses to let go. Writing a few thousand words in the second person format may not be all that challenging, but I can only imagine that continuing forward with a story in this format becomes increasingly difficult with each page that is completed. Writing a novella or a novel in the second person format is clearly possible, but your narrator most definitely must possess the gift of gab. If not, your story will die fast and hard.
If you are interested in writing a story in the second person, just sit down and write it. This is such a unique form of fiction writing that I can’t imagine trying to outline or brainstorm such a tale. Try your best to envision the character to whom you are speaking, close your eyes, and let your story be born.
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