How to Do Point of View: Second Person
Choose your own adventure.
Here’s how Italo Calvino begins his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.
We often imagine ourselves into stories, generally by identifying with one or more of the primary characters. The second person point-of-view novel takes it one step further and makes us an implicit participant in these stories.
Many of us were first exposed to second-person fiction through the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series, which invited us to “control” the story by choosing between a number of options. (Want to fight the dragon? Turn to page 153. Feel like running away would be the smarter move? Turn to page 105.)
Even if second-person novels don’t allow you to influence the outcome of the story, they still imply that you are an active part of its events. Calvino, for example, asks you to tell the other people in your household that you aren’t going to watch TV with them tonight; after all, you’re busy reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Another of my favorite second-person novels, Ron Currie Jr.’s Everything Matters! asks the reader to begin the story at the moment of their own conception:
First, enjoy this time! Never again will you bear so little responsibility for your own survival. Soon you will have to take in food and dispose of your own waste, learn the difference between night and day and acquire the skill of sleeping.
The invocation to “enjoy this time!” takes on a deeper meaning as the book progresses and you move through childhood to adulthood, following a standard coming-of-age plot structure while making a series of choices that you understand to be both logically and emotionally appropriate; choices that you, the reader, assume will lead you, the protagonist, towards a satisfying ending. (You, the reader, know how novels work.)
But the novel ends early, with pages still left to turn—and Currie, the author, asks you if you’d like to see what might have happened had you made one different choice.
Second-person novels often work to subvert expectations; young readers picking up Choose Your Own Adventure books learn that pages don’t have to be read in order, and adults reading Everything Matters! discover that the number of pages left in a book doesn’t always correlate to the point at which the story ends. (I’ll leave the surprise in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler for you to discover.)
N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is a sci-fi novel that alternates chapters between third-person and second-person perspectives, as well as a first-person narrator who occasionally speaks to you directly; like Everything Matters!, you begin reading the novel assuming you know how it works—turn pages, get story, reach the end—to the point that you almost forget that you are also a participant in the narrative. This allows Jemisin to craft her novel as a mystery, giving you clues that eventually reveal why you are there.
That’s the point of second person point-of-view: that you are there, and that you are there for a reason. If you’re considering writing a second-person novel, ask yourself why you want the reader to be directly involved in the action. Is it to give the reader the option, either literally or metaphorically, to change the events of the story? Is it to invite the reader to reconsider what a novel should be? Or is it to remind the reader that every action—even one as simple as sitting down with a copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler—has consequences, and sometimes those consequences can affect an entire world?
Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, is forthcoming May 2017.
