8 | The Writer • January 2020
FROM THE FRONT LINES
BY YI SHUN LAI
Choose your own narrator
When should an author write in the second person?
I
t happens just like this: You are
sitting at your keyboard, a lot
intimidated by the story or essay
you want to write next. You get
up, pat the dog, water the plants, stare
at the laundry pile. You open the
refrigerator, wonder if you can cook
something just complicated enough to
suck up some time, but not too com-
plicated – you don’t want the whole
day to slip by before you’ve laid some
words down.
You can’t settle, so after air-condi-
tioning the kitchen with your refrigera-
tor, you come back to your desk and
just randomly start typing. You’re pan-
icking, so your brain does something
along these lines:
Fzzzt.
Pop!
Sizzle.
And then it shows some mid-channel
television fuzz a la the mid-’80s, and
then, because you really have to get
cracking or the thing will never get
written, you say to yourself, “Oh, fork
it,” and you start telling the story from
second-person point of view, just to try
and give it a little zhuzz.
Or it happens like this: You are
dared, by a well-meaning friend, to
write a short story in second-person
POV in the next 24 hours.
By now you will have figured out
where this is going. We’re going to
spend some time poking around the
second-person point of view this
month, mostly because it’s been on my
list to write ever since I started writing
this column, and, like the writer at the
beginning of this little narrative (who
is, obviously, totally fictional), I have
come to realize that it is never going to
happen if I don’t just knuckle down
and do it.By the time you read this, I will have
spent the better part of five years, as
long as I’ve been editing for Tahoma
Literary Review, musing over why sec-
ond person works in some places and
why it doesn’t work in, well, most
places. As a writer, I love the challenge
it presents, but I almost never set
myself to that challenge because (edi-
tor hat on now) it’s hard to find a nar-
rative that demands this point of view.
What do I mean by this? Well, put it
this way: I think unique narratives that
can only be accessible if you force thereader into the narrator’s shoes can
demand second person. I’m thinking
of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big
City here, a book that opens on a bar
scene with the narrator so full of snow
he doesn’t know which way is up. I
once dated a guy who could access this
point of view in intimate fashion, but I
definitely wouldn’t want to be him.
McInerney’s book helped me to see
what it might be like.
Another reason writers might strive
for second-person point of view?
They’re looking for immediacy. One
example that springs readily to mind is,
of course, the “Choose Your Own
Adventure” series of YA/middle-grade Cvijovic^ Zarko/Shutterstock