Point of view

What if you were the main character?

In second person point of view, the storyteller tries to convince you, the audience, that you are the main character:

graphic showing narrator looking at the audience as a character. The audience is wearing an elf costume, and is now inside the story world.

"What kind of circus is only open at night?" people ask. No one has a proper answer, yet as dusk approaches there is a substantial crowd of spectators gathering outside the gates.

You are amongst them, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is wont to do. You stand in the fading light, the scarf around your neck pulled up against the chilly evening breeze, waiting to see for yourself exactly what kind of circus only opens once the sun sets.

The Night Circus(2011)

You can see this description has the same elements as third person limited subjective: the narrator can describe actions, environment, perceptions, thoughts and feelings of the point of view character—limited to that character's perspective.

The only obvious difference is the shift in grammatical person from third ('they, she, he' pronouns for the main character) to second ('you' as a pronoun for the main character).

How do you interpret the highlighting in these examples?

Does it make sense? If not, what's confusing?

You get to work. You store your lunch. You say hi to Rita. Austen makes a stupid joke. Then you start your calls.

The easiest calls you do before lunch, the customers who are usually good but have forgotten to pay, or they're just experiencing a little crunch so you can cut them some slack, negotiate new terms. After lunch you deal with the hard cases: the perpetual delinquents.

And last of all you phone Him, the crazy guy with the island and the power bill so large that the IT dept had to add an extra zero to the invoice template. That guy is hard work, and honestly you are not paid enough to have to deal with him.

The other surfer is screaming. Everything you heard about drowning men pulling you down is coming back to you as you reach for his hand. Luckily, he grabs the nose of the board instead of you—you feel a slight release in your chest.

But then he pulls himself up. The board tilts wildly and he almost butts your head as he climbs on. You feel the board sink and the water slip over the top and chill your belly, you feel how sluggish it is. Now the shark is coming back and you realise you can't paddle away.

If there's anything confusing about the highlighting, it's that the boundaries between action, environment, perception, thought & feeling get blurry.

There's no problem with it—it's only a challenge in this highlighting-type analysis, which is an artificial activity anyway, so we won't dwell on the point except to say if you feel the highlighters should be applied differently, you're probably right!

Write a snippet using second person limited point of view. Use as many elements of that point of view as you can.

You can have the same variations in second person as you do in third person:

  • You could be objective and not talk about thoughts and feelings.
  • You can be subjective and include thoughts and feelings.
  • You could alternate characters and still refer to each one as 'you'.
  • You could alternate between different points of view (The Night Circus alternates second and third person passages).
  • You could include omniscient commentary.

You can do whatever you want. The challenge is anticipating the effect your choices will have on the reader—whatever you choose needs to be stable and intentional enough to seem coherent, as opposed to a jarring mistake.

Second person is often used in character-based games but rarely used in stories. Why's that?

Both stories and games are immersive art forms, so why is second person associated with increased immersion in one, and not in the other?

In games

In games, the audience has agency. They can make choices, do things, and to some extent control the progress of the game. 

So while the audience know they are not the character they play, the fact that they control the game makes second person 'you' seem like a natural point of view.

In stories

In linear stories, the audience has no control, so second person feels artificial and a little weird: the audience can feel the narrator has put them into the box of this character and now they're being driven around with no choice.

A second effect of this point of view is that there are fewer 'entities' involved—there is narrator and audience, and character has kind of merged into the audience, meaning there are only two people 'in the room' instead of three, which will feel closer in a way that can feel intimate, claustrophobic, reflective, or creepy depending how it is executed.

If there's any reason to use second person in story writing, it's perhaps to create a deliberately reflective, self-conscious state of mind in the reader.

So you can see that you can work with second person exactly like you work with third person and its variants, while noting that it creates a more self-conscious feel than third person.

What about first person? What's that about?

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