2nd Person POV writing tips
Hiya, a couple of friends recently expressed their frustrations with writing 2nd person POV and I promised to share a couple of tips. I’m sure there are other people out there who might benefit from these so here goes:
The biggest pitfall with 2nd person is that you are forced to use the word ‘you’ a lot, and this can feel very unnatural (both to read and write). 3rd person allows you to use all sorts of different words for your subject and object in a sentence, e.g:
The blonde yawns as she takes a seat by her brother. She picks up her book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. The girl begins to read.
However, when you take this into 2nd person it becomes:
You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.
Oooh nooo… taking even the most basic sentence into 2nd person strips a lot of colour from the language and adds unintended rhythm in the form of you you you. And this is just one sentence! Now you have to make every single paragraph like this—yikes!
So what do we do? Well, there are a couple of techniques we can employ to add variety to a sentence, both in and out of 2nd person, by playing with sentence structure and interiority.
The first, most important rule is to avoid having the word ‘you’ at the beginning of consecutive sentences.
Let’s rearrange the sentence a bit:
Yawning, you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.
Already this is a bit better, but we can abolish a few more you’s by messing around with unnecessary the possessive pronouns.
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael. You pick up the book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.
Neato. Right, so, that’s the most basic way to trick the brain into finding 2nd person more palatable, but it’s still a bit sterile.
But! Hold on!! There is another important lever we can pull: interiority. When I say interiority, I am talking about abstract statements that forgo ‘you’ as a subject, because it is already implied by the POV we have chosen. That sounds a little complicated so let me show you what I mean:
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.
We use interiority here to imply a lot of actions that would normally have ‘you’ as the subject. By making the subject the page instead, we are telling the reader that the POV character is interacting with the book without saying it directly. We are also adding padding between the first ‘you’ and the ones that we are putting together in the final sentence. Having that nice big gap followed by a tiny one creates a pleasing rhythm.
So let's look at our starting sentence and our final sentence again together, side by side:
You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.
Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.
As you can see, the second sentence feels much more dynamic, but ultimately they are saying the same thing! This is how I approach writing 2nd person in my work, I hope some of you find it useful <3
