I wrote a story a while ago in 2nd person perspective. You see, when I was a Creative Writing major, we had an exercise in a class that forced us to write a scene from a story in all three points of view: First (I'm doing something), Third (He/she is doing something), and the not-often-used-but-when-it-is-it's-usually-terrible Second person (You are doing something). Now, as I said, 2nd person is usually done very poorly. However, I had the misfortune of having a professor (a really good one, by the way) who believed in me and thought that this particular exercise demonstrated that I understood how to properly write in 2nd person perspective, and she told me this. This is unfortunate because now I have it in my head that I'm capable of using this oft misused point of view, and now I have a story that is probably nearly unpublishable. It's been rejected two or three times already (not that much, I know) but I think that the number could grow by a factor of 10 or 20 before I finally try to include it in a short story collection of all my stories, published and unpublished. Honestly, I think it's a great story, but the weird perspective might mean that this doesn't matter, unless I find an editor that hasn't yet been bombarded by terrible 2nd person perspective stories. Maybe I'm wrong and this is just such a terrible 2nd person story, and I'm only contributing to the problem.
For an example of a really good 2nd person story, Google Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer". You'll be glad you did.
So, ultimately, my advice in this post is that unless you are Lorrie Moore, don't write a story in second person point of view. If you do, prepare to get it rejected over and over and over.
A an engineer, I sometimes get wrapped up in the cleverness or elegance of a design, instead of the project. A quote I come back to quite often comes from Jamie Zawinski of Netscape fame:
ReplyDelete“At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”
I end up wanting to try things like Remote Objects and COM+ because its interesting as an engineer. Even though it isn't the best way to complete a project. It doesn't necessarily help me ship the product and meet the deadline.
Is the "2nd person challenge" because it is interesting to you as a writer? Or because it makes it a better story for the reader than 1st or 3rd person?
That's a really interesting thought, but I think we're kinda comparing two incompatible types. Though it's often interesting to note the similarities between writing code and writing a story, I don't think it applies here.
ReplyDeleteThis story wanted to be told in 2nd person. I don't know if code "wants" to be written a certain way.
And for the record, a well-written 2nd person story is unbeatable, so sometimes it's worth the risk.