NaNoWriMo RE: Writing in 2nd Person POV

Are any of you writing in 2nd person? If so, what have you found to be the biggest challenge about writing in this uncommon POV?

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Out side of a game book (aka a Choose Your Own Adventure book) second person does not go over well, with either readers or publishers. It’s hard to read, if you are just reading it for the sake of reading it. It’s extremely difficult to write well, and is considered a “lazy form” of writing when used outside of a game book. The term “lazy form” is used to describe a style of writing that is pretty easy to write, but is hard to read or understand, resulting in the reader thinking the author was “too lazy” to bother to write something better. (First person, is also considered a “lazy form” of writing as well.)

Unless you are really, really, really, really good at English Grammar, and I mean college professor good, it’s VERY hard to write second person AND come out sounding grammatically correct.

That said, when it is well written, it makes for a very fast read, and draws the reader right into the book.

Pretty much every book on these lists is written in second person. I read most of them, but, most of them came out in the 1970’s so that tells you how long ago I read them. I can’t remember if they had dialog in them or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gamebooks

I recommend you try finding a few of these books via inter-library-loan and scan through them to see how other authors handled second person.

If you are writing something which you plan to publish, I would advise against second person, because most publishers toss every second person manuscript that comes across their desk, with out reading it. Unless it’s a game book, you will have an extremely hard time finding a publisher and will have to resort to self publishing it yourself. But if publishing is not your goal or it is a game book you are writing, than go ahead and write in second person, because it can’t hurt to try.

All Hail Bela Lugosi!

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