wetranscripts | Writing Excuses 20.16: Second Person

Writing Excuses 20.16: Second Person

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-16-second-person

Key Points: Second person, aka you! You the reader, you another character, epistolary letters written to you. Social media and conversations. Second person forces you into the story. Problems when the character does something that the reader would not. Marginalized perspectives use it to grab the reader and say you don't get to look away. Second person in game writing! Biggest risk in second person is the audience bouncing off it. In game writing, you tell players what they are experiencing, but they decide how they will react. Agency! Use senses, not emotions. Buy-in. You get one or two buy-in's for free, but the more you use, the harder it is to sell. Writing trust falls, here's something you know to be true, so you can trust me. Meta-textual? LitRPG is often second person. Recipes! Influencer videos. VR.

[Season 20, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] Second Person.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I thought about trying to do those intros in second person, but it would be really hard.

[chuckles]

[Howard] It would be very hard.

[Dan] You're Dan...

[Howard] Yeah, the best I could come up with was and you're not Howard. I am. But that's still first person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think I could say you're Erin.

[Erin] Chaos would reign. And I think that, like, second person... sometimes feels like the chaotic proximity. So we're talking about perspective, we're talking about proximity, and now we're getting into second person, which is when you use you. That is sort of the kind of very baseline level. And I think there are a few different varieties of second person that I like to think of. The most sort of, I guess, purest second person is when the you you're addressing is the reader. But you can also use second person to address another character in a story, and I often think that letter writing, epistolary, is like you, because when you write a letter, you do, like, I'm writing to you, Sir Mixalot...

[laughter]

[Dan] That's usually who I write letters to.

[Howard] He got her letter back...

[laughter]

[Erin] Oh, great, it's doing things. But… So, what do you think? I feel like you have very strong opinions about both Sir Mixalot and second person.

[Howard] Let me say this about second person.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] It is easy to forget that you… And this is me speaking to you, fair listener, have probably used second person quite a lot on social media or conversationally. So, imagine this. You're driving, and all of a sudden… You know, you tell a story that way. Sometimes. Not all the time. But you slip into second person very naturally, because it is a way to draw the reader into, or draw the listener, draw your conversational group into the experience that you personally had in a way that… No kidding. So there I was, doesn't.

[DongWon] We think of first person as the most intimate voice. Right? We think of first person as the one where you're right next to the interiority of the character. But there's a weird way in which I think second person is actually the most intimate in a way that can make people really uncomfortable. Because you're sort of forcing the reader's subjectivity into the fiction itself. You're integrating the person who's reading the story into the experience of being in the story in a way that can be a little disorienting or really fun for the reader. Right? Like, we've been talking about second person epistolary. Part of why I think This Is How You Lose the Time War hit so hard is that the romance is built over a series of second person direct address letters. Right? So the reader is the one who sort of feeling romanced by these characters talking to each other. Even though we know Red and Blue are talking to each other, but that's all being passed through the reader's experience.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that is… There's a distinction between second person where you're addressing another character and the reader can participate…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And choose to be part of that character and second person where you're addressing the reader, and there, I think, sometimes we… Or where you're attempting to make the reader be a character. And where you run into problems with that is when you have the character do something that the reader would not, but you are addressing the reader. So you wind up breaking the relationship. Like… And then you felt like you were really angry. I'm like, no, actually, I think this is fine. I'm not mad at all. Or… And then you went down the long, dark stairs. I'm like, no, no I did not…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Go down the long, dark stairs. Absolutely a hundred percent no. So I think it is… It's one of the challenges of how can you make the reader into a character when you're doing that kind of second person? Without making them… The actions cause an artificiality?

[DongWon] Well, I still think that this is what led to the silent videogame protagonist for so long. Right? Was they wanted to make sure that they weren't taking the player out of the experience of being the character. So if the character spoke for you… This is why, famously, Master Chief didn't talk for so long, this is why Gordon from Half-Life doesn't talk. Right? Like… And then over time that's evolved as people developed a little bit more sophistication around being able to participate in the story, even though you're being told that this is what's happening to me. But it can be a really tough balance when it comes to prose. Right? Because there's an interesting thing where I see second person deployed a lot, and it's deployed only sparingly in fiction. This is not a common technique. Certainly not a common technique to tell your whole story in. But the ones where I find it really interesting, I noticed a wave of fiction at one point that was all being told from marginalized perspectives that was all using the second person in really challenging ways. And it was a little bit of grabbing the reader and saying you don't get to look away from this. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right. And I think part of why Fifth Season works really well is that it's doing that to some extent. The second person in that is a little bit of no, you're part of this. You don't get to walk away. You don't get to say, "Oh, that happened to those people over there," because of the way the second person creates that immediacy, even though you're like, I didn't do those things. You know what I mean? And there is something really interesting about disrupting that layer between the reader and the narrator.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that's going through my head when you're talking about that is the Fifth Season starts with a frame, a little bit of a frame.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's not there very long. Where it is, let's talk about where we are. It is omniscient voice, it is plural we, and then… Plural we? As opposed to singular we, which is…

[DongWon] Royal.

[Dan] Royal.

[Mary Robinette] Royal we. Thank you. I was like… Who knows what's happening in my brain right there…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But then it narrows into… It immediately pretty much goes into you are doing this. And it is that imagine how you would feel if you were here for the reader. And then you just stop noticing at a certain point that it is in second person. I read, years and years ago, when Shimmer magazine was still going, we accepted a story that was second person because I was like three pages into it before I realized it was second person. It was about someone coming home for Halloween, and it… But it starts with a little bit of this very voice-driven opening and then it drops into second person. You get home and you can smell all of these things. But it's starting with common experiences, things that it's easy to relate to, to kind of lead you into it.

[Erin] Yeah, I think there's a couple thoughts. One is the thing about the marginalized folks using second person. It's funny because I see it… I love what you said about it, and yet I was like, oh, I saw it in a completely different way. Which was that sometimes the experience of being marginalized can be that someone else gets to decide what you… Who you are, what you are doing, and how you are perceived. And I always viewed it as a way to force the reader into that same feeling of us… Of the lack of control. Like, you actually don't get to control even what you are doing in this story…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, therefore, you should feel what this character feels, or what I, the author, feel…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When I don't feel in control of my own.

[DongWon] No, that's what I was trying to say. So we're…

[Erin] Oh, there you go. But you also said another awesome thing, which was that it's also about you can't look away.

[DongWon] Right. Right, right.

[Erin] So, sometimes I think it's you're participating, you're feeling marginalization. Sometimes it could be, like, you're feeling the horrible things you did.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think of… I'm going to take liberties with this, because we do it was Star Wars all the time. But there is a great episode of Star Trek: Voyager where a whole bunch of people participate… Feel that they are participating in a massacre. And it turns out that this is actually a memorial to that massacre grabs you and put you in the place of the soldier that panics and kills a whole bunch of people, and that's the way that they try to ensure that it never happens again. Because if you feel like you did it, you have to live with the guilt, and that… hopefully that stops you from doing further atrocities.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is a really interesting, like, putting you in the mind of it. I had something else to say, but I have completely forgotten. And so you, listener, are going to wait while we take a short break.

[Erin] All right. So, more second person. So I was thinking about it, right, before we actually started this episode… I was asking everyone, like, have you written second person? In one thing that came up again and again, was game writing. So, I'm kind of curious, from those who have written games or played games, do you feel like it works… You sort of mentioned this earlier, DongWon, like you feel like it works better in games than in prose? What do you think is the difference there?

[DongWon] I mean, it's funny because my… Of the people here, my primary creative output is in games. So most of the writing I do, sort of, is second person, because just as a GM sort of live feeding back to my players what's happened, I will say, you did this thing, you said this, you… There will be a lot of, like, I'm telling you what it is that you just did based on the rolls that you made and what you've given me in the narration that you've set up. So there's always this really interesting delicate balance between honoring their intent and making it fit the story that we're all telling together. Right? So, like… The use of the second person, because you're taking control of someone else's experience, does require you to think about their experience in a really different way than I think just straight up narration does. I really love that dance. Obviously, I'm doing that dance kind of live with the players in the moment. There's an improvisational immediate feedback aspect to it. But I think it is… The reason I love second person so much, the reason I find it so interesting to talk about and so exciting for all the things we're talking about is because you cannot escape thinking about the audience and you cannot escape thinking about the writer and they are in direct relationship when you're using you.

[Howard] Um… I was playing a role-playing game in which one of the players decided to introduce themselves in second person by telling all of us how we were reacting to them walking into the room. And to the last player, we rejected that. Because it didn't fit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because we were being told a thing that was not true…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And we actually had to stop the session…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And say, okay, no, the other players have as much choice over what they do as you do. If you want to tell us what you're feeling, we get to have contested die rolls. But when writing game fiction, you're not telling the players necessarily what they're experiencing, you are… It's like you are giving them instruction. And it… When I wrote technical manuals, we would slide into second person all the time. But then we do have editors tell us, hey, if you know what, it's starting to feel a little too personal, let's slide back out into the third person. So, for me, what I've arrived at over the years is that the single biggest problem with second person… And I don't want to say that it's problematic, but the biggest risk is that your audience may bounce off of it in a way that you can't recover from and that makes it really difficult to use.

[Dan] One of the reasons that I think second person works so well for game writing, specifically, is… I'm going to tweak Howard's wording slightly. With second person, you often are telling people what they're experiencing. You're just not governing how they experience it.

[Howard] Yes.

[Dan] When you're in a game situation, you can say, I walk into the room and you see this, and you see this, and you smell this, and… I hope smell is not the primary sense that you experience when I walk into a room. But…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Or when you listen to a podcast.

[Dan] Yeah. But then the players get to decide how they react to that information.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's about agency.

[Yeah]

[Erin] Yeah, I think one of the biggest, like, things that you will find if you end up, like, writing for tabletop games, when you write read aloud text that the GM is meant to read, is that people often say only use senses, don't use emotions. Like, you cannot say you are frightened by the giant monster. You can just say, like, the monster has 8000 teeth and, like, each one is razor-sharp, which… But if somebody's like, that just doesn't… I love that [garbled]

[laughter]

[Howard] It presents a career opportunity.

[Erin] Yeah. Then that's something that's, like, is sort of allowed to happen. And I think what you're saying about agency, it's like agency and buy-in. Like, I think a lot of what we're talking about is like that you… When you're using second person, you have to get much more explicit buy-in or think about how you are going to get buy-in. And, I'm curious, like, what you think are ways that people can get buy-in to second person, like, is it by setting the frame, Mary Robinette, as you were saying, is it something else?

[Mary Robinette] Just buy-in made me… A couple of things click in my head. There's a thing in… When you're writing for film, television, and what we do, the science fiction fantasy, that you get one or two buy-in's for free. People can live under the water and have fish tails. We buy-in. Witches can steal your voice. We buy-in. Storms arise out of nowhere… Nah. Like, the more you asked them to buy-in, the… To things that are off from their experience, the harder it is to sell. And I think that that may be also… I wonder if that also plays out in second person that you can do one or two, like, I'm going to have you… You do this thing that you would not do, and you give me one or two of them for the sake of the story, but the more I do, the more disconnected you feel from the story. The more often I take your agency away, the more often I tell you how you are reacting…

[Howard] There's a worldbuilding trick that I've come to refer to as the trust fall. Trust fall is a group exercise where you build trust quote unquote by catching someone who's falling. As a writer, the trust fall is the simple and easy I am going to tell you a thing that you already know to be true, and I'm going to state it as truth so that you trust me to be a writer who tells you things that are true. By doing that, you build tru… I mean, you shouldn't trust me as a writer, because I'm a liar who's going to lie a lot. But by building that trust early on, you can purchase for yourself maybe a little extra buy-in for when you need it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like you were going to say something before, DongWon? But…

[DongWon] If I was, I have forgotten it. I'm sorry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's an example of using second person to try to force someone to do a thing that they don't want to do.

[Howard] Your face says that you want to talk. Your heart says…

[Mary Robinette] You know something else that… Oh, you do have something now?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] One of the things I really love about second person, while we're on this sort of how to get this buy-in component, is the way second person allows you to use voice in a really different way than other formats, because it's a direct address. Because somebody is speaking to somebody. Even if it's an unnamed narrator, their… It demands a more consistency of voice, than you would get in other… Than in third person omniscient, for example. Where you can slide around from different thing to different thing. Because now that I'm talking to you… Somebody is talking to somebody, somebody is writing to somebody, and so there's a difference in… It forces the narration into a character in your story in a really different way, as well. Right? There is a storyteller. If there is a you, than there is an I. So I think it allows certain things… That probably one of my favorite things to see in stories is when the narrator is suddenly revealed to be a character, and I am suddenly revealed to be an audience to that character's speech.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Or someone in the story. Right? Which is, as we talked about with Fifth Season, as we've seen in other things, the sudden reveal of what I thought was just narration as actually a character is a thing that I always find truly delightful and exciting.

[Mary Robinette] You reminded me of one of my favorite books, which is The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. It's… Throughout… It's two stories that appear to be completely unrelated. It's third person. But at the end of each chapter, he says, "Bones?" That's the last thing in it. And it takes a while before you… Deep into the book, the narrator says that… It's first person, actually. I take that back, it's first person. Before the narrator says that, they always tell this Hungarian folktale to their friends, and they end each section the way their mother did, which was by saying, "Bones?" Which was a way… Indicator to say, "Do you want me to keep going?" So you suddenly realize that you have been active participants in ways that you didn't realize you were an active participant. And… And it's I guess…

[Howard] You were asking me if I wanted to turn the page…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I turned the page. So I guess I said yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I guess it is a very interesting thing to play with.

[DongWon] I guess this all leads me to one question as we're talking about things. We've talked about game writing, we've talked around, like, direct address and epistolary. Is second person always meta-textual? Is it… Does it necessarily require a meta-textual relationship to the text? And is that why it is so difficult to use well?

[Howard] At risk of being slightly prognosticative, I think that that will depend entirely on whether we see a massive market busting breakout work in second person. Because if that happens, it'll shift the marketplace and we may, 25 years from now, look at second person as the new normal.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, we did see a massive market busting thing, which was the Fifth Season. I did just finish another book where I realized at the end of the book that the entire thing had also been doing this. I'm not going to tell you which book it was because there's a reveal, but it is the meta-textual thing again.

[DongWon] A ton of litRPG is second person. Right? Like this entire genre is a sort of…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] [garbled] fiction that's sort of using second person as a default voice at this point.

[Mary Robinette] You know what is also second person? Recipes. Recipes are often second person. They don't always put the pronoun on the page…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But it is.

[Howard] [garbled] for the recipe blogs that are third person and begin with a long essay about…

[DongWon] It's very unsettling when they say, "Howard Tayler mixes the flour."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Between bouts of leaf keeping.

[Dan] Even when you get the big recipe blogs section, the recipe itself is very second person, where it's saying do this, now do this, now add this.

[Mary Robinette] And they're often doing direct address during… I want to actually… I hear some disdain for the essay at the top, and I just want to say you are not the audience. That does not mean that it is bad. It is there to provide context and…

[Howard] Oh, no. I'm…

[Mary Robinette] Yes?

[Howard] I recognize…

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Howard] That I'm not the audience.

[Mary Robinette] So… But that essay, for those of us who read them, are often in second person. It's like, let me tell you about this. It's… I guess those are still first person. But it is that direct address to the reader. Sometimes it's you were asking me about this. I'm like, I'm not. This is my first time I've been here. But I can see that you are excited about it.

[Howard] Part of what they're doing is building trust. They're telling you a story about how the food affected them, and if you want to have this effect, you will now do this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And it drops into the instruction set.

[Erin] Interestingly, I think I was like why do I dislike these things, and I think one of the reasons is that because of the demographics of who does recipe blogs…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] It often feels like an experience I am very distant from. Like, I don't do leaf keeping and so, like, it just feels…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, it often is very like suburban if that makes any sense.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like. I was like… I feel like if I wrote a recipe blog and someone was, like, I found this on the subway or something that felt more to my experience, like, I'm not buying in, because I'm… This is not the kind of experience I would be having. So I can't relate to it. And so it sort of comes back to what we're saying it's just that they're… I'm not the audience for that particular use of second person.

[DongWon] Late into this episode, my brain finally connected two dots, which is, in the same way that I was talking about how one of the dominant languages of our modern world is this third person close because of the video games and film, one of the dominant languages of our world is second person because of influencer videos, Tik-Tok, and [sometimes?] reels, YouTube… These are all second person addressed, these are all persons talking straight into camera to me, and me feeling that relationship and that connection. So when that gets fulfilling and when that gets disruptive, I think, is really, really cued to all these social contexts.

[Mary Robinette] I see Dan has something, but I just want to clarify that I think that those are first-person, but often… The point of view shifts…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That we get influencer videos where you never see the person, what you just see is their hands chopping something or the let me walk you down this trail with my dog and you never see the person who's doing the walking, so it's like you are having that experience. Outing. I am… It's… Video is a totally different media. What were you going to say, Dan?

[Dan] I was just going to expand the kind of… The Internet communication beyond just influencer videos. Because a lot of it… For example, with the recipe blogs, a lot of that is framed as a you… You've been asking for this because it is in conversation with their comments section. And I feel like we get that a lot in the Internet. You've been talking about this. I've been saying this, your response was this, and… It's much more conversational, which, to a point, does have a lot of second person in it.

[Mary Robinette] And also has a lot of that meta-textual thing that you're talking about, which is an awareness of the story and the frame.

[Erin] And I think that one of the things that's interesting, I just thought of VR as you were talking about this. VR is interesting because in VR, you, like… It's all you. Like, you can… You're doing things, you're moving in a certain way, it is the most embodied view I think you can almost be other than maybe immersive theater. Where, like, you're in the center of something and everything is happening around you and you get to have control. And it comes back to agency, which is, I think, the more agency we feel we have in the you, the more comfortable that you feel, the quicker we're able to buy in. So when you're using it as a tool, either you can have a more… You have less agency as the you, and therefore I'm going to put the work in to make you buy in by starting with a frame…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or making sure that you understand that there's another character, or something that, like, helps you to get in there. Or I'm going to give you maximum agency, in which case, you do feel like you control what you're doing.

[DongWon] There was that short story a few months ago that was the riff on Omalos that used Internet language and deprived us of agency by using the second person through that is making it clear that we are all complicit in the walking away from Omalos. Right? Like… And I think part of that… Not walking away from Omalos, but we're all complicit in the exploitation inherent in that story. And that was such a devastating story to read because it uses second person to disrupt my sense of agency and force a sense of complicity. And I'm blanking on the name of the story and the author. But it's wonderful. You should look it up. It's very upsetting.

[Erin] We'll put it in the show notes. And we will send you off now with some homework.

[Erin] So what I'd like you to do is to actually take… Write something in second person. You can decide whatever you want it to be, you can take a scene that you already have, you can write a recipe blog and second person if you want, write a bit of a lit RPG read aloud. But what I want you to do is try it in a couple of different ways. So I want you to think of something that you're getting across in the scene and try it is a you that's directed to another character. Or a you that's a letter. And then try again, where you… The you is the actual reader themselves, the person whose experiencing the text. And look at how that shifts things, and what that gives you an opportunity to do.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.