Second-person Point of View writing is an uncommon but rather unique POV. This is the one where the story is narrated as though it is being told directly to YOU. “You” is the giveaway when reading a Second-person Point of View story.

For example:

You go to the ballpark. Nina is there. She is wearing that red dress you gave her for her birthday last year. She says “Hi”, but you can tell her heart isn’t in it. You feel a pang of wanting her.

Full disclosure: I have not played around with Second-person Point of View very much. I really don’t like using it in my writing but I have some author friends who swear by it.  

So, what are some of the pros and cons?

On the plus side second-person Point of View carries an immediacy similar to, but not quite as good (IMHO) as first person. The story is typically about YOU and if there is one thing a reader can identify with, it’s themselves. That helps to grab attention right off the bat.

Another positive about Second-person Point of View is that the narrative voice can be omniscient, and therefore know things that the character would not otherwise know.

For example, “You don’t see the meteor coming.”

Or “Your sister is upset that you didn’t invite her to the party but is too shy to tell you.”

This opens up a few doors that a view point like first person doesn’t have. In first-person you can only live inside the character’s head and can only know what they know.

As you can tell from that second example, making the narrator omniscient can be a bit tricky if not handled well. The camera in the story is allowed to pull back from YOU and take in the world in a larger scene. This threatens to lose the immediate feel of YOU and distance the reader.

The threat is that the reader can start to become aware of the narrative voice, wondering who this character is, how do they know all of this, and what is their relationship to the characters in the story. That in itself can become something fun to work with – potentially having a further pull back and reveal, but then it sort of begs the question of why do you need second person at all? Why not just start with a third person in what is known as a “third-person deep POV” and pull back toward more omniscience as needed?

For example, second person with omniscient might sound like this:

You step into the tavern, certain that no one has noticed you, but the old woman by the fire has already counted the coins in your purse, and the prince hiding upstairs has just decided you are the one person in the kingdom foolish enough to save him.

Who is telling us what the old woman knows? Who is telling us what the prince has decided? Why are they talking directly to “you”?

The same scene in third-person deep POV might read:

Jaren stepped into the tavern and kept his eyes low, hoping no one had noticed him. He did not see the old woman by the fire watching his purse, and he had no way of knowing that the stranger upstairs had already mistaken him for a hero.

The third-person version still lets us pull back a little, but it does not call quite as much attention to the narrator. The reader accepts the shift more naturally because third person is made to handle that kind of distance.

This line of thinking relegates us to using second person the way it is typically used, in a Second person limited POV, where the narrative voice does not stray from the YOU character’s POV and knowledge.

Let’s check out that same scene written with a limited second-person POV:

You step into the tavern and keep your eyes low, hoping no one notices you.

By the fire, an old woman stops stirring her cup. You feel her watching you and check the purse beneath your cloak.

A floorboard creaks overhead and you glance toward the stairs just in time to see a shadow slip back from the landing.

We don’t get quite as much information but we stay in the YOU character’s head without feeling the narrator’s presence in the story.

You get done reading the blog post and consider commenting on whether you have ever written in Second-person Point of View and what you think about it. It would feel good to share your thoughts and others might like to hear what you have to say. Work is busy today but you have a few minutes so you decide to go for it.

-James