What are you looking at?

It’s rare, but when used effectively second-person narration can knock the reader’s socks off. Anybody who read Fighting Fantasy books when they were younger will know the second-person narrative style intimately: ‘You enter the cavern and see a werewolf dead ahead. What will you do?’ This viewpoint is something of an outsider in narrative theory, but when used well it can have a profound effect on your reader. It is ‘you’ at the centre of things, ‘you’ who is now implicated in the story, for better or for worse. Of course, the second person can also be used to express intimacy and companionship, as this book hopefully demonstrates!

Self-help books aside, you need a good reason to use second-person narrative style in your work. Think about what you are trying to achieve – do you want the reader to feel like a character? Do you want to boss them around, to force them into a certain frame of thought? Do you want to convey the sense of a shared, intimate experience? Or do you want to make the reader complicit in whatever is going on in the text? One striking novel that uses the second person for precisely this last effect is Iain Banks’ Complicity. Several of the chapters involve ‘you’ as the protagonist. Although it’s not immediately clear what you are doing, you soon realise that ‘you’ are a serial killer, and you’re forced to witness – commit, even – several horrific murders from a very intimate, and unsettling, viewpoint.

This feels like you’re behind the eyes of a killer. Whereas with a more conventional form of narrative you could distance yourself from the events, here you literally are complicit with them. Like it or not, you become the character and have to sit with a puppet-like empathy as you maraud your way through your victims. On a less disturbing level, the second person works to make reading the text as strange an experience as possible. People aren’t generally used to being addressed in a work of fiction. By doing so, you are creating an intimate bond with each reader, allowing them to take the front seat in your imaginary world. Used well, and your work will really stand out from the crowd. Used without good reason, though, or written sloppily and all it will do is confuse and alienate people.

Writing an entire text in the second person is an ambitious, and some might say foolhardy, undertaking, but there’s nothing to stop you addressing the reader every now and again. Back in the good old days when the novel was a relatively new phenomenon, narrators often made conversational asides to the reader. And whilst not as common today, the narrator can still throw in an occasional comment or two directed at ‘you’, just to make sure you’re still awake.

If you’re writing in a first-person viewpoint, especially one confessional in tone, this seems perfectly normal – just look at D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. If you’re writing with a third-person narrator, however, addressing your readers explicitly may direct their attention away from the events of the text and towards its construction. All of a sudden, this disembodied, neutral observer has developed an opinion, and is talking to you like you’re its best friend.

If you want an example of how second-person narration is used to excellent effect, read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Here, the narrator begins the tale by instructing you, the reader, to lie down, relax with the book, and tell your friends not to interrupt your reading – almost like an instruction manual for enjoying the book. It alerts you to the novel’s artifice, but it also creates a welcome sense of intimacy between the narrator and the reader.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

How do you stop the big things from having little meaning and the little things from getting too big and messy? Confused? Me too. There was a time when literary convention dictated that only certain subjects were fit for poetry. You could write about love, death and beauty, but if you wanted to tackle any other issues you pretty much had to ditch the verse and write a report. Today, thankfully, things have changed. I’ve reviewed poems on every conceivable subject, from woodlice to iPods, medieval warfare to cypress trees, and while not every piece worked (or even made sense, for that matter), it proves there’s no excuse for a lack of topics to write about.

How do you know if an idea is suitable for a poem? Any idea, however faint, that gets you excited, that touches a nerve, or evokes an emotional response can be the spark of inspiration. The trick now is to fan that spark with enough strength to create a fire without flapping so much you blow it out. The biggest pitfall is going for the big topics such as love, death, time, nature and god without sufficient preparation. All poets tackle some of these subjects at some point – it’s why poetry exists, and it would be unusual if you didn’t want to at least try and explain through verse the issues that mystify you. But in order to capture the essence of these abstract phrases you need to know how to keep it personal.

When you embark on a poem that deals with love, or any other abstract term, you’re always in danger of obscurity and repetition. The word love isn’t tied to anything specific, it’s different for each and every person, and nobody can pin down exactly what it feels like. Moreover, when writing (or reading) about love you suddenly find yourself bombarded with each and every love poem you’ve ever heard, which further loosens your grasp on the term. So when you use the word love in your poetry the image it tends to create is a shadowy, muffled one. The more abstract and high-flown the phrase, the less precise and evocative it will be. Try to avoid abstract terms altogether in your writing – it’s difficult to empathise with a vague impression.

So how can you convey an abstraction without referring to it directly? With subtle, personal hints rather than a slap in the face. Instead of using a poem to tell a reader about a terrifying experience, show them. In other words, don’t use the word terrified (a reader’s eyes will brush over it, it means nothing to them in the context of your poem), but try and convey the experience of being terrified – how you felt, what you were thinking. Everybody has been terrified at some point in their life, and if you evoke the way you were affected by the experience you can attract a reader’s empathy.

Say what now? Yes, it’s a tricky phrase to get your lips round, but then it was one of T. S. Eliot’s. What he was referring to was the need to transfer an abstract emotion onto a real, solid object. It’s no use just bandying words like love and death around. You need to tie them down to a concrete ‘thing’ so that they acquire a physical presence: they become real emotions experienced by real people. I’m not necessarily talking about metaphors here: to write a poem about an old man visiting a cemetery might involve a headstone as a metaphor for the inevitability of death. This is a fairly obvious symbolic link. Instead, the same old man may be looking through his dead wife’s wardrobe for things he can donate to charity and come across a tatty pair of shoes she wore forty years ago. The shoes aren’t a direct metaphor, but they embody the sadness he feels at her passing. Through the object you can evoke a powerful, terrifying feeling of loss; the painful flood of returning memories; the distant abstract made flesh and soul. This is how powerful writing is born.