POV Chart

I've used second person a few times for ledes in journalism, or breaking the fourth wall. Otherwise I've only ever seen it in choose-your-own-adventures.

You can do it in a few different ways.

"You" can be designed to put the reader in the position of the subject.

Or more informally, "you" could be used like "one". You see this from time to time in discussion on here: general "you", not literally "you". Often used in hypotheticals.

Yeah, it's typically locked into a single POV. If I'm not mistaken, Dungeons and Dragons does a lot of this.

I notice people tell stories and share information with "you" all the time. I find it more engaging than "I, I, I, I". Instead of making the story sound like it's all about themselves ("I did this, I did that"), it tricks listeners into thinking it's all about *them*.

It's an overt invitation to use some imagination and pretend to be someone else, somewhere else.

Of course, the thing about first-person POV is that it is simply assumed that the reader is the narrator. So in that sense, second-person is automatically more distanced, as it presupposes a separate reader and listener.

That's my layman's opinion.

You/Reader stories are particularly prominent in fanfiction circles.

I dabble. It's fun. Plus the fanfiction crowd never, ever, evah asks you to defend the placement of a raunchy sex scene.

The blog area is a plugin for Xenforo™. It doesn't work exactly as the regular forum does. This quote I've embedded, for example, I had to hand-construct the BBCode that makes it work.

Small glitch in the blog plugin. If you edit an existing post or reply, the first time you hit post, it tends to come up as raw text with unparsed BBCode all as one chunk. Just hit refresh and it goes back to normal... usually.

This actually breaks down a whole hell of a lot further. I'll post something later tonight or tomorrow, as I have work right now, but I will say that the break downs between the main three get more complicated when he multiplicity of views increases. Also, there are various narration methods that move as objective or subjective based style, which enter a different element to works. Sorry, just give me until tomorrow and I'll get a load of them written out here.

And back to the topic at hand:

I cannot begin to tell you how delighted I am to see others digging deeper into the facets and concepts of POV. I admined this forum for over a decade and the never-ending river of "how do I describe this person" posts was at first frustrating, then maddening, then tiring, then just an annoyance. I stopped trying to ask questions further back in the order condescendi because, well, people don't like the idea that they don't know what to do now because they got here via the most random of paths.

"What's the POV?"

"Um... words?"

"No, no. Who is the character we are using as a filter?"

"My characters are not coffee filters."

"Actually, if you're willing to entertain a metaphor, yes, they are."

"You're a dildo. Can't you just give me words to describe this face?"

"Sure. He had lips where one usually finds lips. Above these, a nose in the typical orientation for an anatomically modern sapiens..."

"Yep, you're a dildo."

"I am many things, and yes, occasionally a dildo, but not today. Today I'm trying to get you to acknowledge the structural scaffolding you've chosen for this story. You keep asking what kinds of walls, what kinds of elevators, how many stories, flats or offices, luxury or economy, and you have yet to tell me what all of this is using as a skeleton. You cannot build an elephant on the skeleton of a platypus, and since you refuse to let me know about the skeleton, my answers can come from elephant, giraffe, tiger, mole, worm, anything!"

"I hate you..."

"You would hate me a great deal less if you just answered the question."