Why did I use Second Person Point of View in The Dragon and The Ranger? Part 1

In most of my fiction writing, I’ve been a hardcore, die hard third person point of view writer. So, why did I choose to write more than half of The Dragon and The Ranger in Second Person Point of View?

I started out with one simple reason:

I was struggling to write first person point of view for another story, and I had read an article somewhere (I didn’t save it), that seemed to state that second person point of view forced a writer to be even closer to their characters than first person point of view.

I thought this was an interesting idea and decided to try it. I figured if I could master second person point of view, then perhaps, I could master first person point of view.

First, I did some research. Books I read with second person point of view which helped inspire me to try it were: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and Ashlords and Bloodsworn by Scott Reintgen.

I also read a series of articles about second person point of view, most notably: Second Person Point of View: Should Anyone Use It? at Reedsy, and What is Second Person Point of View in Writing? How to Write Second Person Narrative Voice with Examples by Masterclass.

Honestly, the cons were big enough cons that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do much with it, but…

I started The Dragon and The Ranger as an act of discovery writing, an experiment of whimsical challenge that started like this:

You stand at the edge of a precipice. Well, not really, because you’re actually terrified of precipices, cliffs, tall trees, boulders, steep slopes, ladders, or any kind of place you’ve seen or could imagine far above the ground, the dropping away of the earth produces a dizzying effect, and you stumble on your feet.
So, in actuality, you stand five feet away from the precipice…

Well, once I had that paragraph, I had to find out why she was afraid, so I asked myself that question: why is she afraid? I wrote a bit more about her fear and the answer showed up in the third paragraph with this line: You know from other dragon kin, that your desire to leap is not something remarkable – but unlike them, you have never been able to fly.

Wow. I had to find out more about this character. And, while she came out of my imagination, she felt really close to me, closer than most characters I’ve written. I spent some time scribbling notes to myself, daydreaming, and wondering about this character. Asking “what if?” kinds of questions.

I had been wanting to write a book about dragons. I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to try second person point of view, and I wanted to write in present tense – another skill I hadn’t mastered… yet. So, I dove in to write more.

I wrote a paragraph more, then another one, and pretty soon, I had a partial scene, but it was missing something. What? (Hmm. I’ll come back to this in my next post because this one is getting lengthy.)

If you would like to check out how it reads, the first three episodes are free at Kindle Vella.