Once I had a partial scene, a bunch of scribbly background, what if questions, and a growing sense of the main character’s core issues, I knew I was missing something, but what was it?
Hmm. Maybe not what, but who.
Another character. In fact, I wondered, how does a second person point of view character interact with another character on the page? How does the dialogue work? Is it the same or different than “regular” third person point of view writing?
And who will this character be? A hero? A villain? Someone in-between?
Scene entrance, upstage right, behind Erissa as she faces the audience and speaks her piece, enter scene… A handsome (gorgeous) man she’s never seen at the castle before. Who is he? Why does he help her?
And oh, he’s human… too bad dragons and humans don’t mix in polite society, even though Erissa herself is half-dragon, half-human, and everyone at the court hates her because of it… (Oh, that’s the answer to some of my what if questions, but now there’s more questions.)
In fact, maybe everyone in the kingdom wants to get rid of her because of it?
Hmm. So, who is this guy? Villain? Hero? Assassin? Love Interest? A little bit of all of those?
This led me back to my scribbly notes and questions in a notebook, which I half-answered before jumping back into write some more, because the reason I wrote a novel with more than half the scenes written in second person point of view, is that I fell in love with the characters, the story, and the challenge of writing second person point of view in present tense.
At some point, after a wild bit of writing over 20,000 words in a week for these characters (writing, not talk-to-text), I realized I was head over heels in this project, and I needed to…. slow down. What?
Yep. I’ll get to that part in the next episode on the process of writing dual point of view with two different points of view – second person point of view and first person point of view, or first and second, if that helps.
Want to see how it turned out? Read the first three episodes for free on Kindle Vella:
Princess Erissa, half-dragon and half-human, can hear the harmony of truth and the disharmony of lies in others, but the hardest lie she may have to face is her own. Daniel, sent to assassinate the “curse” of the kingdom, falls in love when he gazes into her eyes. Instead of being the downfall of the realm, she might be the only one who can save it.
The Dragon and The Ranger on Kindle Vella, episodes already scheduled out for M-W-F.
Rene (Rose) Hawthorne 