Home

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:

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.