[just a creature]

Hiya, a couple of friends recently expressed their frustrations with writing 2nd person POV and I promised to share a couple of tips. I’m sure there are other people out there who might benefit from these so here goes:

The biggest pitfall with 2nd person is that you are forced to use the word ‘you’ a lot, and this can feel very unnatural (both to read and write). 3rd person allows you to use all sorts of different words for your subject and object in a sentence, e.g:

The blonde yawns as she takes a seat by her brother. She picks up her book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. The girl begins to read. 

However, when you take this into 2nd person it becomes:

You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.

Oooh nooo… taking even the most basic sentence into 2nd person strips a lot of colour from the language and adds unintended rhythm in the form of you you you. And this is just one sentence! Now you have to make every single paragraph like this—yikes!

So what do we do? Well, there are a couple of techniques we can employ to add variety to a sentence, both in and out of 2nd person, by playing with sentence structure and interiority.

The first, most important rule is to avoid having the word ‘you’ at the beginning of consecutive sentences.

Let’s rearrange the sentence a bit:

Yawning, you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.

Already this is a bit better, but we can abolish a few more you’s by messing around with unnecessary the possessive pronouns.

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael. You pick up the book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.

Neato. Right, so, that’s the most basic way to trick the brain into finding 2nd person more palatable, but it’s still a bit sterile. 

But! Hold on!! There is another important lever we can pull: interiority. When I say interiority, I am talking about abstract statements that forgo ‘you’ as a subject, because it is already implied by the POV we have chosen. That sounds a little complicated so let me show you what I mean:

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.

We use interiority here to imply a lot of actions that would normally have ‘you’ as the subject. By making the subject the page instead, we are telling the reader that the POV character is interacting with the book without saying it directly. We are also adding padding between the first ‘you’ and the ones that we are putting together in the final sentence. Having that nice big gap followed by a tiny one creates a pleasing rhythm.

So let's look at our starting sentence and our final sentence again together, side by side:

You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

Me when I write for 2 hours: 500 words

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

She also has a book that you may be able to borrow from a local library!

Haven’t drawn this guy in like,,, actual 3 years wowz