[So here is an alternative way that I might tell you about second person narration, using a form of second person narration to do it.]

What’s going on here?  You begin to read a new story, and right away things seem a little unusual.  It isn’t just characters with names inside the story that the narrator is talking about.  He’s actually addressing someone he keeps referring to as you. And at first you can’t quite figure out who it is.  You ask yourself, is he allowed to do that?  And you’re not sure whether you like it, but he keeps doing it.  Does he really think you know how to pilot an airplane?  Does he really think you could have drunk that much last night?  Does he want you to be in his story? 

Or is it someone else he’s addressing?  Is there another character in the story he hasn’t bothered to flesh out?  Where is that character lurking?  And what is the reason for the conflict between the narrator and this amorphous you.

Or is the narrator coming apart somehow?  Are you eavesdropping on something that’s going on inside this guy when he begins a sentence with: “The trouble with you is that you never do anything the easy way.”

But after a while, you’re beginning to sort of enjoy the process.  It’s fresh, sure, a little off-putting because things aren’t as certain and easy to fathom as they’d be if the author stuck to the old comfortable rules of third person narration, but it’s kind of enjoyable.  You see the creative potential of the confusion. Somehow you enjoy the trust and familiarity, even though you sometimes resist when you begin to feel manipulated.  And you’re thinking, that narrator had better be careful with this new form.  It might get out of control. 

Until it does, you decide to hang on and keep reading, partly because you’re thinking, you want to be a writer too, and you like the idea of trying out the second person narration for yourself.

*           *           *

So now that you’ve read this piece, you decide to give it a try. You begin to write something using second person narrative techniques.  And immediately you discover that it might actually be opening new vistas you hadn’t really focused upon before. You realize that when you address a reader as you, it requires you actually to think about who is going to be reading what you’re writing, every moment that you write.  Right away you’re forced to consider the reader of what you’re writing, not as an abstract possibility, but as a reality that is sharing with you the processes of your thought as you think them.  Right there beside you, right there inside your mind, there is the reader.  Your text is coming out of your pages, rising up and floating over to what you perceive as your reader and into your reader, even as you write it.  And the thought of that energizes you, makes it so you can hardly wait to write the next word.  Now you know that writing doesn’t have to be the lonely solitary experience you might have thought it to be, back before you tried narrating in the second person.  And you can’t escape thinking about the notion that maybe, just maybe, this technique might actually help you to get your point across even more effectively.

You also realize you can actually juice up the narrative experience by energizing your own reaction to it -- when you slide other elements into it, when you establish a familiarity with a you that you involve in the process.  That you might be another character you’ve neglected to develop up until now.  It might be another aspect of yourself, deep inside yourself, opening a dialogue you might have dismissed as a form of madness, had you not been given permission to explore it.  Such possibilities!

And as you cook along with your second person narration, you come to recognize the headiness of blurring the lines between writer and reader, between writer and character, between narrator and protagonist-participant, yea even between narrator and narrator. And you wonder to yourself why you never thought to try it before.