It's become a bad habit of mine to ask poor fanfic authors all kinds of questions (curious little thing, Helen is). This time they were the following ones:

1. Why did you choose 2nd-person POV for your story?

2. What do you think are this POV's advantages and disadvantages, its power and its weakness?

3. What did you feel was the most difficult thing when writing your story?

4. Do you tend to read other fanfic authors' 2nd-person stories?

5. Have you ever read a non-fanfic 2nd-person POV story?

Select an author name in the box below to read his/her answers.

1. Well, after seeing a wave of 2nd-person stories appear I wanted to take up the challenge, though I didn't actually set out to do so with 'Unspeakable'. I wrote most of it in one sitting, starting in 3rd person past, then as I got more into Arabella's head-space it changed naturally to 3rd person present and then 2nd person present – so I decided to go with that.
2. I think it was Cedar who said (and I paraphrase) that 2nd person should be like a challenging voice inside the character's/reader's head. I think it works well for internal monologues (or dialogues!), or where the writer wants to portray a very subjective view of a situation. I'd be wary of using it too much for action-based stories; it feels too much like telling the reader what to do ("You pick up the cup."), and I'd be afraid of eliciting the response, "No I don't, I'd never do that in this situation!"
   
   Similarly, I think it takes a lot of confidence to use it for a very well known character. 2nd person (if it works) sinks the reader much more into the character?s headspace than 1st or 3rd, so it requires the reader to temporarily replace their interpretation of the character with mine to a much deeper extent, IMO.
3. This was actually the easiest one I've written – most of it wrote itself, though the 'postscript' took more work. The main difficulty came in deciding how much information to put in. I wanted to immerse readers in the grinding despair of the era, which meant that I had to avoid being too clear about the exact date, and I also didn't feel that it would sound natural for Arabella to go into explanations of the background. Unfortunately that meant that the clues I did put in probably required a nitpicking knowledge of canon to pick up. Then at the end I was trying to put across the confusion of the moment, so again it didn't feel right to explain too much. As a result it seems to have confused a lot of people – but perhaps that's always going to be a challenge when writing something so subjective.
4. I generally choose stories according to their theme, but now I'm quite curious to see what can be done with 2nd person, so I might make more of a point of checking them out.
5. Not that I can remember. I certainly would if I found one, though.