The Complete Guide to POV

Second person singular past tense

You saw the email in your inbox and you clicked on it.

And then — after glancing at the header — you started reading the first sentence, which began, ‘You saw the email in your inbox…’

At which point, the you who has been doing the reading inevitably splits from the you who is being narrated.

Because there isn’t much more to say that can be sure to apply to both. I could, if I stretched it, continue:

You breathed and then you breathed again. Your ribcage rose and fell, although you weren’t conscious of it. And your heart continued to beat. You blinked. There were noises in the background, but you were concentrating on the screen in front of you. The letters were dark against the pale background.

Etcetera, with increasing strain.

At a certain point, you stop reading (if you ever did) as if you refers to you, the living reader.

This is something that happens with a lot of the weirder and less used POVs. It’s a bit like complex molecules breaking down into simpler compounds, just because takes less energy for them to exist that way.

You begin by trying to apply you to yourself, in some way; but fairly quickly you shift the tag across so that it just means someone.

Someone insert verb this and someone insert verb that.

The same happens with, say, a third person singular future tense narrative. They will be going breaks down into he, she or it is going — is, at the point the story is being read, going.

But second person singular past tense isn’t weird in any way. At least, not in speech.

It is the POV your parents would use to tell you an anecdote from your forgotten childhood.

You marched into the grotto and charged up to Santa Claus and said, ‘For Christmas, I want an Argentinosaurus, not a Brontosaurus — they’re rubbish. I want an Argentinosaurus. A blue and yellow one.’

It is the POV the police would use to read your witness statement back to you. Although this, quite likely, modulates into the past continuous.

You were proceeding along the High Street until it intercepts the main road when you heard a crackling sound behind the garden fence at number 68. On investigating, you found that it was a life-size model of a dinosaur which was in the process of burning in the neck and upper head area.

And it is the POV you would use when telling your crush what they were doing all that time you fancied them and were to scared to say.

You were in the corner, speaking to them, and making them laugh. But you didn’t seem to notice everyone was watching you.

Although this is likely to become the first person very quickly, because it’s about a relationship, not just about a you in isolation, going through a series of actions.

That’s the form of Bill Broady’s novella Swimmer.

‘You began to live for the swimming pool. You’d always been awkward, always falling over, into or through things and supposedly inanimate objects went out of their way to cut and bruise you, but now that you’d found a truer element you felt like one of those gods that Dad talked about, who assumed human form to walk the earth.’

Swimmer is the best extended use of this POV that I know. It constantly emphasises the physicality of the training that you, the swimmer has done. But, knowing what’s bearable, it does its intimate thing and gets out after 144 pages.

(I see that Bill Broady has a new novel out in June, The Night Soil Men. Looks very interesting.)

Too much you can start to read as a bit stalker-y. The narrator, who takes care to hide themselves, has been watching you very closely.

Shudder.

Next time, we’ll look at the present tense version of this POV — which is much more common. One instance of it is even blamed with ushering in a whole new era of you.

Generation U, perhaps.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.

You know that novel.

In summary:

Second person singular past tense.

Likely upsides:

Terse, physicalised, colloquial, obsessive.

Possible downsides

Hectoring, constricted, accusative, creepy.