A shorter guide today.
Because a weirder POV.
The second person singular future tense. (You [you specifically] will go...) is famously used by David Foster Wallace towards the end of ‘Forever Overhead’.
(Famously, for those of us who’ve read and taught it in Creative Writing workshops.)
The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever.
Perhaps we could nickname this the Prison Guard POV, because it can sound imperative even if it’s merely being descriptive:
You will stay in your cell and you will come out until tomorrow morning.
Although a quick search brings us a song from SpongeBob Squarepants. Plankton sings,
The wonderful writer Thomas Morris helped me with a couple of suggestions for odder POVs. (I went to him because he’s an example later on for a really unusual one. Third person plural future tense))
Thomas suggested Adnan Mahmutović's short story ‘How to Fare Well and Stay Fair’ from his collection How to Fare Well and Stay Fair.
On the way to one of the refugee camps you will mispronounce names of all towns and villages on the motorway signs. When you arrive at Uddevalla, on the West Coast, the old sand-coloured military buildings will look like something from Dickens, and the ceilings will be three meters high, and the joint bathrooms big and airy, and you will share the room with another family of four, and in the middle of the room there will be a border made of lockers without locks, one side of the room for your family and the other for another set of strangers, but the beds will be soft enough even for all the pea-hating princesses. The other family has two small children, even though the woman is as old and shrivelled as her man’s moustache is grey and long.
You can see in this paragraph an immediate issue with this POV. It’s not clear, unless context makes it so, whether the you is a child or a grown up, an individual, a couple or a family.
An early nudge is needed to slot the reader into the singular.
Your shoes, which you have not taken off for two days, will feel sweaty and too tight.
As I said when I launched it, this Complete Guide is a work-in-progress. I am really hoping that you’ll be able to contribute more examples — especially of lesser known POVs like this one — in the comments.
I suppose the main thing to bear in mind is that anyone constantly being told You will you will you will is almost certain to say, No, I fucking won’t.
In summary:
Second person singular future tense.
Likely upsides:
Authoritative, definite, unfamiliar, future-proofed.
Possible downsides
Authoritarian, stiff, infuriating, monotonous.
I wrote this a few years back - I use 'can' early in the piece and then mix it up with 'will' - partly to alert people to the temporal setting and because, of course, you can't use will can (no two modal verbs together? I think? Or something like that). The nice folk at Sundial nominated it for a pushcart. I still like it. My main thought about it is how hard a POV it is to sustain. https://sites.google.com/view/sundial-magazine/short-stories/there-are-seven-things-that-you-can-do-when-you-are-accused-of-murder?authuser=0