First come, first served. Here’s the first of five (5) grafs for our online party:
Baghdad’s 28th Combat Support Hospital is like a fortress, once the exclusive palace of Saddam Hussein. In the cacophonous din of machines and medics, you’re unconscious and being wheeled into the Trauma Room. The ER staff is dressed in boots, camouflage pants and scrubs. Seconds ago one soldier was alive, now he’s dead. Another is screaming, “Look at me I’m all apart.” There are others who can be heard weeping and moaning. The injuries are horrific. They’re the worst I’ve ever seen says one doctor, but most of these lives will be saved, living on after terrible wounds and brain injuries. The bullet tore your left eye in half, then shattered the frontal lobe of your skull. You felt nothing.
From a nonfiction story about a wounded soldier, who has just been admitted into a field hospital in Baghdad.
Here are my comments:
Second-person narration is not as immediate as you think
I get what you’re doing. You’re trying to put me in that trauma room. But if second-person narration made stories more visceral, immediate and real, then everything would be in the second person.
But they’re not and that’s because in reality the second person creates distance. (Check out Jay McInerney’s BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY for a well-known example.) What puts me in the room is scene setting, characters with emotional resonance, etc.
In other words, execute the basics and my natural empathy will put me in your subject’s shoes.
Even if you decide to stick with the second person, that doesn’t let you off the reporting hook
Your job is to paint the picture, so paint the picture. What does a Hussein presidential palace that’s been converted into a hospital look like? Is it like a brothel with dialysis machines? An outlet mall with blood everywhere?
Also, what exactly is a field hospital? Is it state-of-the art facility that’s not that much different from a domestic hospital? Or is it held together with duct tape and spit and you pray everything holds together while you’re operating?
I could go on and on and on, but I think you get the idea. Just about every detail in that graf could be given a much finer grain of resolution.
Your mistake might be your best opportunity
In the second line you note that “you” is unconscious. This is going to make it very hard for “you” to observe all the things “you” are observing.
But that gives me an idea. If you embrace the distance created by the “you” point of view, then we might have something.
Try talking about “you” from the doctor’s point of view as they look down on your inert body and try to stitch you up. So it’s “you” but only “you” in the sense of “you” being a meatbag that’s in need of fixing. (Even as they scoop the remains of your eye out, your face remains slack, etc., etc.)
Kind of gross, but also kind of cool in an out-of-body-experience kind of way. Also, that approach would give the last line (“you feel nothing”) some weight.
Good luck and thanks for coming to the party!
Fascinating and instructive. I imagine, even lacking first-hand knowledge from the wounded soldier, sufficient research would enable the writer to flesh out this setting without falsely depicting it. Personally, I have no idea when shifting gears from third to second-person is appropriate or effective. You have an interesting take on how the second-person perspective could function here in light of the soldier’s unconsciousness. In this instance it has the potential to put the narrator in the room, in a sense describing to the soldier (the “you”) what’s happening to him. I wonder if this was the writer’s intent.
I don’t fly with second person, so that was a red flag for me. Great setting and premise, but I want to smell antiseptic and body waste, to taste blood on the air, to hear instruments clinking, to cringe at doctors swearing, I want to feel terror in the pit of my stomach, which is all served by description via action.
I think it was documentarian Werner Herzog commenting on criticism of his tendency to “invent scenes” to embellish the “truth” of his films. If he didn’t have what he needed for sufficient dramatic impact he created it. How much license does the documentarian or nonfiction writer have?
@Dennis: If you have a great subject and you do your homework then you don’t need to take any license.
@bets: Agreed.
I should also note that most nonfiction editors would send back a story written in this tense. Second person carries the stigma of being gimmicky.
Most fiction editors would too. (Especially this one.)
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0704-JULY_ASTRO
Good discussion, particularly that the use of second-tense raises–what?–antipathy among editors. I wanted to post the link above but don’t know how. In the article, “Home”, written for “Esquire”, author Chris Jones switches tenses–third-person to second and back. If any editors among the crowd has the inclination to google the story, might be enlightening to learn if the author did so effectively. Why it was effective? Would his approach have instantly warranted an editor’s pass–a gimmick?
Hey, that link did post. Cool. Now, I feel as though I’ve mastered digital technology
I think it works at first because it’s used in a conversational way, not as a device. Brief colloquial usage serves to include the reader rather than condescend.
But then it goes on and on. I’d rather stick tight with the men I’ve gotten to konw.
Thank you bets. Appreciate your viewpoint.