Every Story is a Second-Person Story

Notes on "The Ear of the Story"

I’ve been doing a series here on point of view on the page, and I already wrote a bunch about first person, so it’s time to tell you about second person, but WAIT, before you run away protesting that you would never write in the second person, I need you to hear me out: Every story is a second-person story. Every single story.

There are quite literal versions of second-person in which there’s a “you” who’s the main point-of-view character (think Choose Your Own Adventure—You open the door and hear a noise. It’s a monster! Do you run or stay?—or novels like Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty); and there are ones in which a narrator (usually a first-person narrator) is addressing all or much of the text to a named “you” character (as in Elizabeth Crane’s story “Ad,” which is addressed to Owen Wilson, or my own novel I Have Some Questions For You).

But we can back way down from either of those modes and simply think about the flip side to point of view, which is: In theory, who is being spoken to or written to here? To whom is the story addressed, even tacitly? This is what I call “the ear of the story,” and while that’s my own term, not one you’ll find in a craft book, I think it’s the best and simplest term for what we’re talking about.

Before I break this down, I want to say that this is important. I’ve ranted before that most problems on the page are point of view problems, but to be more specific, when we get to advanced writers, a huge number of them are in fact problems with ear. Plenty of writers manage the issue unconsciously, and plenty have to think it through eventually… Because when it’s off, it derails the entire manuscript.

An example, before I lose you:

Let’s say we meet at a conference. We awkwardly shake hands, and then I do my signature move, which is to gesture with a cup of coffee in my hand and spill it all over the place. You tell me it’s fine and leave, mopping coffee off your sweater. Your best friend, who also reads this Substack, is at the same conference, and you run into her in the hall. She asks what happened to your sweater and you say, “Oh my God, I met Rebecca and you’re right, she’s an absolute klutz, this is her coffee, she wouldn’t stop apologizing. Did you see her ADHD posts? I think it’s all one big issue.”

The next day you go home, and your spouse/roommate/family member asks what happened to your sweater. You say something like, “Remember how I was hoping to meet Rebecca Makkai so I could tell her we both know Zach? Zach, my friend from college, with the mullet. Yeah, well I ran into her and this is her coffee.”

The next day, you take your sweater to the dry cleaner, and she asks what happened. You say, “I was at a writing conference and I was talking to this writer, and she sploshed her coffee all over me.”

The next day, you run into a time traveler from 1300s Bulgaria. This person asks what happened to your sweater. You say, “Ah, well, we have a brown drink called coffee that many people enjoy. It gives energy! And we sometimes walk around with this drink and drink it while we talk. I went to a big meeting of many storytellers, and one of them—a woman, because we sometimes let women tell stories in public now—she spilled her drink on me. Coffee tends to stain. We did not execute her! Haha, no, we mostly don’t do that anymore. Only sometimes. Not for coffee!”

In all four instances, you are telling the exact same story. But based on the information the listener already has, you are not only focusing on different details, but giving different information. I go from being “Rebecca” to “Rebecca Makkai” to “this this writer” to “a woman.” The conference goes from needing no introduction to “a writing conference” to “a big meeting of many storytellers.” And so on. The point of view in all these scenarios is the same. It is you, first person singular, the person who witnessed this happening on this day and time with a fairly similar amount of remove. You witnessed it. Your experience hasn't changed. The reason that your language has changed is that the ear has changed. You are calibrating the story you tell. In real life, we do this constantly.

If you've ever spoken to someone who gets it wrong, it's disconcerting. They might talk about their friends as if you know who they are when you don’t. They’ll say, “Sarah told me…” and you're like, Who the hell is Sarah? When I was a kid, I would find it alarming—I still do—when people who were not my sister said things like “Mom called.” She is not my mom! Why are you saying it that way? Or a subpar storyteller might give you more context than you need (telling you things you’d already know) or far less context than you need (and now you can’t follow the story).

All of this is what I mean by “ear.” To whom is the story calibrated? And it’s always calibrated to someone.

Here comes some literary theory, beware:

If this feels wildly intimidating/is giving you flashbacks of school, feel free to skip on down and just read “Narrative Audience.”

Literary theorists rarely agree with each other and often use competing terms for the same things. So the following are not terms you neglected to learn in 11th grade. It really doesn’t matter what you call anything. It matters if you're doing it. (A lot of these, if you’re interested, are from narrative theorist Peter J. Rabinowitz.)

Enunciatee: A (usually named) person or entity to whom a piece is being addressed. (In my last novel this would be Mr. Bloch, a sketchy music teacher, who is fictional.) In Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale, who might be real but is rather unlikely to ever read the poem, is the enunciatee. Or the enunciatee could be a real person; Claire Dederer’s memoir Love and Trouble includes a section that starts, Dear Roman Polanski, As I grow older I think about you more and more often. In fact, sometimes I find I can't stop thinking about you. Of course not all pieces have an enunciatee.

Narratee: Someone or some group of people to whom the story is being overtly narrated. Think of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere… He probably didn’t literally intend for his poem to be read only by children, but within the text, that’s the conceit; he’s narrating this to kids. Or think of Jane Eyre, in which Charlotte Bronte’s Jane writes/says, Reader, I married him. Bronte is acknowledging a reader to whom this is all narrated—something not all texts do. Or consider this passage right near the end of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Ah!” I can hear you say, “so it was all a buildup to bore us with his buggy jiving! He only wanted us to listen to him rave!”

Actual Audience/Readership: This one is easy! The literal readers of a work. The humans who went to the bookstore or library and found the book and are reading it.

Authorial (or Hypothetical) Audience: The hypothetical audience for whom the text is composed. These are again literal readers, but they’re the ones the author is hoping for/picturing/aiming the text at. As you write, you might imagine a certain type of reader, or you might imagine Barack Obama picking up your book, or you might think of your workshop or an awards committee, or your ex (who will weep tears of despair). This group might overlap somewhat with your Actual Audience, or it might not.

Narrative Audience: We’re back in the world of the text again, not in the literal real-world bookstore. This is the audience to whom the narrator is narrating. I'm reading a sci-fi book, and this author is talking to me as if I already know this planet and these spaceships—and so I pretend, on some level, to be a person who knows this planet and these spaceships. And I assume the author will soon fill me in, via contextual clues. Or I'm reading a text that says, Listen up, girlfriends, here's one kind of man not to date. I'm not your girlfriend. And plenty of readers might not be girls. But for the purposes of this text, the narrator is speaking to me conversationally, calling me girlfriend. Upon picking up this text and engaging with it, this is the relationship I’m committing to. In the case of fiction, the narrative audience is asked to consider the (fictional) events of the text as actual occurrences.

(Rabinowitz then breaks this down further, writing about Ideal Narrative Audience and Actual Narrative Audience, the former being those to whom the narrator wishes he were narrating. The best example I can think of is someone like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, who wishes that he were narrating to the “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” who are going to find him sympathetic; he's talking to us as if we're going to be on his side and find him innocent. But then that text also has an actual narrative audience; there's a brief frame narrative around the main story, with a narrator (John Ray, Jr., PhD) who's found Humbert’s pages in a prison cell after his death, and he's presenting us with this lurid text—so we're actually meant to be the people reading that text, not Humbert’s sympathetic jury members. This is a complicated one, and in most texts it’s not that easy to split.)

Thank God the literary theory is over:

You made it! So, while I love geeking out over all these things, I think a lot of them can be combined. When I say “ear of the story,” I basically mean “actual narrative audience”—but that audience might also be a narratee (a named or implied group with certain characteristics) or an enunciatee (a named person)… And there are times when someone’s writing, say, a personal essay that addresses, as “you,” its actual readership (whoever finds it on that website on that day)… and “ear of the story” encompasses all of that.

Essentially: There’s the point of view (Who’s telling the story, and when, and why, and how?) and there’s the ear (Who are we? Who is being addressed?)

One big practical example:

Theodore is writing an autobiographical novel about coming of age in Montana in the 1960s as the son of French immigrants; it’s also about crochet.

He workshops his opening chapters, and someone in the group says, “I don’t get why sometimes you’re just giving us French on the page, and sometimes you’re translating the French.” She points to examples: On page 5, the text reads “Au revoir,” Philippe called, indicating his departure. But on page 12, we get “Va t’acheter une vie!” Philippe yelled, and left the room.

Someone else points out that in the early pages, Theodore gave us the history and layout of his town, as if we were outsiders who’d never been there. But then in chapter 3 he says, Years ago, after the school burned, Old Mrs. Beason asked the mayor to open up City Hall for classroom space, but the kids knew the legend of the statue in the attic and refused to enter the place. And we never heard anything before about the school burning, and we don’t know who Mrs. Beason is, and we don’t know about this statue. If this came in the middle of a different kind of story, a story in which we were pretending to know this town, it would make sense. But here it doesn’t.

Sometimes crochet is elaborately explained; sometimes Theodore does a “half-treble front post crossover,” and we get no help.

Sometimes Theodore’s narration says things like But you know how Mom can be, and sometimes he says things like My mother, who was born to a different era and had old-world values…

Sometimes he says I went to the shoe store and they x-rayed my foot, as if we’re all old enough to find that normal; sometimes he says In those days, there were payphones on the street corners, as if we’re all young enough that we don’t know this.

And the workshop group concludes that Theodore has a point of view problem. At least they’re halfway there! Often this kind of writing just feels “off” in intangible ways; it’s a hard thing to pinpoint. But what Theodore actually has is an ear problem. He has not stepped back to make decisions about who we are, who is (in theory!) being addressed. Do we speak French or not? Are we as old as he is, or younger? Do we know Montana? Do we know his mom? Are we crocheters? And any combination of answers is fine here.

Theodore might decide we know all of it, or none of it. Or he might decide that he’s going to speak to us as if we are his age and we know Montana, but we don’t speak French or know crochet or his family. And yet his narrator is speaking to a close friend, one with whom he can be casual and honest, not one for whom he’ll need to posture.

He might, in fact, decide that in the present day, Theodore has been good friends with someone for the past ten years but has never told him about his past, and this is a story told over drinks with increasing vulnerability. But then he never puts that friend or their barstools on the page. This is just a purely hypothetical listener for him to picture as he writes, so that everything stays aligned. This allows him to tune every phrasing choice to that listener.

Or he could make that barstool friend literal. He could start his entire book with Have I ever told you about where I grew up? No, not just Montana in a general way, but have we talked about the summer my mom adopted a rabbit? Wait, Phil, pass the ketchup over here. Yeah okay, so my Mom… And certainly there are books narrated this way. However, and I cannot emphasize this enough, you absolutely do not need this kind of frame narrative. I say this because 95% of the time when I explain this concept to someone they decide they really need a frame narrative, and I swear you don’t need it. Most published books/stories/memoirs do not have a frame narrative, but most of them do have their ear sorted out.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Is my narrator speaking to a specific person, named or otherwise?

• Is my narrator speaking to a specific group of people, named or implied?

• Does the ear/narrative audience know absolutely everything about this world up to the point when the story starts?

• If not, what is the ear/narrative audience assumed to know, whether or not most of the actual audience will know these things? Do we (the audience) know these people? Do we know this place? This time? This fraction of society? Do we know the general state of the world? Are we implied to know things about a certain field/industry/area of expertise? Are we supposed know about certain phenomena (how time travel works in this world, for instance)? (An example: If a short story begins with Helene received a lime green Birkin on her fifteenth birthday, we are assumed to be people who are wealthy enough/versed enough in fashion to know that this is a very expensive handbag. If the author is worried that the actual reading audience might include people who don’t know this, and she wants to include them, she might drop hints in the next sentence—e.g., It couldn’t hold much more than makeup and keys, which hardly seemed to justify the $80,000 her Aunt Susan had spent, but you couldn’t put a price on iconic. And note that “her Aunt Susan” implies that we do not know Aunt Susan, whereas just plain “Aunt Susan” would imply that we do know her.)

• With what formality, intimacy, veracity, and trust is the narrator speaking to the implied ear? (e.g., Salinger’s Holden Caulfield speaks to “us” very casually, as if we are fellow teenagers who will understand his slang, his complaints, his world—but he also does quite a bit of posturing and obscuring, as if he wants to impress us.)

Next time…

There’s a lot more to say. In the next part, I’m going to dive into examples of everything from overtly second person narratives to pieces where that second person (the ear) is completely invisible but just as important.

Meanwhile, if you’re a paid subscriber (OMG thank you!) please feel free to ask your questions below… This is a heady concept but such an important one, and if I were giving this as a live talk I’d have stopped for questions at least five times by now to make sure you weren’t languishing in confusion.