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I spent 2 years writing prompts in second person because a workshop leader in Portland told me to, and I finally switched back
I took a prompt writing class back in 2022 and the teacher kept saying second person pulls readers in faster, so I wrote everything as 'you walk into the room' for like two years straight. Last month I was prepping a prompt for my Tuesday writing group and my friend Dana read it out loud and said it sounded like a self help book, which stung but she was right. So I rewrote the same prompt in first person and suddenly the character had a real voice instead of just following orders. I went back through my notebook and counted 31 prompts in second person and almost all of them felt flat when I read them again. Turns out I was hiding behind 'you' instead of committing to a person with a name and a mess. Anyone else get stuck on a rule like that from a class and take forever to shake it off?
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the_xena10d ago
Got told by a poetry teacher in college that adverbs were lazy, so I cut every single one for years and my writing turned stiff as a board. My stuff read like a robot giving directions, and it took a friend pointing out that "he walked slowly" actually tells you something to snap me out of it. Rules from classes are weird like that, they stick way longer than the class does.
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