As mentioned before, I’m working on some characters for my new Cthulhu game and empowering my players to decide their characters’ genders on the fly. I asked you guys what writing style you preferred for gender-non-specific back story, and the results are quite the landslide:
This makes a certain amount of sense to me – in a roleplaying setting where the reader is about to take on the role of the person being described the 2nd person feels pretty natural. And as mentioned in the original poll none of the options were really jumping out at me so if one is clearly so much more popular than the others I’m happy to go with it.
I just hope it doesn’t cause too much marital strife. My darling wife writes a YA fiction blog and apparently there is some small portion of YA authors that are trying to stand out or be avant-garde by writing in the 2nd person, and it infuriates her. I grant that a whole novel in the 2nd person would probably drive me nuts. I personally cannot abide fiction written in the present tense, and 2nd person in my mind is reserved for choose-your-own-adventure books and perhaps the occasional travel guide. I content myself with my own use of it in this instance as being pretty close to the former. We’ll see how it goes.
