E-mail o’ the week

August 3, 2007

Mandrake, who attends the future entertainment industry powerhouse incubator known as UCLA, swapped some e-mails this week. In one he wrote:

And…in regards to “Doomsday Club”, I like the “you” aspect. Making us (the reader) the narrator in a college-set novel-noir.

Which made me think that I’ve been planning on discussing the use of the SECOND PERSON perspective and why I chose it for “The Doomsday Club”.

It’s actually a very simple answer. I’ve mentioned before that the choice was heavily (if not wholly) influenced by two of my favorite books “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Buffalo Soldiers”, both of which were penned in the very rarely-used second person. And what dawned on me, several years after the first draft of TDC was why my book had to be second person to really hit the right note with the story.

Originally, TDC was written in the first person (influenced very much by my love of “The Catcher in the Rye”) but later I realized the level of self-absorption Holden Caufield brings to his life, the foul-mouthed pathological liar he is. The willingness to pick a fight with anyone makes him, well, pretty much a psychopath.

But in TDC, Scott Lorlon is along for the ride, lost and willing to be dragged down by his friends and his environment-very much like in “Bright Lights, Big City”. He doesn’t care about the consequences because of his spiral of despair and the upstream swim to get out of the mess he’s found himself in. Scott Lorlon is a sociopath.

Psychopath-first person. Sociopath-second person. Because the sociopath always blames others for his problems. The psychopath feels he is superior to those around him.

’til next time,

Second person just works so much better when your main chracter is a sociopath.

Posted in Uncategorized