It is nice to have a 2+ year effort rewarded with some recognition…and just in time for Memorial Day! The late Paul Eastman — with his detailed combat diary, many photos, and all those letters to his wife — deserves the real credit.

If you cannot read that sign (my el cheapo cell phone doesn’t take great photos), here’s what it says:

NO LOITERING
VIOLATORS
WILL BE
PROSECUTED

And yet…they do provide a nice bench suitable for loitering.

You just have to love the governmental bureaucratic mindset, don’t you?

I’m not talking about an incidental use of second person in the midst of a first- or third-person narrative, but rather, keeping it up for an extended narrative. I have toyed with second-person POV in short fiction and have read one or two second-person novels (although I cannot recall the books or the authors…which might indicate something about the inherent problems).

By way of illustration, and with more than a bit of trepidation, I offer the following as an example. This is the opening of a short story I have yet to complete, for a variety of reasons only partially connected to the second-person narrator.

THINGS CHANGE
by Walt Shiel
Copyright ©2012
All Rights Reserved

You know you shouldn’t do it, but that doesn’t stop you. You know it’s foolish, possibly even dangerous, but you press on. Here, deep in the dense north woods, the tinge of yellowish light just now teasing the eastern horizon is swallowed up by the tall trees — oaks, maples, aspens, pines, cedars, and more.

The darkness reminds you of those closing lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — the ones about promises and “miles to go before I sleep.”

All right, so the promises were only those you made to yourself, and once you’ve trekked those miles into the woods, there’ll be no sleeping. Not if you hope to survive this day.

How did I come to this? you wonder. But, even as you ask the question, you know the answer, no matter how much it discomfits you.

Was it really only five days ago? You know it was, although it seems like ages have passed. It seems as though it all happened in another life, maybe some parallel universe. How could you go from a comfortable, normal life — a life of “quiet desperation” in Thoreau’s words — to this urgent, day-to-day existence in which you had become the hunter.

You step gingerly through the underbrush, trying to make as little noise as possible. You watch for and step over, or sidestep around, twigs, dry leaves, or anything else that might make a sudden noise. After only three days, you feel as though you’ve spent a lifetime in the woods.

Maybe this is where you’ve always belonged.

The sling digs into your left shoulder, so you readjust it to equalize the weight of the heavy 30.06 rifle. Five days ago…

So, yes, it can be done. Can it be done well? Probably. Can it be sustained over a full short story (say, 2,500 words)? Again, probably. How about for a complete novel? Maybe, but I still think it quickly becomes tedious for the reader.

What do you — as a reader or a writer — think?

To read it now, just click on the Freebie tab at the top of this page.

Two things pushed Once A Knight into an action-centered story. First, our hero Tex has thrived on action, not words, and head-on, direct action is the only way he knows to tackle problems. Second, the story is set in the midst of a whole new realm of combat (air warfare), an environment where inaction or hesitation could be, and often was, a quick death sentence.

I could have had the pilot-characters sitting around an evening fire discussing the idiosyncrasies of their aircraft and the problems of attacking balloons or aircraft with gunners who could swing around to shoot at you no matter on what trajectory you attacked.

Instead, I chose to put Tex in the thick of the aerial action and let him and his actions explain how the airplanes performed and how their tactics worked…or didn’t. I felt his observations of the results, often fatal, of the mistakes made by his fellow pilots said more about WW I air combat and Tex himself than any deep discussions back at the base.

My other historical novel, Devil in the North Woods, also used action to carry the story forward. In that case, the motivating action was the rapidly approaching and all-consuming wildfire. That motivation drove those hardy pioneers to fight back by a variety of means, some successful, most not. But few of them gave up. It wasn’t in their nature to give up. Lots of people died. The fire consumed homes, farms, and a whole town. The survivors, however, continued to take action to pick up the pieces, salvage what they could, and bury those who did not survive. Almost all of which was told through action sequences.

Sure, there are other ways to write historical fiction, but probably not for me. I’ve read a lot of historical fiction, including some that rocked back into prehistory. The ones I enjoyed most always managed to find action to tell the story and limn the characters.