Valerie Miner (born in New York City) is an American novelist, journalist, and professor.

[1] A dual
US/UK citizen, she lives in San Francisco and Mendocino, California with her partner.[2]

Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Bread and Salt is her fourth collection of stories.
Her latest novel is Traveling with Spirits. Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking
Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories and Murder in
the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night
Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays,
Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the
PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award. Her short fiction collections, Trespassing and Abundant
Light were each Finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards (1990 and 2005).
Miner's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters,
Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The T.L.S., The
Women's Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in
more than sixty anthologies. . A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her
work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and
Dutch. In addition to single-authored projects, she has collaborated on books, museum exhibits as
well as theatre.
She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, Fondazione Bogliasco, The
McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia
Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has received Fulbright Fellowships to
Tunisia, India and Indonesia.
Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a
professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings,
lectures, and workshops. She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County,
California. Her website is www.valerieminer.com.[3]

Valerie Miner
Adjunct Professor
M.J. Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
B.A. English Literature and Journalistic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
At Stanford Since: 
2006

About
Valerie Miner, a novelist, is Artist in Residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender
Research, and Consulting Professor in English. She has authored 13 books and teaches
in Feminist Studies.

Bio
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Bread and Salt: Short Fiction is
forthcoming in 2020. Her latest novel is Traveling with Spirits. Other novels include After Eden, Range
of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter’s Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in
Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The
Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected
Essays, Reviews and Reportage.
Valerie Miner’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi, New Letters,
Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Conditions, The T.L.S., The
Women’s Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in
more than sixty anthologies.
A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her collaborative work includes books,
museum exhibits as well as theatre. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish,
Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Dutch.

She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, Fondazione Bogliasco, The
Brown Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation,
The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has
had Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia.
Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is
now an artist-in-residence and professor at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving
readings, lectures and workshops. She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County,
California
*******

I don’t know whether I am first a writer or a traveler, but I became interested in exploring and
storytelling early in my childhood. In the kitchen, I listened to my mother’s memories of her native
Edinburgh, window-shopping along Princes Street, errands to the corner shop to buy chipped fruit and
The News of the World. Out in our back garden, I sat on the lawn while my seaman father tied up his
beef steak tomatoes, drank iced tea and described the brilliant fabrics he had seen in Argentina and
the tasty seaweed he had eaten in Japan.
During the many months he was on the ocean, I awaited his return, eager for more stories and
especially eager for the new doll he would bring dressed in a local fashion. Those dolls from Korea and
Japan and Holland and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic now sit together on my bookcase. Just as
I always knew each one had a distinct personality, I knew this personality was related to her place of
origin.
As an adult I lived abroad for ten years in England, Australia, India, Canada and other countries
and traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Now I faced ethical and moral and spiritual
questions about the differences between visiting and trespassing, describing and appropriating.
Such travelling made coming “home” that much more fascinating because I now knew other
places (settings) to which I compared familiar food and voices and climate. Home became something
smaller and larger and far more complicated than the place I left. And I was never able to think about
home again without seeing it on a map – in context. Home wasn’t the center of the world anymore,
but it was finally in the world.
© 2012 Valerie Miner. Created by SmartAuthorSites.com ... Websites for Authors
Definition of Second Person
Second person is a point of view (how a story is told) where the narrator tells the story to another
character using the word 'you.' The author could be talking to the audience, which we could tell by
the use of 'you,' 'you're,' and 'your.' In fiction, second person is used as a narrative voice, a term
used for the method in which a narrator describes the story. In nonfiction, we see second person in
business and technical writing, process writing, self-help books, and even more interactive game
playing writing.
An author may use second person when he/she wants to make the audience more active in the story
or process. The author may use it to talk to the audience (as in self-help or process writing), or,
when used in fiction, the author wants to make the audience feel as if they are a part of the story and
action. When writing fiction in second person, the author is making the audience a character,
implicating them. The author may even be employing second person as a thematic device, a way for
a character to distance himself or herself from their own actions.

Second Person Point of

View: A Writer's Guide
If ever there was a rule that most editors and publishers agree on, it’s this: don’t write
a novel with a second person point of view. In fact, that’s exactly the feedback Jay
McInerney got when he was drafting his debut novel.

“I wrote the first draft in six weeks during the summer of 1983. When I told my best
friend and future editor Gary Fisketjon what I was doing he said that he hoped I
wasn’t trying to write an entire novel in the second person. I was too embarrassed to
tell him that that was precisely what I was doing.”

However, McInerney persevered, and in 1984 he published Bright Lights, Big City to

great acclaim. Set in the coke-fuelled party scene of '80s New York, the novel is
entirely written in the second person, with the reader/protagonist relating their story in
real time.
You are in a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either
Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the
bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.
This novel took the literary world by storm. But in the three decades since, its
signature feat has rarely been replicated. And in fiction, Bright Lights is often cited as
the exception that proves the rule: it’s been done already, so don’t bother, okay?

Not so fast. In this post, we’ll be looking at the possible effects of a second person
narrative. With the help of experienced editors on Reedsy, we’ll provide examples of
authors who have used it effectively. From there, you can better understand what it
means to experiment with this point of view.

What is the second person point of view?

Second person is a point of view where the reader is addressed directly. In fiction, a
second person narration is often used to transform the reader into a character, as a
means of drawing them closer to the story. When writing from this POV, authors will
most commonly use the pronoun, 'you' — as opposed to 'I' in the first person and 'he,'
'she,' 'they,' and 'it' in the third person.

Most contemporary novels are written from first or third person perspectives, but
many prominent writers (such as Junot Diaz and Lorrie Moore) have written short
stories from a second person POV.

What is the effect of using second person?

In other words, what is an author trying to achieve when they write their novel,
chapter, or short story from the second person POV? Let’s start with the most obvious
effect....
1. To bring the reader closer the story
When we talk about narrative POVs, we often mention intimacy — in particular,
how first person narratives tend to be more intimate than third person ones.

“Second person is a cut closer than that because readers actually are the character,”
says Joel Bahr, a developmental editor at Amazon Publishing. “Even the minimal
distance created between reader and character with the phrase, “I thought" is refined
even further in second person. In this closer POV, there is no "I thought," but rather
this is how you (we, really) think.”

Here are 4 *actually* good reasons for writing from a second person POV.

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In the example of Bright Lights, Big City, a level of immediacy and intimacy quickly
emerges as the reader is thrust into the role of a serial cheater.

“There is no level of interpretation or justification. Consider if McInerney instead

opted for first person, and we had: ‘I'm not the kind of guy who would do this, but I'm
at a club…’

“In this instance, first person is inviting the reader to believe what they're telling them.
Second person takes the ask off the table. There is no debate about what kind of
person you are or if these actions happened. You are, and they did, and we know that
because there is no functional difference between the reader and the character.”

As Bahr hints, the second person narrator can bypass the ‘unreliability’ of first person
narrators. When characters tell their own tales, we often wonder how the truth of the
story might be filtered — either by their selective memory or lack of 20-20
introspection. With a second person narrator, readers are told what to feel, think, and
see — and they usually have no reason to doubt it.
A more recent example you could look at is N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo-winningThe Fifth
Season. Set on a dying world, the story is told from the viewpoints of three women,
one of which is in the second person.

You’re the mother of two children, but now one of them is dead and the other is
missing. Maybe she’s dead, too. You discover all of this when you come home from
work one day. House empty, too empty, tiny little boy all bloody and bruised on the
den floor.
Reedsy editor Tricia Callahan worked on Jemisin’s book as a proofreader and sees it
as a prime example of how this form can benefit a story.

“The second person POV brings the reader closer to the narrator, making the reading
experience more intimate and less detached. When the narrator turns the reader into
one of the characters, the story feels immediate and surrounding.”

Greater intimacy, however, is not always the only result of this viewpoint.

2. To create more "distance" between the narrator and

the character
We’ve looked at how second person narration can bring readers closer to the story.
But often, it’s actually used to create a greater sense of distance between the true
narrator and the story they’re telling — as editor Matthew Sharpe suggests is the case
with Bright Lights, Big City.

“It's almost as if the narrator's conscience is writing the novel, and there's a bit of self-
accusation there, like, ‘You screwed this up, then you screwed up this other thing,’
and so on.“

Similarly, you can see this level of detachment in Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. “How to
Be an Other Woman,” like many of the stories in that collection, takes on the form of
a self-help guide. It tells the story of a woman who has started an affair with a married
man.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet.
Now you are older and you know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to
put your shoes on the wrong feet.

3. To give your narrator someone to address

Now, we’re entering a gray area. Some novels directly address the reader as a
character — but they are not strictly written in the second person. Books that fall into
this category include epistolary stories that take the form of letters written by one
character to another. These include works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple, and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why.

The effect of reading epistolary narrative is often an intimate sense of voyeurism —

we’re peering into the lives of others. The intention, in most cases, is to bring us
closer to the characters.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes this even further and blurs the
lines between first and second person. The protagonist, a Pakistani man on the streets
of Lahore, speaks to an American stranger — you, the reader. As the book progresses,
we are given clues as to who ‘we’ are in the book and what role we might play in the
story.

Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be
frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for
something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am
both a native of this city and speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my
services.
Unlike a straightforward first person viewpoint, this type of narrator may have some
agenda with ‘us’ — something they want to convince us of or an attitude towards us.
Cast in the story, we feel more involved in the discourse.
4. To reinforce the ideas that drive the story
Here’s a piece of advice from editor Kate Angelella: “If an author wanted to try
writing in second person POV, I would encourage them to do so — so long as it's a
purposeful choice. Is there a reason why this POV works best for your story, other
than style and a desire to be Literary with a capital L?”

Iain Banks’ Complicity contains two viewpoint characters: a journalist and the

murderer whose killings have been inspired by his writing. The chapters told from the
murderer’s POV are in the second person:

You hear the car after an hour and a half. During that time you’ve been here in the
darkness, sitting on the small telephone seat near the front door, waiting. You only
moved once, after half an hour, when you went back through the kitchen to check on
the maid.
Author and editor Tim Major points out that this choice of POV ties with the novel’s
primary theme (which is spelled out in the title). “The second person perspective
makes the reader complicit in the murders, experiencing them as if he or she is
carrying them out, and therefore the reader is involved in a very unusual manner.”

This uncomfortable intimacy in the ‘killer’ chapters brings the reader into the
headspace of the journalist — who himself is dealing with this acute sense of
complicity. It’s interesting to note that Complicity, like The Fifth Season, uses the
second person as just one of its viewpoints.

Editor Eleanor Abraham also points to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a

Traveler, which begins:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a
traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you
fade.
As the book unfolds, more assertions are made about the reader (“You’re the sort of
person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything”). According to
Abraham, Calvino’s book is ”very self consciously and brilliantly about the writing
and reading processes, and about narrative itself. About spectator and spectacle.
About reality and unreality.”

As this book is a metafiction that delves into the nature of literature — and is very
much about the act of reading — the use of second person POV is not just appropriate
but an intrinsic part of what makes it work.

Now that we’ve seen the effects of second person point of view, let's address the
elephant in the room.

Should you write your novel in the second

person?
The short answer? No. In the opinion of almost every editor we spoke with, if you aim
to start a career as an author, then 99.9% of the time, writing a novel in the second
person is a bad idea. Here are some of the reasons they give:

It's an additional set of hurdles you don’t need

“I think an entire novel in second person POV would be a difficult undertaking as it
can be hard to get right — it’s easy to lose your way and write a confusing scene.
Those repetitive pronouns can tie you and your story up in knots.”

— Ben Way

Thinking of writing a second person POV novel? Here are a few things to
consider.

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It can be a lot to ask of your reader
“In second person, I think it's crucial to consider what spaces you're asking the reader
to occupy intimately, and how you're going to get them to suspend their disbelief.
Sometimes, it's actually an increased distance between the character and the reader
who's watching her that can cultivate the empathy you need.”

— Ashley Strosnider

It can get tiresome

“I rarely tell an author not to do something, but an entire novel told through second
person can become wearying, especially when the protagonist of the story is
unpleasant, as is the case in Bright Lights, Big City. To be honest, I've never been able
to finish that book.”

— Kristen Stieffel

Your editorial resources may be better used

elsewhere
“An author’s money and an editor’s time is better spent when his or her editor is able
to focus on core tasks rather than constantly getting distracted by POV issues.
Because if we’re distracted by the POV, it’s a sure bet that readers will be, too.”

— Jim Spivey

It may affect your chances of finding representation

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to secure a literary agent and get a publishing
deal if you are a new author. If that is your dream, don’t create any extra barriers for
yourself that might put industry professionals off publishing your novel.”
 — Amy Durant

When can you try writing in second person?

The few editors we spoke with who don't actively discourage authors from writing in
the second person, like Ryan Quinn, are careful to qualify their advice:

“Margaret Atwood, one of our most prolific popular writers, has only occasionally
found it advantageous to wade into the second person. That should be instructive on
approximating the ratio of how much time an author should spend experimenting with
the second person. That being said... my number-one piece of advice for aspiring
authors is: Don't listen to other people's advice. Trust your gut. If your gut isn't
working, neither will your story.”

Remember that this is your book. Maybe you intend to self-publish, or you don't mind
limiting your potential audience. Maybe your story just can't be told in any other way.
If that describes your experience, then, by all means, ignore the naysayers. Take a
deep breath, and jump into writing from the second person perspective. You may also
find that this POV works better for short fiction, where it's less likely to tire your
readers.

Either way, you are the author, and all the storytelling decisions are in your hands.
Shifts in Point of View
Now that you can identify the three types, we can now discuss shifts in point of view. As a general
rule, you want to avoid any sort of shifting in point of view. If a writer is inconsistent or shifts point of
view unnecessarily, the reader will be confused. The message of the text could be lost.
Consider the following example.

 Even though he believed weight loss was possible, you do not know how hard it can be until
you try to lose a few pounds.

Who is the one trying to lose weight? We first get the male pronoun he, but the second part of the
sentence switches to the second person you. Is the author speaking about himself? Is he giving
advice to the reader? The shift in pronouns creates questions that the reader should not have to ask.
Here is another example.

 He was so happy his girlfriend said yes. Now I have a fiancé!

Did you notice the shift from third person to first? The perspective of the first sentence is outside of
the events. However, the second sentence shifts to make the narrator the one who is engaged. This
confusion should be avoided at all costs.

About Shifts in Point of View

(Pronoun Shift)
Shift in Point of
View: Pronoun Shifts
 When we write quickly, we sometimes change the point of view of a sentence
or a paragraph by switching from one pronoun perspective to another. This
switch in perspective is called a switch in point of view or a pronoun shift. For
a polished, professional writing style in English, it is important that we
maintain the point of view that we establish. Let us take, for example, the first
sentence in this paragraph. We could easily have written, "When we write
quickly, you sometimes change the point of view of a sentence or paragraph."
In this sentence, we started with the pronoun "we," which is 1st person plural,
and we switched to "you," which is second person (singular or plural). This
switch detracts from our writing style. Once we establish a point of view
through the use of a pronoun, we should maintain that perspective, unless we
have good reason to switch it.