Writing a short story in second person — you know the risks, I know the risks. Here's the opening. Tell me if it's earning its keep or if I should just switch to first. --- You don't notice the bookshop until the third year you've been walking past it. This isn't unusual. The street is narrow and the shop is the kind of narrow that cities use for storing things they haven't decided to throw away yet: a locksmith, a printer of business cards, a place that sells one specific kind of knife for one specific kind of cook. The bookshop has no sign that you can see from a normal walking angle, only a handwritten notice in the window saying *We have the thing you're looking for* in letters too small to read from the pavement. On the Thursday in September when you notice it, you are walking home after a conversation that went exactly the way you'd predicted and feeling the particular exhaustion of being right about a bad thing. You go in because the door is open and it seems easier than continuing to walk. The woman at the desk looks up. She says: 'I wondered when you'd come in.' You don't say: *I've lived here three years.* You don't say: *That sounds like something people say in stories.* You say: 'I'm just looking.' 'I know,' she says. She turns back to her book. --- My main worry: second person risks feeling like the reader is being railroaded. Does this feel that way here? Is the 'you' specific enough to be a character, or is it too vague to care about?
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