The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?

The knock against second person is that the writer doesn’t know anything about the reader, so how can the writer pretend to know how the reader would think or feel any of things that the writer assigns to the second person character. In this case the bridge is made by identifying with the reader as a reader and nothing else, simply someone who is beginning to read a Italo Calvino’s book, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

The story becomes a story about a reader (you) finding that the book you had begun reading is mixed up with ten other fictional stories. Each passage conveys a tantalizing bit of what seems like an incredibly interesting story in its own right. Each passage typically cuts off at a climactic point.

As I read through the novel, I found the switches from one story to both engage and frustrate as any reader would. By connecting to these emotions shared by most readers, Calvino can successfully tell the story in the second person. The story concludes with the revelation that the titles of the fictional stories all add up to the opening passage that could begin yet another story.

This story struck me as particularly clever in an intellectually satisfying way. Aside from Art of Fiction by John Gardner, this book probably had the greatest impact on my writing. I don’t how much Italo Calvino plotted and planned what he wrote, but I have a strong tendency to plan and overstructure my stories.

Ever since, my fiction writing Achilles heal has been an impulse to keep adding many different interconnections and layers of meaning to a story. I once tried an expressionist science fiction story about a journey through a world that was also Utnapishtim, the Noah character that Gilgamesh runs across in the Sumerian epic. At the time, I though I was being terribly clever.

I don’t think I ever got the basics of plotting and storytelling down before I went off into the weeds, ambitiously attempting to write the postmodern Moby Dick. I was a bit like a technically skilled musician that listened to jazz musicians to figure out how to write a fugue.

As much as I enjoy metafiction and the philosophical implications of postmodernist thinking, I guess I am just a modernist at heart.