Stephanie here. Jill Williamson talked to me so much about the podcast Writing Excuses that I was eager to check it out. During a conversation about point of view and tense, I was struck by Brandon Sanderson’s description of what prose should do. Brandon said most writers are striving to write “Orwellian” style prose, in which:
“You don’t see the prose, you see the story. The prose is a window, beyond which all these wonderful things are happening. If you start fiddling with tense, people pay attention to the window instead of what’s happening beyond it.”
Writers are creative people who enjoy experimenting with words and techniques. (I would guess most of us have an attempt of a second-person novel stashed in a drawer.) But we want to be careful that we’re not so fresh and different that readers are unable to see the story.