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I’ve also heard readers stating a preference for first-person over third-person narration, or vice versa, but not whether they’d rather have stories told in present or past tense. I don’t mind any technique or combination and think the confining qualities of present tense work very well if that’s what the author is aiming for and achieves. Equally, present tense doesn’t have to feel confined. But it’s never felt static to me even when it fixes on narrative events in a way I’d call exploratory — which could perhaps be seen as a polite word for static!
Does anyone have any preferences for or against present tense?
Brief, and not necessarily well-thought out reply, (nor am I 100% I’ve got the terminology right), but Elly Griffith’s ‘Ruth Galloway ‘ series is told in present tense, with sentences/Pov as “Ruth watches as C and C get into the Rolls” (second person??) Every time I start a new one I think “Oh no, forgot how much I dislike this” then very quickly cease to notice. Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan is present tense, all from her PoV and superbly done.
That said, I am increasingly aware how poor I am at analysing writing.
I find the idea of present tense feeling static quite odd. Because you are in the moment, I think it’s hard to pause in a way that is possible in past tense. So I’d say the opposite of static.
Like Sandra, sometimes I’ll find a book jars a little initially in present tense, but I’ll quickly cease to notice as I adapt to the books style.
I read a lot of YA, which leans more towards first person present. My favourite YA book by Sally Green – Half Bad, is present. But a present tense historic fiction I read a couple of years ago constantly tripped me up. In third person, it often felt as if descriptions were actually thoughts from the character. Most confusing.
I think like all tenses and POVs, it’s not a problem when done well. But it does seem present tense might be harder to get right than past.
Just realised, quite a few of my Challenge stories are written in first person present. I think to give myself an extra treat!!Would definitely deny they are static!
No preference.
My WIP is first person, present tense. I didn’t choose or plan this; it just happened when I started writing. I think it fits the voice of the MC.
I suppose that many people who are mainly familiar with a narrator, often omnipotent, addressing the reader in past tense, assume that present tense (especially first person) is likely to be some kind of stream of consciousness. There’s no reason for this, although if you’ve never tried it before it can be tempting, and leads to all kinds of self-indulgence.
I don’t know about you, but most of my life is lived first person, present tense. It doesn’t stop me thinking about, conversing about, past events. If my narrator is in the present, there’s no reason why a passage of text shouldn’t begin, ‘Yesterday, we drove from Faro to Seville. The streets of Seville were full of orange trees, but the air was so thick with pollution that I didn’t want to eat any.’ All past tense but recounted by a present tense narrator. Or that story may be told by somebody else. Or you may be drawn into the story by the device of an unacknowledged conversation. The narrator says to you, ‘Did you ever taste fresh oranges from Seville?’ The story time pauses while you consider this, but not a second is lost.
Another issue is what you might think of as “the cursor of time”; the presumption that because the text is present tense, time will move in some curious facsimile of real time. It’s almost as though if a book takes four hours to read, then in present tense it can only describe four hours of events. But that’s the magic of being an author. You can do what you want. Whereas writing in present tense you (probably) maintain the logic of time passing and events are truthful to how they should appear (insofar as any story is truthful in that sense), there’s nothing to say that the next sentence can’t signal the passage of ten minutes. Or ten years.
And that’s before we get into five pages of description about seeing a gun being aimed, the fear, and then the pain in your arm, versus a one liner such as ‘Frank shot me in the arm”.
This is off the top of my head, but honestly, there must be a thousand ways that a present tense narrative can avoid being static.
It is odd. Almost as if the commentator was doing a list for a creative writing course: what are the pros and cons of etc etc. But among the reasons I have for not enjoying a novel or short story, static-ness (?) isn’t among them. Slowness, yes of course, and an apparent lack of narrative thread, and straightforward dullness, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced doldrums. Not really.
I too fail to understand what ‘static’ is supposed to mean in this context, or why it should apply to present tense. I have no problem whatever with reading present tense stories: sometimes I think I even prefer them. With past tense you’re always at one remove, as if listening to someone tell a story. Present tense is immersive, immediate. After all, as Ath says we live our real lives in present tense.
For my own writing, present tense – and first person – are my default settings, what come to me most naturally. I like the way you can incorporate your protagonist’s thoughts and reactions seamlessly into the narrative. It’s like the difference between direct speech and reported speech: free indirect style becomes free direct style, as it were. Like this:
I take a couple of steps towards her, and she shrinks away, her eyes wide. What’s up with her? It’s not exactly as if I’m an intimidating sight. A woman, on her own, and not a very big one at that.
Maybe I find the technique so congenial because I’m an introvert, and so when I’m writing I tend to closely inhabit my protagonist’s head, filtering everything that happens through that one POV.
Emma Darwin says that present tense can be restrictive, but I guess that depends on how you want to tell your story. Bearing in mind that she is a historical novelist, I imagine that she wants the ability to stand back and take a broader perspective than present tense can afford. On the other hand, when I took my second novel to York I told her I’d deliberately chosen first person present tense because I wanted restrictions: my story depended for its effect on the reader knowing no more than the protagonist knew.
I think ‘potentially static’ probably referenced one of those generalised statements that crop up when creative writing is discussed. There could be a nugget of wisdom in there but as shorthand it’s too cryptic to decipher and I couldn’t reverse engineer it to anything that might be a pitfall we should be aware of. It doesn’t seem to be like the statement, ‘changing POV equals head hopping’, for instance, which often doesn’t add ‘unless you know how to do it.’ So I put the idea out here.
It make me think about staticness — characters who don’t want to change or who want to but can’t. Or just ordinary status quo. Present-continuous tense could help show some of that, keeping the reader in the character’s moment. But as Ath says, there are a thousand ways to avoid present tense being static, and I think that applies to writing in general and it’s the writer who loses narrative drive. I’d love to blame grammar for my own failings, but…
I tried to come up with reasons not to use present tense and couldn’t apart from, as Richard says, the feeling of remove that past tense gives. I enjoy that sense of space and reflection but I don’t miss it if the story isn’t told that way. Like first-person, I suspect present tense can seem simpler to write than it is. When I’m reading, flashbacks have to be handled well or else I forget that a move to past tense isn’t the story’s ‘now’. I can lose track. But that could be because past tense is so familiar. Richard points out that past tense might be natural for historical fiction. I agree but I don’t think it needs to be the default and that point of view has stronger control of the sense of scope. Is tense more about what the writer prefers? In the various meetings between your own mind and the story’s soul which will hopefully make the story work, choice of tense seems among the least complicated. To me, point of view asks a larger number of questions about whatever parameters we want or like.
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