A few months back ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
isis did a post about her negative reaction to present tense fiction, in which she discusses how despite being supposed by many to be more "immediate," to her present tense is distancing. It's a good post *pause for you to read it* and I understand what she's getting at even though I don't "bounce off" present tense in the same way. I do often feel there's an excess of This Is The Now in fanfic, but as long as something's well written I don't care much what tense it's in, and there are lots of things that will throw me out of a story faster than verbs with s on the end.
However, I'm as prone to navel-gazing as the next writer (you all have figured this out by now) so I do think about tense along with all the other elements of a story (also, being a writer of time travel books gets you noticing it even if you're committed to using standard past tense narrative). Until last year, I wrote almost exclusively in past tense, and when I moved into using present I thought of it as an effect of suddenly writing a lot of visual media fic - that "immediacy" thing. (A lot of other things changed this past year, of course; one could make all kinds of false assumptions about, say, menopause or hyperthryroidism or empty nest syndrome causing present tense to break out. I don't think we need to go there.) Certainly when I'm writing, to choose a totally random example ha, Vorkosigan fic, I'm going to write in past tense, because my style is not wildly different from Lois Bujold's, and to some extent I'm modeling on the books. I can think of a few examples of Vorkosigan things I might choose present tense for - it would be interesting to write Memory fic from Simon's POV that way - but in general I don't consider anything but past tense.
(I'm not sure "consider" is the right word, actually. But more on that later.)
Some published fiction is written in present tense, of course; most of what got me thinking about this last week was finally getting around to reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, which by the way is just as wonderful as Wolf Hall, and let me tell you, reading about Thomas Cromwell and writing about Ben Linus (even a Ben Linus on the way to reformation, if I may confusingly use that word) is an interesting and strikingly appropriate combination. Oh my. No, I do not want to read the crossover, though I would like to watch the chess game, or listen to the trash talk. Anyway. WH and BUTB are in present tense, which I remember clearly not noticing until well into WH, which tells you how well it works. And I suppose if I were to write Mantel fanfic (there is a vanishingly small chance of this) it would have to be in present, or it wouldn't sound right. The opposite (writing present-tense fic based on something in past tense) is somewhat more likely (for me, I mean; other people do it all the time).
So, I started in with the present tense fic this year, but I didn't write it all that way; the Vorkosigan fic is 100% past tense, and so is the "Lewis" fic even though that's visual media-based. I made the jump with the "Sherlock" story "Improbability," which is a style exercise using John POV while he's in the abyss of mourning and depression, and really couldn't have worked for me any other way. And then I stuck with that for "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time," for consistency's sake if nothing else. So it's the "Person of Interest" fic that's some of each; here's how it divides up (not counting the Vorkosigan crossovers, which are in past for reasons discussed above):
"Then Move Not": Harold POV, present
"The Human Heart": John POV, present
"Children of an Idle Brain": mixed POV, present (this is the dream one - I was writing it when I readisis's post, and mentioned it in a comment, and she agreed that even for her it would work best in present tense)
"The Three Graces": Harold POV, past
"Phoenix": John POV, past
"Halcyon": Harold POV (with a little Carter at the end), past
"The Rest is Silence": John POV, past
"All I Know Is Flight": John POV, present
"Untalked Of and Unseen": Harold POV, past
"A Heap of Broken Images": Root POV, present
"Night's Candles": John POV, past
Well, it's certainly... mixed.
I admit to influence in my tense choices (to the extent that if I'm in the middle of a past tense piece, and I go off and read a really good story in present tense, I may come back and start writing in present before I realize what I'm doing), and I thinkisis's post gave me a little nudge back into past-tense writing (which is, after all, my homeland and my native state). One thing I have realized, thinking about this, is that I'm not looking at it from isis's perspective, that of a reader (since, as a reader, I really don't care most of the time what tense something's in, though I do notice and occasionally disagree). And while of course I'm thinking about tense as a writer, since I'm the one who has to get the words down, what occurred to me as I mused further was: a) there's nearly always some way in which the story itself tells me straight off what tense it should be in, and often won't be changed even if I try to. I'm still trying to figure out what it is, and if it's always the same thing. And b) it may be the characters' experiences and perspectives that are the key point, not the readers' or the writer's. "Immediacy" may indeed be an important factor, but it's not an immediacy going on in a reader's head; it's more about what the POV character is feeling.
Maybe. The problem with using examples here is that the present-tense-peer-pressure effect in fanfic is fairly strong, and so is my past-tense default, and sometimes the story-nudge is stronger than my whiplashing between those two, and sometimes it's not. But some of this division makes sense. It seems odd at first that "The Rest Is Silence" (which is basically a PWP with a long introduction) should be in past, and if I'd written just the voice-kinky sex bit, it would probably be in present; but since John's obsession develops over the course of his relationship with Harold, the first part is all about time going by and things changing, and didn't work in present tense (I think I tried. Anticipating the latter part). And "The Three Graces" starts out with Harold reminiscing, and is really steeped in the past throughout. "All I Know Is Flight," which stands out among a whole bunch of past-tense fics, is in present because it's about the future, perhaps, about leaving and going somewhere else, and not dwelling in the past (if I'd written it from Harold's POV, that might be different). Whereas in "Night's Candles," John thinks he's about to die, so his head is lingering in the past despite him wanting to just enjoy things in the present moment. Maybe. I'm still not sure.
I've been thinking about this because of "To Make Amends In," the "Lost" fic I just finished, which started writing itself in present tense and could not be wrestled into past even though I wanted to. So I decided to acknowledge that straight-on; there's this line pretty early on:
But the past bleeds and stings less than it did, nor does the weight of the future ache; he feels oddly anchored in the present.
and it all begins to be about Ben drawing a dividing line between his past and his future; he's thinking about both in the course of the story, but he's existing very much in that in-between place and starting to understand how to live in the moment (which he hasn't done a lot of before. He always has a plan, and he's always making up for something he resents about his earlier life). So, despite being a conventional sort of narrative, not a dream or an internal monologue (it is fairly introspective in parts, but there's plenty of dialogue if little action), it really did speak as a story in present tense. I suspect that if I were to write Ben-POV chronologically earlier than this, I'd end up in past tense. He doesn't flex from one to the other the way Harold and John do. (Though aside from "Children of an Idle Brain" I've only written Harold-POV in present once, and that was the very first PoI fic I wrote, and I'm not sure I'd do it that way again. I think Harold may be a past tense kind of guy, really. John, though. Goes both ways. Heh.)
I wanted to mention, too, the couple of original-fic experiences I've had with present tense. First, there was the time I started writing one of Olivia's dreams in present tense despite the rest of the book being in past - I fixed it, but golly it really wanted to be in present, which says something about how dreams work, and why "Children of an Idle Brain" really had to be in present tense. Present tense does often have a dream-like quality even if the characters are awake, but dreams themselves really like to be narrated in the moment, and it always feels a little odd to me to do it another way.
Also, I do have a short story that's set in the same universe as my novels, and it is possibly the first finished thing I ever wrote in present tense, and it shocked me utterly at the time that it emerged that way. But the first line came out "There is a man in the German barn who babbles of time and bells" and I couldn't make it be "was" and "babbled" no matter how hard I tried. (It's an outsider POV, an 18th-century girl looking at my time-traveling protagonist George without realizing that he's from another time, which possibly has something to do with the tense, though I can't define quite what.)
*The Past, the Present, and the Future, not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Thanks again, Ebenezer.
isis did a post about her negative reaction to present tense fiction, in which she discusses how despite being supposed by many to be more "immediate," to her present tense is distancing. It's a good post *pause for you to read it* and I understand what she's getting at even though I don't "bounce off" present tense in the same way. I do often feel there's an excess of This Is The Now in fanfic, but as long as something's well written I don't care much what tense it's in, and there are lots of things that will throw me out of a story faster than verbs with s on the end.However, I'm as prone to navel-gazing as the next writer (you all have figured this out by now) so I do think about tense along with all the other elements of a story (also, being a writer of time travel books gets you noticing it even if you're committed to using standard past tense narrative). Until last year, I wrote almost exclusively in past tense, and when I moved into using present I thought of it as an effect of suddenly writing a lot of visual media fic - that "immediacy" thing. (A lot of other things changed this past year, of course; one could make all kinds of false assumptions about, say, menopause or hyperthryroidism or empty nest syndrome causing present tense to break out. I don't think we need to go there.) Certainly when I'm writing, to choose a totally random example ha, Vorkosigan fic, I'm going to write in past tense, because my style is not wildly different from Lois Bujold's, and to some extent I'm modeling on the books. I can think of a few examples of Vorkosigan things I might choose present tense for - it would be interesting to write Memory fic from Simon's POV that way - but in general I don't consider anything but past tense.
(I'm not sure "consider" is the right word, actually. But more on that later.)
Some published fiction is written in present tense, of course; most of what got me thinking about this last week was finally getting around to reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, which by the way is just as wonderful as Wolf Hall, and let me tell you, reading about Thomas Cromwell and writing about Ben Linus (even a Ben Linus on the way to reformation, if I may confusingly use that word) is an interesting and strikingly appropriate combination. Oh my. No, I do not want to read the crossover, though I would like to watch the chess game, or listen to the trash talk. Anyway. WH and BUTB are in present tense, which I remember clearly not noticing until well into WH, which tells you how well it works. And I suppose if I were to write Mantel fanfic (there is a vanishingly small chance of this) it would have to be in present, or it wouldn't sound right. The opposite (writing present-tense fic based on something in past tense) is somewhat more likely (for me, I mean; other people do it all the time).
So, I started in with the present tense fic this year, but I didn't write it all that way; the Vorkosigan fic is 100% past tense, and so is the "Lewis" fic even though that's visual media-based. I made the jump with the "Sherlock" story "Improbability," which is a style exercise using John POV while he's in the abyss of mourning and depression, and really couldn't have worked for me any other way. And then I stuck with that for "The Cat Did Nothing in the Night-Time," for consistency's sake if nothing else. So it's the "Person of Interest" fic that's some of each; here's how it divides up (not counting the Vorkosigan crossovers, which are in past for reasons discussed above):
"Then Move Not": Harold POV, present
"The Human Heart": John POV, present
"Children of an Idle Brain": mixed POV, present (this is the dream one - I was writing it when I read
isis's post, and mentioned it in a comment, and she agreed that even for her it would work best in present tense)"The Three Graces": Harold POV, past
"Phoenix": John POV, past
"Halcyon": Harold POV (with a little Carter at the end), past
"The Rest is Silence": John POV, past
"All I Know Is Flight": John POV, present
"Untalked Of and Unseen": Harold POV, past
"A Heap of Broken Images": Root POV, present
"Night's Candles": John POV, past
Well, it's certainly... mixed.
I admit to influence in my tense choices (to the extent that if I'm in the middle of a past tense piece, and I go off and read a really good story in present tense, I may come back and start writing in present before I realize what I'm doing), and I think
isis's post gave me a little nudge back into past-tense writing (which is, after all, my homeland and my native state). One thing I have realized, thinking about this, is that I'm not looking at it from isis's perspective, that of a reader (since, as a reader, I really don't care most of the time what tense something's in, though I do notice and occasionally disagree). And while of course I'm thinking about tense as a writer, since I'm the one who has to get the words down, what occurred to me as I mused further was: a) there's nearly always some way in which the story itself tells me straight off what tense it should be in, and often won't be changed even if I try to. I'm still trying to figure out what it is, and if it's always the same thing. And b) it may be the characters' experiences and perspectives that are the key point, not the readers' or the writer's. "Immediacy" may indeed be an important factor, but it's not an immediacy going on in a reader's head; it's more about what the POV character is feeling.Maybe. The problem with using examples here is that the present-tense-peer-pressure effect in fanfic is fairly strong, and so is my past-tense default, and sometimes the story-nudge is stronger than my whiplashing between those two, and sometimes it's not. But some of this division makes sense. It seems odd at first that "The Rest Is Silence" (which is basically a PWP with a long introduction) should be in past, and if I'd written just the voice-kinky sex bit, it would probably be in present; but since John's obsession develops over the course of his relationship with Harold, the first part is all about time going by and things changing, and didn't work in present tense (I think I tried. Anticipating the latter part). And "The Three Graces" starts out with Harold reminiscing, and is really steeped in the past throughout. "All I Know Is Flight," which stands out among a whole bunch of past-tense fics, is in present because it's about the future, perhaps, about leaving and going somewhere else, and not dwelling in the past (if I'd written it from Harold's POV, that might be different). Whereas in "Night's Candles," John thinks he's about to die, so his head is lingering in the past despite him wanting to just enjoy things in the present moment. Maybe. I'm still not sure.
I've been thinking about this because of "To Make Amends In," the "Lost" fic I just finished, which started writing itself in present tense and could not be wrestled into past even though I wanted to. So I decided to acknowledge that straight-on; there's this line pretty early on:
But the past bleeds and stings less than it did, nor does the weight of the future ache; he feels oddly anchored in the present.
and it all begins to be about Ben drawing a dividing line between his past and his future; he's thinking about both in the course of the story, but he's existing very much in that in-between place and starting to understand how to live in the moment (which he hasn't done a lot of before. He always has a plan, and he's always making up for something he resents about his earlier life). So, despite being a conventional sort of narrative, not a dream or an internal monologue (it is fairly introspective in parts, but there's plenty of dialogue if little action), it really did speak as a story in present tense. I suspect that if I were to write Ben-POV chronologically earlier than this, I'd end up in past tense. He doesn't flex from one to the other the way Harold and John do. (Though aside from "Children of an Idle Brain" I've only written Harold-POV in present once, and that was the very first PoI fic I wrote, and I'm not sure I'd do it that way again. I think Harold may be a past tense kind of guy, really. John, though. Goes both ways. Heh.)
I wanted to mention, too, the couple of original-fic experiences I've had with present tense. First, there was the time I started writing one of Olivia's dreams in present tense despite the rest of the book being in past - I fixed it, but golly it really wanted to be in present, which says something about how dreams work, and why "Children of an Idle Brain" really had to be in present tense. Present tense does often have a dream-like quality even if the characters are awake, but dreams themselves really like to be narrated in the moment, and it always feels a little odd to me to do it another way.
Also, I do have a short story that's set in the same universe as my novels, and it is possibly the first finished thing I ever wrote in present tense, and it shocked me utterly at the time that it emerged that way. But the first line came out "There is a man in the German barn who babbles of time and bells" and I couldn't make it be "was" and "babbled" no matter how hard I tried. (It's an outsider POV, an 18th-century girl looking at my time-traveling protagonist George without realizing that he's from another time, which possibly has something to do with the tense, though I can't define quite what.)
*The Past, the Present, and the Future, not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Thanks again, Ebenezer.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 10:14 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-06-08 10:20 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 12:29 am (UTC)From:But yeah, Mantel's Cromwell trilogy--can I call it a trilogy yet? Is that like how the Quagmire triplets remain triplets post-third-triplet?--is an interesting case, not least because her style has a dense, cognitive delicacy that I associate more with past tense. Not at all dreamlike, except in patches of grief or violence. Although it's also very narrated, as
no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 12:30 pm (UTC)From:More like how it's triplets even though one of them's still in the womb? But yeah, sure. And good observations. I wish I could pull out quotes, but I had to take the book back to the library. It's a combination of immersion and detachment, and the detachment is what's striking and unexpected, because it's not the tight third POV that you'd expect. It's almost like he's reliving his life. Weird, but it works.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 07:58 pm (UTC)From:Hahaha, yes, wouldn't want to imply that The Mirror and the Light is already in the ground. Not least because I really want to get my hands on it, sigh. But yeah, definitely the reliving it thing! Mantel's occasional hat tip to the fact that this is history, however much she pulls it open.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-10 06:25 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-06-10 06:51 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-06-19 08:48 pm (UTC)From:I think the stories I've written in present tense tend to span short time periods, tend to be short, and tend to be those which are otherwise 'different' or experimental - original characters, minor characters, moments in time (as opposed to plot moving through time).
Also, I wanted to let you know that one of my guidebooks mentioned St. Hedda's church in Kirkby Stephens, and I was going to take a photo for you, but as it turns out the church there is not named for a saint at all. Oh, well.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-19 09:05 pm (UTC)From:And alas for St. Hedda's!