@ChickenFreak The point of my examples is to reveal information that we tend to ignore. By adding the phrase "before now" after verbs, I do not "insert present tense into it". Instead, I simply reveal the present tense frame of reference that was already there by expressing it in additional words instead of inflection. I never said past is harder to understand than present (although that can be true with more complex constructs like conditionals and subjunctives). I said it adds an unnecessary layer of information. It just so happens that you and I are so used to digesting that layer of information that we can do so without noticing. But it is still there. Writing is a process of making one deliberate, well-reasoned decision after another, and every time you write a verb, you decide whether to add any information about tense. If I have no reason to inform the reader that the event described by the verb precedes my act of writing, then I do not go out of my way to express that information. When I do not inflect the verb, it defaults to present tense. You maintain that it is natural to tell a story in the past tense. Correction: it is natural to narrate actual history in the past tense, as in your examples. When you narrate history in past tense, you are literally telling the listener that those events happened before you started narrating them. Your mind is in the mode to inform the listener. In that mode, it is natural to give correct information. When I write fiction, my mind is not naturally in the mode to inform someone of what actually happened. My mind is in the mode to describe a hypothetical series of events. In fact, even when I deliberately choose past tense for a section (e.g. a character telling a story), if I am not careful, then I slip back into present. That is evidence that "narrating events in the past tense is more natural" is false in some contexts.
To come back to amorgan3’s original post. Perhaps this is the crisis of confidence that most of us get in our writing at some point (many points). If you had written 35k in 1st person, you might well now be having a similar crisis and wondering whether it should be 3rd person. When I hit a crisis of confidence I usually find a book or two to read, or flick through, as an example that addresses the writing issue I am struggling with. I find it rarely helps directly and perhaps it’s just time away from writing that helps. I’m currently reading the prize winning ‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ and find the tense odd at times. Since I started writing I see much more that I’m not totally comfortable with when I read and not just my own work. Hang on - I think my mind’s wandering here. Until my last work, I have, by default, written past tense. I’ve enjoyed writing present tense this time. However, I suggest that yours is a temporary crisis that you ‘simply’ need to work through. Writers have certainly built suspense and emotional connections well enough in past tense. So, I think you need to look at your writing generally and not specifically at the tense – if you’re going to look at anything. Having said that, it is probably much better not to look at all, but to get on with it and see how you can improve when you come to editing.
Just to play devil's advocate here. If we're talking about narrating a hypothetical series of events, would it not be logical to use future conditional tense?
In English, we normally use present tense to describe imaginary things. "The ball I imagine is blue." "In the series of events I imagine, the first event is that I throw the ball. The second event is that you catch the ball." "In the series of events I imagine, I throw the ball and you catch it." "Imagine that I throw the ball and you catch it." "I throw the ball and you catch it." I think this stems from the fact that in English, we use present tense to make timeless statements, like "two plus two is four." A description of an imaginary thing is as timeless as a mathematical statement. Either that, or it stems from the fact that in English, we use present tense to qualify our references, like "I prefer a ball that is blue over a ball that is red."
That doesn't speak to the logical imperative for the use of future conditional, it merely justifies the use of the present tense.
Why is there a logical imperative to use future conditional? Also, I am trying to imagine a story written in future conditional. Would it not look identical to a story written in present? "If I throw the ball in a minute, then you will catch it." Semantically, "throw" is future conditional, but syntactically, it has the same form as present.
At first my reaction to this was, "you're doing it wrong," but then I thought, okay, if writers/readers struggle to connect with present tense, surely a writer can feel past tense isn't immediate or close enough for them too! And that's fine, different strokes, but just in case, you can check if you're using e.g. lots of filtering verbs that tend to diminish the sense of immediacy and closeness or if you're writing as if reporting, telling, listing, describing it like a movie. I think you can do all of that well with both tenses, but it's possible that for your story one tense serves it better than the other. Are you writing in first person as well? I also do this. If I'm struggling with the flow, descriptions, tense, whatever, I pick up a book that is similarly narrated and it helps me to get back in track.
Fiction is, as I see it, presented as if it were actual history. So from your point of view you're supporting your argument, and from my point of view you're supporting mine.
Literary essays are traditionally written in the present tense... "Macbeth struggles with his conscience but allows himself to be persuaded by the witches" or whatever.
Tons of awesome comments in this thread. Tim3232 and KaTrian woke me up a bit. I think it is really more of a crisis of confidence/case of getting tangled up in my writing. I am really close to wrapping up a certain part of the work, and I think resolving the current short term conflict in a graceful and suspenseful way is bothering me, so I am starting to second guess on a larger scale. I am going to take a little break and give it some thought before I put pen to paper. I never expected that the most challenging part of writing a novel would be sustaining my own confidence along the way.
The past is slippery. It ranges from the Big Bang, and even the physically impossible but accessible to the imagination time before the Great Singularity, to the infinitesimally close to now that makes a femtosecond seem astronomically vast. It is dynamic and fluid, gravid with potential. The present, however, is caged in an impregnable temporal prison. All one can do is stick firmly to it and remember what came before. And what came before, inescapably, is the past. That's where the story lives.
One thing I like about past tense is that I can seemlessly transition from one scene to another in a paragraph. Most of my writing, the reader is right behind the POV character, but if I want to jump forward a few weeks, I can summarize those two weeks. To do that in present tense would be difficult, and you'd probably end up with a scene break instead.
Sorry to jump in, but that as a universal rule simply seems false. I know we're going around in circles, but no, stories written in past tense presents itself as actual history. Even the word 'history' is necessarily rooted in the past. Let's try a little thought experiment: you want to write a story that not presented as actual history, but as a scene by scene account of a hypothetical present. Can this work? Of course it can -- there's no rules that says otherwise. Maybe stories in past and present tense are just fundamentally different in what it tries to deliver. I'm more interested in the strengths/weaknesses of tenses and how we can make things work. Here's an interesting point from the linked article: "The use of present tense encourages us to include trivial events that serve no plot function simply because such events would actually happen in the naturalistic sequence of time. As a result, a present-tense story sometimes seems, in the words of Macauley and Lanning, “less the work of an author than an unedited film.” Take, for example, Kate McCorkle’s slice-of-life story “The Last Parakeet,” in which for no apparent reason we watch the “Today” show with the narrator while she eats a bowl of Rice Krispies. The principle of selection can be applied more readily, and ruthlessly, in past tense." Here's the question: do you really have to narrate every moment of natural time just because the story is written in present tense? Let me give this a shot... "I wake up and see a photo I've never seen on my bedside table. It's a picture of an old man in a national park or something. His puffer jacket's way too big for him -- he looks like an eskimo. Who is this dude? I don't even know any old people other than my racist grandparents. How did this get here? I put the picture down, grab my towel and go to the bathroom. A leak, a shower, and a ten second shave later, I find myself thinking about who I've talked to in the last two weeks. I mean, yeah, I already knew the answer, I've spoken to nobody. Things have been rough. I guess there's the owner of the dairy, but he doesn't count. Who would do this? This is pissing me off, I'll figure it out after work. ------------------------------ Remember when I said I wouldn't think about it? Yeah, I lied. I spent the entire day sitting in front of the mill and cutting myself 'cos I couldn't focus. Five times. That's more than the touchdowns Brady scored against the Bucs. I grab a lukewarm beer from my crappy fridge and down it on my bean bag. Tastes like arse, but it'll do." Looks alright. I managed to manipulate time and cut out the irrelevant bits just fine. Not sure exactly what the article was talking about now. Did I just read it wrong? To be fair, my piece was pretty slice-of-life-y.
But it's "slice of life-y" because of the content, not the verb tense. I didn't understand that point from the article (or many other points from it) either.
Maybe it depends on the number of time-jumps involved. I can't say for sure though, I don't remember the last story I read in present tense. YA fans, what do ya reckon?
This is true. I was opposing the argument that a type of language that is used to recount past history can't be used to recount fictional history. At least, that's what I thought the argument was. My point is that that form of language doesn't care if the events-presented-as-being-in-the-past are true or false events. For that matter, there's nothing to stop you from using present tense to recount real history ("Queen Victoria says blah, and then Parliament votes to blah...") and as BayView points out, it's often used for literary analysis. I think they can deliver essentially the same thing. My passionate hatred of present tense in fiction is purely a matter of taste. I can find some inherent objections to it, and I can find some inherent objections to past tense. Neither of them are enough to make an overriding decision. It's taste and custom. I don't buy the author's argument. As you demonstrate, you can cut events in present tense just as easily in past. I do feel that "...I spent the entire day..." is cheating on present tense just a little bit, but it's not actually wrong. People do sit in the present ruminating on the past.
If it was the most frequent technique to pop up in new fiction in 1987, and it has only continued to grow since then (to the point where now it is commonplace), I'd say it has moved well past the fad phase. That's almost 30 years of continued, growing use.
I don't agree that past tense fiction is necessarily to be considered as actual history, any more than present tense is necessarily meant to be considered as an actual contemporaneous recitation of events by a narrator. In either case, the story might be that, but it doesn't have to be.
In The Nightingale, the present tense portion of the story is set in 1995. And in The Orphan Train, which I've just started, both the "present" (2011) and "past" (1929) narratives are in present tense. Although I have to say I'm not especially fond of that, gripping though the story is.
Yes, that's a good example. There are also past tense narratives where the narrator dies suddenly without having the opportunity to record anything that has happened, and where the final thoughts of the dying narrator are presented right up to the moment of death. It cannot, of course, be the narrator recounting past events. Both tenses are simply stylistic choices, and nothing more should be read into them unless the author has made clear by the story that more is meant to be read into it.
Consider a universe that begins with a big bang. It rapidly expands for the first few imperceptibly short moments and then slows down, although it continues to accelerate in its expansion. All this time, the amount of order in its arrangement of matter and energy decreases. Some think this entropic decay ends in what they call the heat death of the universe. At the universe's inception, you can fully describe its state in a small amount of information, and in its youth, you can recognize clear patterns like "galaxies" and "planets". But after the heat death, there are no recognizable patterns to draw abstractions from, just particles in a chaotic soup that you cannot meaningfully describe without referring to each individual one. In between those two extremes, there is life. On one planet in particular, called "earth", life begins as a single cell and takes many millions of years to evolve into more complex multicellular forms. In just a few millennia, an especially interesting life form called the "human" accelerates its own development with the aid of technology. It begins with primitive discoveries like fire and inventions like the wheel, and progresses to systems that can think on their own. A day in the life of a human is a rich experience filled with complex social interactions, value judgments, and musings on the philosophical aspects of life. The study of philosophy is rooted in influential thinkers like Plato, who theorizes the existence of ideal forms of things, and Confucius, who talks about the moral role of each person in society... I could go on, but I think I have made my point that the syntactic present tense in English is a lot more flexible than the semantic present tense. As I said earlier, the verbs we use to describe an idea outside the dimension of time (e.g. a fictional story), and the verbs we use to refer to events that happen as we speak, are syntactically identical. So to me, "writing in the present tense" could either refer to semantics (deliberately trying to create an impression that the reader is there with the character -- or is the character -- in the moment), or it could refer to syntax (the choice of verbs that do not carry information about time). I take it you were referring to semantics, while I always refer to syntax. Not that you equivocated the two, but I do think it is worth pointing out the difference. I think a lot of the disagreement about tense in writing stems from different people referring either to the semantics or to the syntax of tense. @ChickenFreak I agree that the language used to make historical true-or-false statements can be used to describe an imaginary history -- but my point is that by doing so, the author attaches information to the verbs that goes ignored by a silent agreement between the author and the reader. Whether or not the author really means that the events truly happened, that is what he is stating. Syntax has definitions just like vocabulary, and you can use a syntactic structure contrary to its definition and still be understood just as you can use a word contrary to its definition and still be understood. (I guess you could say the use of past tense to describe an imaginary scenario is a syntactic idiom just like vocabulary-based idioms.) On the other hand, describing an idea that exists outside our own timeframe is not contrary to the syntactic definition of the present tense.
The novel I'm currently writing started out in present tense, but I've recently changed it to past tense. I like it that way, but at the same time, I really like present tense. It gives me a sense of 'being there' if that makes sense. What is your preference? Do you prefer one over the other, or are there certain circumstances where one works better?
Past tense is preferred by most writers because it's the natural method of storytelling. Of course, present tense has its advantages; otherwise writers wouldn't have considered it. For example, present tense gives everything a sense of happening immediately. It's therefore very good for dealing with long chunks of internal narration (e.g., stream of consciousness).
Bolding mine - every time this topic comes up, people make claims like this. I'm not sure how it can ever really be established as the truth. I mean, there are lots of writers using present tense - are their stories somehow unnatural? That doesn't make sense to me.
