First Person Present Tense

Yeah, but agents and publisher don't know that. So they open the the first page, find out it's printed in Arial instead of Verdana, and say "this guy is not trendy" = reject.

 

That was just a sarcasm. As I understand, "agents and publishers are currently reserved towards first person present tense writings". My underline. Currently. Start writing today, finish in 2 years and see what's gonna be "current" then.

 

While there are plenty of novels in first person, past tense has been the overwhelmingly common choice for novels for many, many decades. It seems unlikely that that's going to abruptly change in two years.

And to address the question of whether it's _possible_ for a first person present tense novel to be published - of course it's not impossible. But what's the value of setting out to be the one an (large number) exception? What's wrong with improving, rather than drastically reducing, your odd of being accepted for publication? Many people seem to be thinking of a scenario where their work is brilliant, one in a million, overwhelmingly convincing, the work that makes the editor's career and the publisher's fortune, with a brilliance that justifies shoving aside all standards of style, length, and every other convention. What's wrong with the more realistic scenario where your work is a pretty decent novel, but one that has to fulfill some expectations in order to have a chance of being published?

 

Hi,

To me it's about the comfort of the reader (and the writer of course). First person present is a difficult tense to write, but it's also a difficult tense to read. Third person past (and omniscient as said earlier) is accepted by most readers as the norm, and for that reason its comfortable to them. It's what they're used to.

First person present is more shocking, more unfamiliar. I can see it working well in a short story, as the shock value of the tense and perspective adds to the impact of the story. But to maintain it for an entire novel? I think that would be both hard to write and hard to read. It'd need to be a truly outstanding work to overcome that issue.

Cheers, Greg.

 

thanks for speaking accurately for me [as usual], cog!

greg... i agree...

 

Thanks everyone for your input. I would still like to get people's thoughts on present tense's deficiencies and ways to overcome them, and what its' strengths are. I understand that it is a difficult style, but why is that?

 

I wouldn't say it's a difficult style. It's just relatively new. My theory is that the novel as a form peaked sometime in the early 20th century. Basically, everything that could be accomplished with the novel had been done. I'm not exactly sure when writers began using present tense in novels, but it's definitely a post-modern thing. Some writers are consciously trying to break away from the form of the traditional novel by trying out new things. Sure, there may be a lot of failed attempts, but there are also some really good novels written in present tense.

I've never actually come across a novel or story written in first person present tense. But I'm not convinced that this way of writing is inherently bad, and I can actually see this being a powerful technique in the hands of a good writer.

 

Present tense locks the story's pace to the reader's reading rate, because everything is "right now." You may be able to work some wiggle room in that with unusual writing skill, but past tense is already elastic - it extends easily from nanoseconds ago to yesteryear and beyond.

First person is not as serious a problem, but it is less flexible than third person. First person is best limited to a single POV, but third person allows smoother transfer of POV.

 

Hi,

The issue with using present tense is that as Cogito has said it locks you into the reader's immediate sense of time. It makes the action immediate. So for a short story where you want to bring a sense of immediancy and urgency to the work, it can be very powerful. But for a novel were your character is hanging around for long periods of time doing nothing, or nothing important, that is wasted. So then you have to jump, going from I am now, to I am ten hours in the future when say the object of your stakeout has turned up. The transition can be hard.

As for first person POV it's less of a battle, but still it comes at a cost. The main one is that you can only see the story through the eyes of a single character, which may make the actions of other characters look flat and unconvincing. Also the plot may not look right unless your MC is everywhere to see what's going on, or else has some other mechanism to know it. To get around that you can then try switching POV's with other characters to advance your plot and explain things, but that can jar if not done well. After all how is the reader to know if the 'I' in one section is Jasper and in the next it's Kate? So you end up having to throw in names or other obvious cues early on in each section.

Again I come back to my main thought is that this would be difficult to write and difficult to read.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Maybe the main problem, as I see it (as a non-native speaker) of using present tense in English, is the fact historical present ('present in the past'), found in many languages, virtually has no application in everyday spoken English (well, outside telling jokes, in a way).

Writing in present tense often tempts you to write about everything that happens to you main character (whether he shares the same voice as the narrator or not).

...etc, etc... This may work in a paragraph or two, maybe even a whole (shorter) chapter, but reading 300 pages of this is exhausting. It makes the reader skip whole portions of text to see if anything important is ever going to happen - until he eventually gives up.
But this happens a lot of times with books written in past tense as well (and those written in well prescribed third person/past tense). The author has no sense of narration, no idea how to move forward, so he uses well known tropes in storytelling to progress from one point in narrative to the next, or he just fills in the space with meaningless minutiae.

The same applies when writing in first person - take note of what is important to tell, skip through what is just everyday, plain and boring and uneventful activity. You are not going to write a dialogue the way it is spoken, right? You skip through all the "Uhm"s and "Aaah"s, you create sentences and use punctuation. I think the same goes on in the wider perspective: you choose what to write, what to skip.

Also, what I think is a trap in writing, whether it be 1P/PrT or 3Po/PsT, is not making the difference between the character, the narrator and the writer himself. Writing in first person makes it mush easier to just loose yourself in the character, and to forget not only you (the author) are not the same as the narrator (which happens all the time in third person writing) but also to forget that the narrator (the one who tells the story) is not the same as the main character (the one who acts). They may present themselves as the same thing, but there is a loud and clear difference - the narrator narrates by „distancing“ himself from action. In past tense narration, it is easy to picture the narrator as the main character telling the story as an old guy, or just after his story ended, or from a safe distance, etc. But in present tense, this distance is more superficial. It is the distance between the inner self and the acting self - or if you like it that way, between a director behind the camera and a director leading his actors.

You are not going to use the present tense to show things “as they are”, but “as they appear to be”. You have to show that your narrator is limited in his scope, as well as showing the main character is limited in his actions. So, his emotions, frustrations, inabilities, lack of perception come in play (should come in play) before actual actions. This is a good thing about present tense - you can create an illusion of imminence, limited knowledge of consequences, and instability.
If your character is a suicide bomber, and he dies at the end of narrative, telling the story in past tense makes it look like it’s told from the afterlife! On the other hand, the choice of present tense makes it harder for the reader to predict what happens next and how the story ends. Of course, only if used carefully and with a lot of re-reads and re-writes.

 

Updike described writing "Rabbit, Run" similar to writing a movie script. This maybe a good analogy.

 

This is exactly why I felt FP/PrT would maybe fit. You find out very quickly that the MC's perception of things may not be entirely accurate, that he may have something mentally wrong with him. The plot consists of the MC being mysteriously transported to a different world, so his perception of things is additionally put into question, because he is a stranger to the world. I was hoping I would be able to write it in a way where the reader would be experiencing things through the MC and with his opinions and perceptions, but still be able to see that what the character thinks is going on isn't exactly accurate. And hopefully use the narrator's limited scope to keep a sense of mystery about what is going on.

As far as what Cogito and psychotick said about time, the story takes place as a series of events over several days, so there are not really any significant jumps in time, except for sleeping and travel time, which the more I think about is probably what you meant anyway. So thank you for making me aware of that problem. Thanks again to everyone who posted, your comments have been incredibly helpful.

 

But you can do this with third person limited. Or if you really want first person, you can do it with first person past.

I get a vibe that you may be feeling pretty literal about past tense, as if it's necessary to somehow imagine the context in which the narrator is reflecting on his past--say, he's eighty years old and telling the story to a visitor to the nursing home, or something. But that really isn't necessary--a story doesn't really need a "wrapper" that explains how the story got told. Some stories do, similar to the way that some movies or TV do--like The Office or Modern Family, both of which have a "wrapper" of a documentary being made about the people in question, or How I Met Your Mother, which has a wrapper of the narrator telling all the stories to his children. But that wrapper absolutely isn't needed.

 

I somehow believe (I may be wrong, but it helps) that this implied context is a necessary attribute of first person/past tense narration. The story is in past tense - meaning, the story already happened, storytelling is a consequence, so to speak. No literal "wrapper" (frame story) is needed - in modern fiction that is. But historically, first person narrator evolved away from the necessity of a frame story, leaving it implied, when not explicit.

 

"The past" can vary from "a nanosecond ago" to "right after the Big Bang, when time began."

This is how past tense narration can become almost indistinguishable from present tense, except the past tense tether can be as flexible and as elastic as the writer requires, with nearly no additional effort.

 

I see no more reason for past tense to have a frame, than for present tense to have one. If the reader is puzzled as to how a character is telling them a story of his past, wouldn't that same reader be even more puzzled as to how he's telling them a story of his present? Is the character constantly typing into a wireless keyboard, even as he's, say, fighting Ninjas?

But we don't wonder those things; if we start wondering those things, the whole structure of disbelief falls apart. We don't wonder about them for either past or present tense.

 

I don't know, maybe I'm not explaining things well. I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean about the "wrapper" and past tense not having to be real reflective. And I do understand that past tense is more flexible. But for this story, I don't want to be flexible. The whole story is from one character's POV, so I want the reader's experience to be dictated by one character's slightly flawed perspective. But am I completely wrong in thinking that writing in present tense might possibly bring something that past can't? And, could writing in present tense lend a story more immersion? I suppose that is what the issue is. I want people to, when they're reading the story, have a different opinion of things than the character's biased views, and also be fooled in certain situations. I hope that maybe clarifies things a little. And I'm not trying to be stubborn about the situation, I just don't want to completely give up on the idea, and understand how things work.

 

But that's what third person limited is. It's from one character's perspective. There may be some flexibility as to whether it is or isn't entirely from that character's emotional point of view, but I'd say that it quite often is.

An example:

First person present tense:

Janet walks in. I try not to roll my eyes as she coos and smiles and chirps "Good morning!" to everyone. Such a self-important, passive-aggressive little Pollyanna. She heads for me and I look down at my desk right before she can chirp at me. That'll show her.

Third person limited past tense:

Janet walked in. Fred tried not to roll his eyes as she cooed and smiled and chirped "Good morning!" to everyone. Such a self-important, passive-aggressive little Pollyana. She headed for Fred, and he looked down at his desk right before she could chirp at him. That'd show her.

 

Well said, that's the main reason past tense is the "default" storytelling tense in English. It is flexible, it is elastic, but as Owen8 said, he doesn't want to be flexible and elastic - he wants to do it the hard way.

Don't be stubborn - give up on your idea because it is not a common one.

 

What I meant by not being flexible is that I don't want to change POV characters through the story. And no, I don't necessarily want to do it the hard way. I realize I'm a new, inexperienced writer, and first person present tense would be incredibly difficult to pull off. Thanks to the feedback I've gotten from the thread, I'll either wait to write this story until I'm a better writer and pursue a story I'd planned to write in third person past, write it in a more typical style, or maybe try to write it both ways. As for the second part of your post, I must be real dense because I don't know how take that.

And ChickenFreak, both of those examples were well written. Maybe I'm crazy, but I genuinely enjoyed the first person present example. I like reading the action as its happening, forming my own opinion of things while reading about the narrator's view at the same time.

I don't know, I think I'd better stop posting about this. I think people are getting annoyed with me, and I don't want to be a nuisance.

I really do appreciate everyone's feedback, so thank you.

 

Owen8, just go ahead and write it and see how it turns out. At the very least, it'll be a learning experience.