For me, no, that's kind of like the norm, right? Most SF/F books I read are written in close third past. The more I think about this, the less I actually care whether it's in past or present, first or third. I mean, if it's well-written, I'll enjoy it, and the point-of-view tends to be the least of my complaints. I wasn't all that bothered by the tense (and POV) of e.g. Bright Lights, Big City. It's written in 2nd and present. When I think back to, especially first person/present books I've read, I have a feeling I've read those books faster than other books. Is that weird? Off the top of my head, books like The Rules of Attraction, Story of My Life, Brass, Apples, the Sandman Slim series... Certainly if I were to pick a favorite tense, it'd be simple past, but I don't really have a problem with present. Not anymore, anyway. I think I used to balk at it a bit since I was so used to third past. In the end, if the author feels like the present tense / first person works best for their WIP, then just go ahead and do it. There will always be readers who'll be on board as long as it's a good story.
Yeah, I think past tense is generally vastly superior to present. It's more elegant for writing complex verb phrases, for one thing. But I think the biggest issue for me is that present tense is a lazy way to feel intimate and in-the-moment. You can do clever things with it to present a story in a striking way that builds its theme/tone/characters/etc., but more often it seems that present tense is used because you can achieve a certain effect even without really knowing what you're doing. It's similar to the modern obsession with first person, which again can be used to excellent effect but which is often just a lazy shortcut for people who don't know how to achieve more complex effects of narration and character voice. It bothers me that some writers don't seem to understand how to convey intimacy or immediacy in third person past. Not just that they choose not to do it that way, but I've heard too many people say that these things can't be done well in third person past. Too many people think the only way to get into or out of a character's perspective is to actually switch between first/third, or that the only way you can have flashbacks is to switch between present/past. Writing has the power to be so much more subtle and elegant than that!
I'm really never sure about writers saying other writers are "lazy". It seems like something that should be impossible to judge based on what the criticizer knows. Saying that a certain piece of writing works or doesn't work (for a certain reader)? Fair enough. But if present tense can be used to achieve a effect, then it sounds like it's effective. How can we judge how hard the author was working to create that effect?
One's an original, two's a copy, three's plagiarism, four's a bloody rip-off and five is "any more room on the bandwagon?"
I don't think it's that hard to judge, honestly. It's self-evident that some writers are not Tolstoy. I don't know how hard a given author has to work to write what they write, whether the end product is good or bad, but I can see in the writing itself how effective it is, and how ambitious it is, etc. Maybe "lazy" is the wrong term, but the right one wouldn't be much more complimentary. If it helps, I don't believe that the craft of writing is ultimately subjective. Enjoyment is subjective, and what an individual gets out of a book is subjective, but the technical ability which is demonstrated in a work is not subjective, since we can judge writing by consistent criteria. (I've yet to hear an argument to the contrary which doesn't confuse complexity with ambiguity.) Like I said though, there are potentially well-crafted uses of present tense, so the tense alone doesn't tell anything about how good or bad an author is. I was only observing that it's often used (in spite of its general built-in clunkiness) by less skilful writers, which is simply because the effect of present tense is a lot easier to understand, a lot more concrete, than other aspects of narration.
I agree that "lazy" is the wrong term. Not sure what you think the right one would be, so I can't really address that. And I'd disagree about the "consistent criteria" for judging writing, depending on your definition of the "we" who are doing the judging. There are loads of respected academics who disagree about the relative quality of a variety of works... so if "we" is "me and people who think like I do" then, yeah, okay, there are consistent criteria. But if you mean "we" as in "everybody who's reasonably well-educated and has put some thought into it" then... I don't think so. What criteria are you thinking of that can be objectively applied?
My point is: lazy, feeble, rudimentary perhaps, whatever word you use, sometimes you can identify when something has been done badly or when very little was attempted in the first place. We can recognise good and less good writing or else there'd be no point gathering on a forum to critique it. Like I said, it's a matter of complexity. People have different opinions, but they're not all equally insightful or well-argued, so it's possible that there's a right answer even if there isn't a consensus, or that different people each have part of the right answer. I believe it's worth striving for the most "right" answer rather than saying "well, we all have our different opinions." People evaluate writing by different sets and subsets of criteria, as well as have their personal tastes enter into it. But in the end, you can basically identify a specific criterion and determine whether an author has met it or not. If you can't define that criterion in the first place in order to identify it, the disagreement/confusion is probably semantic rather than actually substantial. I think serious arguments about a book's quality usually concern which criteria should be applied, rather than whether criteria are met, but I don't see how different choices of criteria preclude the possibility that a book can have objective features. Academics may argue about whether a book's evocative, unexpected imagery made up for some cardboard characters that only served as obvious devices. But it's hard to argue that the imagery isn't there or that the characters are more nuanced than the writing makes them. The contention seems to emerge in deciding how to weigh these different things against each other. Again, irrelevant to whether or not you can make objective claims about the book. Otherwise, concerning things that are less easily perceived, an obscure allegory or an intertextual reference or an unrecognised effect of the structure, we perceive these things differently based on our individual differences and level of insight, not because the book itself somehow simultaneously has and does not have particular features or qualities. Sorry this explanation is so long and kind of complicated. But I stand by my point that a given piece of writing has objective features and qualities which are independent of our opinions... basically because the universe does, and these writings are part of the universe. There are subjective elements in how we respond to books, and I'll admit my subjective feelings about present tense probably colour the way I feel about specific books, but that doesn't change the fact that some writers use present tense badly for bad reasons, regardless of how I feel about it.
I'd say that both "evocative" and "unexpected" are subjective - one person's "evocative, unexpected imagery" is another person's "purple, random prose". Can you think of a single book that's universally (even for the value of "universal" that would be, like, all academics with an interest in the subject, or all professional reviewers, or whatever) accepted as brilliant in a specific area?
I already explained why objectivity is not a matter of consensus. But if there's a single academic who thinks that, say, Nabokov's diction in Lolita isn't elegant and precise in ways that are very easy to agree on, or who would argue that he wasn't commenting on the trendy ideas from the psychoanalysts when he brought psychiatry into the book... then yeah, that academic is an idiot. Yeah, it's actually really easy to give examples.
I have an intense urge to shout, "Green Eggs and Ham!" But then I'd have to come up with a specific area. But, see? Here I do it anyway. I think I'm lightheaded as the hour approaches lunchtime.
There are lots of things to say about Seuss that, if you disagree, you're pretty much wrong, or don't know what you're talking about. If someone were to say that they're personally annoyed by Suess's rhyming style, that they don't enjoy his stories or they feel that he's "over-rated", we couldn't really say that their feelings are wrong. But if the same person made specific claims, for example if they said that he didn't know how to craft a catchy line, or that The Cat in the Hat isn't indeed a more inventive alternative to the kind of books that had previously been written using Dick and Jane-style early vocab lists, we can pretty much say that that person is wrong on those counts. We know that opinions can be more or less well-informed, more or less articulate and more or less reasonable. Opinions can also refer to facts, which have a truth value, or feelings, which don't so much. So why the resistance to the idea that some opinions might be more objectively true than others? That's not to say that we know, definitely and finally, which opinions are objectively true, just that there are ways we can try to figure out which ones are, and that's where conversation about literature actually gets interesting. There'd be no point arguing about anything if we were to believe that every contradictory opinion is equally true.
Write in past tense, far fewer people will bitch than if it is in present tense. Though each has its merit, present tense bothers most for some strange reason. My theory is that they can't handle being there in the moment, so they prefer things to have already happened. But what do I know, I am just some guy who stumbles from one story to the next.
I dont think present tense allows much depth. Past tense is like plasticine and present is like already dry clay or something. Metaphors. It's too hard to turn present tense into a pot.
How are we the reader suppose to know that it has happened in the immediate past? Old clay is usually dried out, and new clay is pliable. Anywho, you can add depth in present tense. It takes a little imagination, and extra work. It is like following the character(s) around in real time, and not recounting the events to the reader as a recollection of the same events. So it is still possible to get depth, and is quite similar to past tense that you get more revealed about the character the further you read. Also gives a little more freedom to be unpredictable with the future, because the future hasn't happened yet. Where as in past tense it loses a bit of that unpredictability due to having already happened. Though I think past tense is far easier to write in both third and first POV, while present tense kinda falters in third POV feeling clumsy.
From context. How are we the reader supposed to know that the present tense is in about things happening in the immediate present? It's just a grammatical tense. It can be in the distant past and still be told in present tense. "So I'm three, see, and my Mom says, 'Honey, this is not working for me. You're going to boarding school.' And she packs up my stuff and sends me to full-time--I mean 24-hour full time--preschool. And there's a teacher there that teaches me how to make cocktails. And I'm thinking, 'What is this vodka stuff? Why not use something pretty like creme de menthe?' But I'm getting the best tips for the vodka stuff, so that's what I'm making. I'm making it when I'm three, I'm making it when I'm ten, I'm making it when I open my first real legal bar. And I'm always getting the best tips."
But it hasn't already happened. The choice of grammatical tense does not mean, not one whit more than it means in present tense, that the end of the story happens before the beginning of the telling of that story.
I kinda see what you're saying. To keep to things. Tense has nothing to do with when the story begins and ends. It does affect the events and how they play out inside of it.
@ChickenFreak We think and relay events in three points in time: past, present, future. So by that logic, it would be natural to do the same in written form. Granted I have no idea who writes in future tense, outside of small actions. Ergo past tense happened, and present tense is happening, So following the standard we use on a daily basis, what is relayed in the past is the past, and that of the present is the present, By extension the past does not affect the future, because you can't change what has already happened. The only way that the past can affect the future, is if the past events are not set into motion until a later point in time. A guy thought about going to the store. An hour later he thinks he will put it off until tomorrow. The guy's future has changed because of a choice he made, that was the opposite the one in his past that changed the outcome of the future. Thought-Counter Thought-Variable Outcome While the first two (past and present) are constants, one is choices made, and the other is choices to make. Future is the variable, based upon the choices to make and not on the choices that have been made. Past affects present, present affects future. Without a time machine, that is how linear time works.
Well, no... just because there are three basic time categories doesn't mean there are only three points in time. Something can happen a thousand years ago, a lifetime ago, a second ago... all in the past. Something can happen a second after now, a lifetime after now, or a thousand years after now... all in the future. The present is the only one, I think, that has only one time to it, and of course you can alter that from a present second to a present day to a present era, etc.... And of course the past affects the future... possibly you meant to say the future can't affect the past? I'm really not getting your argument, here. Are you still trying to talk about writing, or getting more philosophical?
@BayView Both. Though I think we can all agree it is hard to convey the immediate past or present in a story. And since time only works in one direction, tense will change the way events play out, because as you said the future can't change what has already happened.
How would you establish it as being the immediate past/present? Only things that come to mind are having to often mention it at random points to keep it where you want it, or have a prologue that ends on the note that it takes place in making mention of the time frame that the events are taking place in within the larger narrative. Not mentioning it at all, and it can be so skewed by the reader that it would vary widely based upon their observation from being a few seconds to a few years (and possibly longer depending on which side of the time spectrum your story is portrayed in). So we can't have others assume to know that you intended it in an immediate on either side.
