‘Here’ is to indicate your location is in the proximity of something or somebody. ‘There’ indicates your location of something or someone is away from you. The question is what relation adverbs have with tense and is there a rule? Several years ago, I had a beta reader change a narrative line in one of my novels. It was written first person past. “I stopped and reflected on all that I went through to get here.” He replaced ‘here’ with ‘there’ saying in the past tense she would be getting there. I had been writing long enough by then. I knew that wasn’t right, so I did my thing and ignored his change. Later and more than a couple of times, I have seen the use of adverbs in a tense form. It makes sense when someone writes—past first, “I stood there waiting...” And this is the conundrum for me. You wouldn’t say “I stood here waiting…” In my years of beta reading, I have come across the significance of discerning between someone being over 'there' or right 'here.' And I would make suggestions for a change. There's one scenario that comes to mind, although not too clearly, where two characters were in different spots in the story—one on the porch and the other in the yard—and the writer used 'there' for both. Something like… He saw Bob there next to him and he motioned for Tom, who was still there. My suggestion was that the individual on the porch was here, and the one in the yard was there. It could be written; Bob was 'here' next to him and he motioned for Tom, who was still 'there.' If we overlook the poor sentence structure and focus on the misuse—if any—of 'here' and 'there.'
I tend to agree that the proper way to write this is: I stopped and reflected on all that I went through to get there. The place, being in the past, is now away from the narrator and the audience.
Oh my gosh, I didn't realize the narrator would be a different element in first person. I have to rethink of the times I struggled with this. Speaking of 'this' I ran into a similar issue with the pronouns this and that. Where my character spoke in the narrative of first person past. ‘I took a deep breath of sea air and thought how happy I was to finally get to this island.’ The edit was to change it to ‘that island’. To me, if she was standing on the island, it seems it would not be that island. So.... I guess the same thing applies. Just when I thought I knew some things.
Yeah, you've got four dimensions in play for certain sentence constructions, where "here" is also defined by the moment in time. But not always. And first person screws everything up because it locates the narrator in a specific place and time. And even that slides across a spectrum depending on whether it's narrating current events or past events, which can both occur in the same sentence. Reason #4080 why I don't write in first.
At first glance, "there" looked wrong to me, but let's say you replace it with something else - would you write: I reflected on how I had gotten to where I am. or I reflected on how I had gotten to where I was. ? In this case, I think past perfect is more correct, since the process of getting there is complete.
Thanks all, I truly did not know that. So the two characters, one on the porch next to our MC and the other over by the cars, would you refer to them both as there? Maybe not in the same sentence as I hurriedly put together, but and any instance is the character next to you right there or right here. Or maybe back to my original question: would you ever use 'here' in a first person past narrative?
I would refer to one of them as being "right there next to me" and the other one as being "over by the cars".
Thank you @Thundair, you bring up a subtle point that I hadn't really considered in my own writing. Food for thought.
To risk echoing w. bogart's post, thank you all. I wasn't aware of how "here" differs from "there" when considered through the medium of time. ... and to digress slightly, the title of this thread also reminded me of this legendary song.
Sure, but it depends on what you're talking about, the context of the event, and the antecedental vibe of the sentence. "Dave left his sunglasses here yesterday." "The Beatles played here in 1965." This actually came up yesterday with my mom talking about the upcoming Thanksgiving. She was at my house talking about how my sister, who lives in Canada, will not be "here" for Thanksgiving this year. My mother was sitting in my living room, but "here" meant her house where we host, not mine. That is understood because with my sister living in another country, "here" means in the US, regardless of house. But if we talking about one of my uncles who lives down the road, she probably would have said Uncle Bobby won't be "there" for Thanksgiving this year when she's sitting in my house, but "here" if were sitting in hers. The thing with past tense is that it doesn't necessarily refer to the "ago." There's probably some technical bullshit about this somewhere, like the "past" can mean a nanosecond ago, but you see plenty of past tense first person stories that narrate the events as if they were happening currently. And like I said, "here" and "there" can refer to a location as it has always existed or a location as it existed in a moment of time. Your first person past narrator could be narrating a car chase as they participate, or retelling events that happened to them fifty years after the fact. And then in the process of the narrative, the voice could swing between the events as they happened or to the narrator recounting them to their grandkids sitting in their lap. If you start flipping "this" and "that" and "here" and "there" too much in that spectrum it's going to look weird. My advice for this and all the other vague syntax rules that depend on context is to write around them by making different word choices and sentence structures like @Naomasa298 mentioned earlier.
Yeah, I think I got hung up looking for a rule instead of what was appropriate. I guess my background as an aerospace engineering checker pushes me to a rule-driven application.
Haha, yeah. Best bet in my opinion is write around the gray areas. There was another thread not too long ago with a similar vague/rules-y grammar question. Somebody checked a style guide for an answer and it basically said, "Well, you could go this way or you could go that way but we recommend writing the sentence differently to avoid the shit in the first place." Sage advice.
With a past tense narrator, "here" or "there" place him in a certain time frame. This line puts the narrator in the present day, looking back. “I stopped and reflected on all that I went through to get there.” And your original leaves the narrator back in the present moment of the story. “I stopped and reflected on all that I went through to get here.” Your reader was forcing everything to simple past tense with your narrator looking back from today at all the events of yesterday. It's a cool device. I'm reminded of the old "club stories" where you have an older guy and his pals at a parlor, smoking cigars and drinking, and he recounts some grand, impossible adventure. I love that old style. . . But in fiction you also have literary past tense, and that treats the events as if they're happening as they're described. Even though the verb tenses are in the past, to the narrator everything happens in the moment. So in literary past tense it would be okay to have a narrator say: "He reflected on how he got here." Or, "I reflected . . . here." Same thing. That approach wouldn't work in a club story though. In literary past tense, your narrator has to stay back in the story's moment. He sort of floats about like a ghost and describes everything in past tense, but the other descriptions are about the immediate time and locale. (Here, today, this, etc.) So I guess I agree with you and disagree with your reader. They weren't really wrong, but the change wasn't necessary. You'd just have to be consistent and make sure that the narrator stayed in the moment of the story and never jumped to the present day.
I think your beta reader’s suggestions came from a misunderstanding of the past tense perspective In a first-person narrative ‘here’ lets you amplify the reader's connection to the described moment. Using ‘here’ in your example highlights the character's journey and current state, which is about keeping that emotional resonance with the reader
