Is present tense taking over?
Short post today, since this past week has been a bit chaotic for me—but in a good way. The phone has been ringing off the hook (finally) with job opportunities, interviews, and even one offer. Then there was my birthday, I screamed myself hoarse at the MSU vs. Notre Dame game, and I’m on week three on the cold from hell, so instead of the long post about Banned Books weeks I’d been mulling over, all I have is this question: Has present tense narration taken over fiction? Philip Pullman seems to think so. And, if so (okay, I can’t really stop at one question), is it really such a bad thing? And is there a difference, say, in a present tense prevalence in novel length fiction as opposed to the short story?
Tags: books, present tesne
Great question. Might have to expand into more coherent thoughts about the subject, but the short answer is, yes, I do think it’s a bad thing.
Form is meaning, both in fiction and in poetry. What does the flattening of time suggest? A disinterest in the past? A lack of narrative distance and control? (or interest in either)? In the Pullman piece, there is a suggestion about present tense being used to create vividness. In my classes, I think students use present tense to create a sense of immediacy. But it tends to ring hollow. Maybe, though, the point here is to make sure as writers we think about why we use present tense. Right or wrong, okay, argumentative. Often, however, present tense reads as a default choice that hasn’t really been given careful consideration.
It makes me wonder, though, where this prevalence comes from. Verbal storytelling is traditionally past, no? So why is it that so many new (and especially young) writers lean toward the present?
That said, I think there is a place for it, and I think there are stories that demand it, but I’m with you in that a writer absolutely needs to understand and be able to articulate that choice.
I read a book recently that was first person present, and after reading the first line I was so disappointed, but after only a page or two the tense became all but invisible, and when I made myself see it again, the choice made sense not just for the plot, but also for the character. I could tell the author had real reasons for her decision.
Depends on the verbal storytelling. Creation myths, sure, past tense. But what happens when you’re telling a story about the meter maid ticketing you last week? You start in past tense (“The other day, I was blah blah when”) and end up in present tense (“So I say to the lady…”).
Maybe we tend toward present tense now, maybe it is taking over. Students use it for immediacy and uncertainty (not even the narrator knows the outcome)–maybe that is a reflection of our current, post-1960 nationstate.
…To really know the answer if the present tense has taken over, we’d have to run at least six million words of New York Times text to check on the claim, right?
[...] I came across a quick post on The Bark, the energetic blog of Willow Springs. Kathryn Houghton posted briefly about Philip Pullman’s [...]
Yeah, had to do it: expand it into a TMR blog post. So, Kathryn, gracias for the inspiration!
@Kathryn: I guess my feeling about present tense is that, generally, it doesn’t seem to be a careful choice but a default. It can work, like anything in fiction, but I’m often cautious with those stories.
@Amaris: I’d argue verbal storytelling, the anecdote, works differently than the story on the page. No real worked-on thoughts here, just my sense of it.
No, I thank you for taking the time to dig deeper into something that I flat out admitted I didn’t have the time (or wasn’t going to take the time) to explore too deeply.
I think maybe why a lot of writers choose it, consciously or otherwise, might be because its immediacy can lend itself to simplicity. It can be an easy form for a writer to move forward but it can often also get repetitive for the reader. But now I’m curious to go and read these books mentioned in the article to see if they are able to make the tense work, because without having read them, I wonder how much I’m judging works I haven’t read based on those I have. If any of that makes sense. I meant to be in bed a long time ago.
This may be a generality, but I think the stories that work best in the first person present tense have a sense of past instilled into them, or in other words, don’t stick to present tense but shift between the two. I’m trying to think of an example off the top of my head and one, in novel form, that comes to mind is White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. The narrator functions in the present tense laying his story out as a series of letters to the Chinese Prime Minister, but his ruminations drift back into the past in order to bring us up to speed on why he is the way he is in the present, and this device works well in this particular context.
I think keeping the story entirely in the present without offering a sense of how past actions form character and that character’s choices seem set up to fail, but from Micahel’s comments and the MR blog, I think there’s a difference in discussing use of present tense in student writing vs. discussing it in polished, professional writing. You can see a student’s choice as laziness or you can see it as experimenting and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. With polished, professional, published writing, we should probably enter the discussion assuming they made the choice of present tense consciously and from there question, why? and does it work?
@Jason: For me, stories that work best in present-tense have a quality of being circular, repetitive – Porter’s “Flowering Judas” springs to mind, where the present tense conveys the character’s state of being. The narrative choice fits the character; the choice has meaning to the form.
You’re right: a student’s usage and a “professional’s” usage might be for wholly different reasons. But that doesn’t mean the writer’s underlying assumptions, understood or not, are all that different. Ultimately, as you pointed out, the question “Does it work?” is really all that matters: the book is awesome or it isn’t.
I’ve noticed a seemingly endless number of TV commercials lately that only use present tense when they are intended for past tense. I used to wonder if this was some unknown sadistic intent by the advertising industry. However, after listening to the latest generation of students over some period of time, I’ve come to the conclusion that a large number of young people (in particular) do not seem to really know the difference between past and present tense. (Examples: “So, I go into the store and see this….”, or “I get a call from….”). Am I the only one that notices or cares about this? Maybe I’m just too old.