Getting fed up with present-tense writing

[Randy M.]

I'm not fond of present tense -- as an earlier post suggested it creates, for me, the image of the narrator typing as they walk, talk, or do anything else. Still, like 2nd person narration or other less used approaches, I imagine it presents an irresistible aesthetic challenge for some writers.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Surely the suspension of disbelief required to accept that the narrator is somehow communicating (it need not be by typing it out) their experiences as they happen directly to the reader is no more than that we customarily extend to the idea that a first person past tense narrator can remember in such detail conversations and events years after they occurred ... or to the idea of an omniscient narrator, which is a big leap we are accustomed to make without even thinking about it.

If we were as accustomed to first person present tense narratives, wouldn't we unthinkingly make that same leap without even thinking about it?

 

[Extollager]

I wonder if an effect of the current fashion for present tense writing, if it persists, will not be that readers who grow up on it will find past-tense writing puts them off. Along with whatever other difficulties they might have in reading, say, Jane Austen, they will not be able to bear her use of past tense narration?

As a (retired) English teacher, I've found it interesting to consider the effect as if there were a conspiracy of writers and teachers, etc., to make the past (for the young) an unappealing foreign country. The amount of older literature that they read declines at the same time that the language changes rapidly. Even the current no-no about using Man as the name of the species, and man as a word for members of either sex ("a man never knows what his real priorities are till he is put to the test" really means "no one knows what his or her real priorities are till he or she is put to the test"), means that the ways of writing that were ordinary, before the past few decades, will seem strange, old-fashioned, unappealing to many. (I suppose some readers are put off by Virginia Woolf's "sexism"!)

So now the use of present-tense narration, short sentences, lots of dialogue, the avoidance of so-called info dumps, and so on, will tend to make a great deal of earlier literature alien to emerging readers. I wish lots of teachers would make it a priority to have their students read widely outside our own time, so that they will be better able to venture outside our little temporal province -- for it's a sad irony that the same era, our own, that has often recommended multiculturalism, i.e. getting outside one's spatial provincialism, encourages temporal provincialism.

 

[Snicklefritz]

I wonder if an effect of the current fashion for present tense writing, if it persists, will not be that readers who grow up on it will find past-tense writing puts them off. Along with whatever other difficulties they might have in reading, say, Jane Austen, they will not be able to bear her use of past tense narration?

As a (retired) English teacher, I've found it interesting to consider the effect as if there were a conspiracy of writers and teachers, etc., to make the past (for the young) an unappealing foreign country. The amount of older literature that they read declines at the same time that the language changes rapidly. Even the current no-no about using Man as the name of the species, and man as a word for members of either sex ("a man never knows what his real priorities are till he is put to the test" really means "no one knows what his or her real priorities are till he or she is put to the test"), means that the ways of writing that were ordinary, before the past few decades, will seem strange, old-fashioned, unappealing to many. (I suppose some readers are put off by Virginia Woolf's "sexism"!)

So now the use of present-tense narration, short sentences, lots of dialogue, the avoidance of so-called info dumps, and so on, will tend to make a great deal of earlier literature alien to emerging readers. I wish lots of teachers would make it a priority to have their students read widely outside our own time, so that they will be better able to venture outside our little temporal province -- for it's a sad irony that the same era, our own, that has often recommended multiculturalism, i.e. getting outside one's spatial provincialism, encourages temporal provincialism.

I still remember Beowulf in the original as an adventure.

 

[Randy M.]

If we were as accustomed to first person present tense narratives, wouldn't we unthinkingly make that same leap without even thinking about it?

Probably ...

Surely the suspension of disbelief required to accept that the narrator is somehow communicating (it need not be by typing it out) their experiences as they happen directly to the reader is no more than that we customarily extend to the idea that a first person past tense narrator can remember in such detail conversations and events years after they occurred ... or to the idea of an omniscient narrator, which is a big leap we are accustomed to make without even thinking about it.

... although some of this is just the allowance the reader makes for getting the story told at all. (Which is one of the reasons I grin when someone objects to things like FTL in s.f. Is the story otherwise legitimate? Could it have been told without FTL?)

But I do take your point. It becomes part of the reader's habit to gloss over some logical objections in order to let the story proceed.

 

[The Big Peat]

I would gently suggest that we are nowhere near a ratio of present tense to past tense in YA fiction, new fiction, fiction for the young, and so on that we should be worrying about them being unable to read past tense. There are undoubtedly changes that will make it harder for people to connect to their literary heritage - that's just life - but that one seems quite a way off.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Well, I don't know. It seems like a majority of the new YA fiction that I end up reading is told in the present tense, but that is purely anecdotal evidence of course, and who knows what it is worth?

But I think one of the reasons why present tense first person narration was able to appeal to more young readers than to older readers is because the young readers were not yet so set in their ways, and were more open to something different. In fact, the YA fantasy and science fiction being published today is in many ways more willing to explore new ideas and settings, and different sorts of characters, than I see in adult SFF. Again, anecdotal evidence, but I think worth considering at least. And where the adult SFF is more daring in its choices, I notice the writers themselves are very often rather young (in their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties)--in other words, the same people who were probably reading a fairly steady diet of YA fiction ten or fifteen years ago.

So it may not be the new young readers and writers coming up who are more likely to be provincial in their tastes, but in fact members of our own generation(s) (I add the plural because the members of this site represent so many different age groups).

Jane Austen was mentioned up above, and I present the great surge in her popularity during the late 20th and early 21st century, with readers and cinema-goers as evidence that this may be true. (Although even back in the 70s and 80s she did have a surprising number of fans in the SFF reading community.)

 

[HareBrain]

Well, I don't know. It seems like a majority of the new YA fiction that I end up reading is told in the present tense, but that is purely anecdotal evidence of course, and who knows what it is worth?

But even if this is true of newly published YA generally (and I suspect it is), it probably won't be enough to make young readers shun past-tense writing. I think that was Peat's point. Before we need worry about that, I think there would have to be a large-scale shift to present tense in the way young people relate their own experiences in conversations and in social media posts etc, and I really can't see that happening. If some older readers shun present tense, it's because they're not familiar with it in any narrative form, not just in written fiction. Everyone is familiar with the past tense just from talking about their day.

 

[Extollager]

"So it may not be the new young readers and writers coming up who are more likely to be provincial in their tastes, but in fact members of our own generation(s) (I add the plural because the members of this site represent so many different age groups)."

Teresa, the "provincialism" I worry about was "temporal provincialism," which one sees when people won't or even can't read anything that's more than a few decades old.

I saw this develop in higher education. Anecdotal: I created a Literature of the Non-Western World course for my very small state university. When I taught it, the students got at least some exposure to the Mahabharata, they read Arthur Waley's retelling of Wu Ch'Eng-En's Journey to the West (i.e. they read Monkey), they read Japanese folktales as retold by Lafcadio Hearn, etc. -- as well, to be sure, as 20th-century works. The department hired a new professor upon the departure of a predecessor. I was really impressed by her having taught in China, etc.; though I liked teaching LNWW, I offered the course to her. Well, it was her course, no strings attached. But the impression I have is that she taught it basically just as a "multiculti" course in which all of the works were recent -- maybe The Kite Runner and so on. So the course had become temporally, or chronologically, provincial.

In my view, students, especially English majors, really need to read a lot of early literature. I would be pretty receptive to the idea that they should read anything after, say, Ulysses on their own, not in their courses. Do they really need to study, say, Byatt or Amis (either one) or McEwan or Grace Paley or Cormac McCarthy in college, if that means they do not read much from (say) the 17th century? I myself am a case in point; basically I never read Milton in college, had to study him on my own (also his fellow 17th-century authors Browne, Bunyan, &c.) I was in college in the 70s and 80s. This sort of thing has only gotten worse, so far as I can tell, since then. Anecdotal: my little college hosted a "conference" on "early British literature" a few years ago. (I have mentioned this before, here at Chrons.) Now I would take "early English literature" to be, you know, Beowulf, "The Dream of the Rood," Chaucer, Sir Gawain, maybe Malory. But from what I saw "early" could include even, say, D. H. Lawrence (!? -- died 1930). Memory might be deceiving me -- is that really possible? Lawrence? But you get my drift.

That's what I'm getting at about temporal or chronological provincialism. Sf is a special case because, really, the genre hardly gets going till the late 1800s.

Some of what I've written here is something of a digression from the topic we were discussing, about present tense narration. Anyway: the habitual and pervasive use of present tense narration is a very recent thing. If that becomes the norm for young readers, if that's what they expect most imaginative literature to be like, then the great majority of literature in English, which is not written in present tense,* is likely to become that much more alien. We shall have readers who know the airports of Amsterdam and New York, Beijing and Saigon, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, but are terribly provincial as readers.

*I have the impression also that more and more readers struggle with, say, The Lord of the Rings -- they find their minds wander during the "walking bits" and so on. Now why would that be a problem?

 

[Extollager]

Harebrain: "I think that was Peat's point. Before we need worry about that, I think there would have to be a large-scale shift to present tense in the way young people relate their own experiences in conversations and in social media posts etc, and I really can't see that happening."

No? Hasn't it?

"So I'm sitting at my desk and this guy comes over and says, 'Can I borrow your notes from yesterday's class?' And I'm like, 'Who are you?'"

Is that a caricature with insufficient in reality?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

"So I'm sitting at my desk and this guy comes over and says, 'Can I borrow your notes from yesterday's class?' And I'm like, 'Who are you?'"

Is that a caricature with insufficient in reality?

It's quite accurate, but young people were talking in just that way 40 or 50 years ago, as I remember it. And it had nothing to do with the books they were reading, since those most likely to speak that way did little or no reading outside of what they were assigned to read (and not always even that).

As for what Peat said about present tense taking over so that young readers won't read anything else, I wasn't contradicting him. Actually, I was basically agreeing with him (that it won't happen), but adding that instead of reading either past or present tense exclusively young readers (in a few decades to become middle-aged and eventually old readers) are likely to be open to both, as well as to a variety of fresh settings and viewpoint characters.

Unlike Extollager, I don't see this as leading to "temporal provincialism." Writers like Austen and Dickens will still be read and enjoyed. But it is natural that, as there are more and more books available to be read (we can thank—or condemn, depending on the quality of some of the works on offer— ebooks for that), some works by older writers will undoubtedly fall by the wayside, but at the same time some that had fallen into obscurity, only to be encountered on the dusty back shelves in used-book stores by those already looking for them (that would have been me, looking for works by writers like Vernon Lee or Fitz-James O'Brien a couple of decades ago), with the ready availability of new editions (again thanks to ebooks) may enjoy a revival of interest among readers.

Whether readers come upon these books as assigned reading in high school or college, or searching for new books to read on their own (I will note that not everybody has had the privilege of a full college education, and not all those who didn't are cultural yahoos), I don't think it matters so much, so long as the books are still being read and discussed.

Of course we all have our own perspectives on this based on our own experiences, Extollager (for instance) as a teacher, and me (for instance) as one who is mostly self-taught.

 

[The Big Peat]

My anecdotal evidence is that most of the YA/YA adjacent stuff I read is very set in established boundaries and in past tense, and most of the interesting boundary pushing stuff I see is in the adult category from authors of a group of age ranges but mostly trending older.

But, again, anecdote.

I think my point though would be that the amount of present tense fiction needed to be consumed for it to be such a baseline that past tense is a fingernails against the chalkboard experience is it nears to be near total. Not just a majority, but pretty much everything. And that seems miles away even from the most present tense loaded experiences, particularly when most YA readers I've met are usually reading from the adult shelves pretty early.



I also think most demographics can be accused of provincialism these days.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Our opposite experiences may be a reflection of the particular authors and/or sub-genres we personally tend to be drawn to.

 

[Ursa major]

I find the idea that the mere use of a different tense could be thought responsible to put people in general** right off what must be many tens of thousands of books and/or risk, if they read and like those books, put people in general off a whole swathe of other books. Are most people really that affected by the tenses being used?

The only situation where I find present tense really calling attention to itself (and thus increasing the distance between me and the "story") is when the historical present is being used, something that still seems to me (after many years/decades of reading/listening to people deploying it) to be a silly, not to say "arch", solution to a supposed*** problem (the time gap between the past being described/discussed and the present, and how that may affect immediacy) that just draws attention to that gap, and the lack of immediacy. Even so, I will still read/listen to something in the historical past tense. (Why wouldn't I if that's the tense it happens to be in?)

(Note that the historical present is also used in reports about recent games of football (soccer for those in the US).)



** - Obviously, there will be some for whom using this or that tense may be a problem -- we seem to be getting a few examples of it in this thread (and that's fine, as far as I'm concerned) -- but could it really be a problem for the vast majority, who may not even take much notice of the tense being used?

*** - Oddly enough, if I'm discovering something about an incident in, say, the twelfth century, I tend to realise that it occurred many centuries ago, and that I can be fully engaged with it without any need for immediacy.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I’m with Ursa. I’ll read anything if it’s well written and it engages me. And I’ll write anything in the format that feels right for it.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Well, what's really been bugging me about More Recent story telling, and another one of the primary reasons I am, and have been allowing my long held subscriptions to several SF and F Mags lapse; I can't even google up a descriptive name of the grammatical intent.

A technique which seems to have been escalating over the last half-dozen years.

"You wake up this morning. You go to the Fridge and you grab yourself a beer. Then you go to the Roadhouse and you see all hell break loose, as you are beset by Flying Monkeys and you wonder why the narrator is addressing you directly."

No, I, the reader, am not ,in fact, doing any of this stuff; the narrator is the narrator and the narrator is supposed to be telling me a story about, either itself, or something else, thank you.

Leave, me, the reader, comfortably at home in bed.

 

[HareBrain]

The only situation where I find present tense really calling attention to itself (and thus increasing the distance between me and the "story") is when the historical present is being used, something that still seems to me (after many years/decades of reading/listening to people deploying it) to be a silly, not to say "arch", solution to a supposed*** problem

This really bugs me too in discussions about history, mostly because when the speaker switches to talking about present day equivalents etc, the tense doesn't change! Yes, you can infer the switch in time period, but why should anyone have to when language has already provided a neat solution?