How to write badly

Last week in the happy land of Feedback Friday, we took a look at passages that writers had switched from present to past tense, or vice versa.

A couple of things struck me. One was the number of people saying that they disliked the present tense. Absolutely no one said the opposite. I’m in rather low-key agreement… agreement rather undermined by the fact that I write in it. 

The other was the weird way that the present tense somehow invites the kind of off-key writing that the past tense doesn’t. In particular, really weird things seem to get personified and made the centre of things. Take this (invented) snippet: 

I am running fast, feet pounding the road. Sweat gathers under my T-shirt on this hot night, and dark patches start to appear on my upper chest. 

Now that, I think you’ll agree, is the sort of writing you quite often encounter in first person. And it’s weird. All of it.

Take the very first bit: I am running fast.

That sounds like a Russian trying to speak English and getting muddled with our multiple present tense option. Surely it would be more natural to say, I run fast. The tense there is just as much in the present as the first version, but it’s not waving a banner saying, ‘Look how very present tense I can be.’ It’s a way – quietly and neatly – to transmit the information you want to communicate. 

And then: feet pounding the road.

Assuming that you are on a road to start with, I challenge you to run in any way other than one that involves feet pounding road. You can’t do it. This is empty, pointless text. But somehow people writing in the present feel the need to add things like this. I think the impulse is something like, ‘I need to be immediate and present and descriptive. I need to make the reader feel what it’s like to run on a road at night.’

And OK. I’m all for being immediate and present and descriptive, but just don’t do that in a stupid way – a way that’s as daft and unnecessary as ‘I breathe big breaths, using my chest muscles and diaphragm to rapidly inflate both lungs, allowing me to draw oxygen into my surging bloodstream.’ 

Next, we have: Sweat gathers under my T-shirt on this hot night.

This bit is still weird. If you wanted to call attention to your sweat, you’d probably say, ‘I’m sweaty.’ You’d make yourself the subject of the sentence, not the sweat. And although the ‘gathers under my T-shirt’ bit isn’t quite as empty and pointless as the feet ‘pounding the road’ bit was, it’s still very pointless. Sweat isn’t really going to gather above a T-shirt, is it? 

The same thing can be said of the next bit: dark patches start to appear on my upper chest. 

Again, the speaker is not the subject. The speaker seems to have been pushed out of their own experience, in favour of body parts, sweat and T-shirts. As a matter of fact, it’s unlikely that anyone running hard will pause to pull the top of their T-shirt out to see if there’s a dark patch at the neckline. So the point of view character here is someone jumped out of the speaker’s own body – which is plain nuts. 

Something else happens here as well. Because the subject is pushed out of their own experience, ordinary descriptive writing seems to vanish. 

In practice, if you’re running hard down a dark street, a good part of your attention is with your surroundings, not with your T-shirt. So you’d probably say something like:

The road is lit by dim orange streetlamps that seem only to thicken the shadows. The sea, to my left, is visible only as an uneasy grey restlessness, an animal moving out of sight.

That’s maybe a little bit fancy, depending on what kind of book you’re writing, but I hope it strikes you as perfectly acceptable. And notice this: 

1. You didn’t even notice what tense it’s written in. It doesn’t matter. 
2. The subjects of these sentences are the road, the lamps and the sea – all of which are inanimate, none of which are the narrator, and none of which have anything to do with body parts.
3. And yet – because the narrator is seeing these things, experiencing them as he/she runs, because they’re a natural part of the narrator’s own viewpoint – these sentences actually stick more closely to the narrator’s point of view than all those sentences about road pounding and sweat ever could.

The lessons?

Well, the lessons are to stick with your character’s point of view in a natural way… which generally does not involve making list of body parts and what they’re doing at any point in time. 

And yes: that lesson has nothing at all to do with the present tense itself. The present tense is an innocent bystander, a spectator at the drive-by shooting. The real culprit is weird writing; people suddenly deciding that they have to write weirdly, just because they’re writing in the present. So don’t. Just write normally, and in whatever tense you choose. 

Here’s our original passage in a perfectly acceptable present tense:

I run as hard as I can. The road is lit by dim orange streetlamps that seem only to thicken the shadows. The sea, to my left, is visible only as an uneasy grey restlessness, an animal moving out of sight. I’m running hard, but at a pace that I think I can keep up, till the road ends and the I reach the shelter of the dunes.

And there we go. No weirdness. All present tense. All perfectly centred on the character’s own experience.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY // Body parts

Find a chunk of text that has too many body part / clothing / sighing-nodding-shaking-panting type references. Then rewrite it in a way that doesn’t make me want to rip my own teeth out.

Let’s see before and after, please. Max 250 words each passage. As always, please give us title, genre and any context we might need. When you’re ready, post your work here.

If your writing is already perfect, then give yourself a spoonful of salted caramel ice cream and take the week off. 

Til soon. 

Harry