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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019m in rather low-key agreement\u2026 agreement rather undermined by the fact that I write in it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other was the weird way that the present tense somehow invites the kind of off-key writing that the past tense doesn\u2019t. In particular, really weird things seem to get personified and made the centre of things. Take this (invented) snippet: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that, I think you\u2019ll agree, is the sort of writing you quite often encounter in first person. And it\u2019s weird. All of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the very first bit: I am running fast<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. The tense there is just as much in the present as the first version, but it\u2019s not waving a banner saying, \u2018Look how very present tense I can be.\u2019 It\u2019s a way \u2013 quietly and neatly \u2013 to transmit the information you want to communicate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then: feet pounding the road<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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, \u2018I need to be immediate and present and descriptive. I need to make the reader feel what it\u2019s like to run on a road at night.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n And OK. I\u2019m all for being immediate and present and descriptive, but just don\u2019t do that in a stupid way \u2013 a way that\u2019s as daft and unnecessary as \u2018I breathe big breaths, using my chest muscles and diaphragm to rapidly inflate both lungs, allowing me to draw oxygen into my surging bloodstream.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Next, we have: Sweat gathers under my T-shirt on this hot night<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This bit is still weird. If you wanted to call attention to your sweat, you\u2019d probably say, \u2018I\u2019m sweaty.\u2019 You\u2019d make yourself the subject of the sentence, not the sweat. And although the \u2018gathers under my T-shirt\u2019 bit isn\u2019t quite as empty and pointless as the feet \u2018pounding the road\u2019 bit was, it\u2019s still very pointless. Sweat isn\u2019t really going to gather above a T-shirt, is it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The same thing can be said of the next bit: dark patches start to appear on my upper chest<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s unlikely that anyone running hard will pause to pull the top of their T-shirt out to see if there\u2019s a dark patch at the neckline. So the point of view character here is someone jumped out of the speaker\u2019s own body \u2013 which is plain nuts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Something else happens here as well. Because the subject is pushed out of their own experience, ordinary descriptive writing seems to vanish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In practice, if you\u2019re running hard down a dark street, a good part of your attention is with your surroundings, not with your T-shirt. So you\u2019d probably say something like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s maybe a little bit fancy, depending on what kind of book you\u2019re writing, but I hope it strikes you as perfectly acceptable. And notice this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n The lessons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, the lessons are to stick with your character\u2019s point of view in a natural way\u2026 which generally does not involve making list of body parts and what they\u2019re doing at any point in time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n