
Make it now: the rise of the present tense in fiction (2015) - benbreen
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/21/rise-of-the-present-tense-in-fiction-hilary-mantel
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klodolph
Some people have pretty strong opinions about this but in casual conversation
you’ll naturally use either past tense _or_ present tense to tell stories set
in the past.

Try and explain the rules for when to use past tense and you’ll find that
those rules are a difficult to formulate or articulate.

The weird thing is that apparently, using present tense is something that new
writers gravitate towards. Kind of like how new composers and musicians
gravitating towards modes and chord progressions.

~~~
mola
the novel is a different medium than casual conversation, it has proven to be
much more sophisticated. For example, you can have multiple narrators,
diagetic and non diagetic. Etc.

If we expect novels to mimic nothing more than casual conversation, we lose a
whole depth of creativity. While us readers lose sense making tools.

I believe new writers are gravitated towards present tense mainly because
their cultural world is in present tense. I bet they are exposed to twitts,
blogs, films, TV, etc much more than to novels.

So I believe they adopt the style of these media, because of naturalization
via immersion. Even in the article, most answers of writers to why present
tense, are 'it just happened' and then rationalized.

For me, it is another proof of the "medium is the message" theory. I believe
we are losing thought technology.

~~~
wyattpeak
You know what will really lose us a whole depth of creativity?

Prescribing that novels should only be written in a particular manner.

~~~
kovek
Yes, when there’s a new way of doing things, we can’t think everyone will
shift to that. It’s very often that the distribution shifts somewhat. Let’s
say we introduce a new color (haha), and it rises in popularity, then we
shouldn’t be fearing that everyone is going to adopt the new color as their
favorite. The distribution is changing.

We should really recognize that individuals have valid feelings and thoughts
for whatever they gravitate towards.

So, present tense, let’s do it I’m interested! However, we won’t lose the past
tense.

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danpampelon2
First person present tense is on the rise, but third person present tense? One
solid example I know of is the Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's "Books of
Jacob". And even there it is justified from the very prologue as everything
there is POV of a person who dies or falls into a comatose trance, be it real
or magical, I don't want to spoil you.

~~~
kibwen
That's a good point, the best argument that the OP gives for present tense is
that it removes the idea of there being an invisible narrator who is
physically removed from these events and characters, which feels true for
first-person present tense, but third-person present tense feels like a voyeur
who watches but never engages, which doesn't feel like any interesting
distinction from the typical third-person past tense narrator.

(The reason why I like third-person past tense is that I like to imagine that
I as a reader am not just reading the book for myself, but reciting the book
to someone else as a form of active storytelling. I don't find the "invisible
future narrator" to be a problem because to me, that's me! But maybe that's
just, er, me.)

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I don't buy any of this - for myself at least. Tense (mis)used like this is
like talking about the colour of the paper - "we used green for this section
because it shows they're in a meadow".

Reading is far too high-level an interpretation to be affected by tenses
except where the tense is part of the story.

When I read I don't see words, it's much more like a cinema playing in my
head, and I'm watching. It's a process of filtering (discarding), synthesising
and reconstructing. You might as well play with font size or typeface - it
won't make a whit of difference to me in the end because it's low level stuff
that gets discarded.

------
tunesmith
It's also something that beginning writers fall into... I run a creative
writing site that is for groups of authors to write collective branching
fiction together. It's like choose-your-own-adventure but with a slightly more
literary focus, where choices are about character and plot choices, rather
than just like dungeon exploration. As part of that we encourage third-person
past tense, but it's interesting how frequent it is that a new author will
come in write their first couple of chapters in present tense - even if the
chapters they are following up on are in past tense.

~~~
phoe-krk
What is the site? What kind of software do you use for that?

~~~
tunesmith
It's called storysprawl, the site is private now and has been off-and-on
dormant and active for the last 25 years. More active now because of COVID.
We've got around 1000 chapters written across 20-30 stories. It started out
perl/gdbm, then php/mysql. More recently it has a smattering of react thrown
in (particularly for graphically mapping the stories) and I'm rewriting the
backend in scala/play. The tech has generally tracked my career I guess. :)

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throwaway_pdp09
I read a book where the author I generally liked (Phil Rickman, I really
recommend December [https://www.amazon.co.uk/December-Phil-Rickman-
Standalone/dp...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/December-Phil-Rickman-
Standalone/dp/0857896954)) used past tense but for a new book switched to
present. It really jarred and I had to make several restarts before I got into
it, and that only happened because my brain learned to discard the tense
(edit: several retries over a period of days; it wasn't quick).

I guess the theory is it makes it more dynamic, now-ish. In fact it just seems
a trivial affectation that ultimately adds nothing.

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BrandoElFollito
French perspective.

When I was a kid at school in the 80's, we were told to use the whole palette
of past tenses and their relationships.

Fast forward to today, same age and same school and they are told to use
mostly present for narration. The past tenses coordination is almost not
taught anymore.

I do not know whether this is a good thing or not as many of these tests are
useless and basically unused. When they are used, they are usually used (and
written) wrong anyway.

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KineticLensman
For some variety, how about fiction written in the second person - as in "You
Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages ..."

One such novel is Halting State by Charles Stross [0], which appropriately
enough includes a cyber crime that takes place in a MMORPG setting.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State)

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1propionyl
A surge in the popularity of present tense also accompanied literary modernism
a century ago. I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't draw any
comparisons or contrasts.

At the least, the title suggests that this parallel was in the author's head.
"Make it now" is a riff on Ezra Pound's maxim "make it new".

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InfiniteRand
I’m not a particular fan of this, but there is a long tradition of the
historical present tense (correct me if this article is talking about
something different). I don’t know the details of its development but I first
encountered it in Latin class, so it was at least being used with the Romans

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Pxtl
I always thought that was an important standout feature of Snow Crash, which
iirc did it by accident because it was originally going to be a comic book and
present tense is common in comics.

------
sasaf5
For an interesting mix of tenses, I suggest "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang. It
has two chapters in the past tense and one in the present tense, all by
different narrators.

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ezoe
As a native speaker of a language which doesn't strictly use tense, I don't
see why some languages are so strict about it. It's obvious from the context.

~~~
skrebbel
Can you elaborate? I can't wrap my mind around the idea of not having tense.

Are you saying that "I walk" and "I walked" are the same? How about "I'm
walking" vs "I've walked"?

~~~
KineticLensman
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseless_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseless_language)

> Tenseless languages can and do refer to time, but they do so using lexical
> items such as adverbs or verbs, or by using combinations of aspect, and
> mood, and words that establish time reference

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amayne
I picked up the style after seeing Suzanne Collins use it so wonderfully in
the Hunger Games.

Now I write this way almost exclusively for all my books.

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statictype
The earliest I saw this was in Neal Stephenson’s earlier work and I found the
style to be really interesting and engaging.

~~~
R0b0t1
I was taught to always write present tense for this reason. There's stories
that consistently use past tense?

~~~
Tycho
Almost all English language fiction is written in past tense...

~~~
R0b0t1
Doesn't mean they're right. When did that happen? I had 3 classes on this, and
they stressed use of present tense for writing regardless of use along with
some other guidelines.

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garmaine
...this isn’t normal? All the fiction I read has always been present tense.

~~~
amayne
It's very common in YA, but was extremely rare a decade ago.

~~~
garmaine
I don’t read any YA. It’s mostly classic sci-fi, and some detective stories
and occasional political thriller here and there. Maybe I just wasn’t paying
attention, but the only time I recall past tense stories is when a character
is describing something that happened off-scene. Narration is always present
tense.

I can think of a handful of exceptions where the whole story itself is
narrated from the perspective of someone telling a story, but those are
notable exceptions for having a weird narrative gimmick (e.g. the excellent
but dated Icehenge is written in the past tense because it consists of
personal diary entries).

~~~
amayne
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc., almost exclusively wrote in the past tense.
Did you mean a past tense framing device instead?

~~~
garmaine
Yes, I thought the article (which I only skimmed) was talking about framing
devices. That's what "the story is told in past tense" means to me. I guess I
don't really pay attention to tense, because I just opened a Clarke on my
bedside table, and the verbs are past tense. Thanks for the correction.

~~~
amayne
This reminds me of how I go through a lot of trouble to pick a seat in a movie
theater, but after it’s over and if I really enjoyed it, I couldn’t tell you
if I sat in the front or off to the side.

Good storytelling just pulls you in. Our brain fills in the rest.

------
smitty1e
Go ahead. Try it out.

Use present tense in email.

Crisp as a haiku.

~~~
gjm11
Most of my emails / are already present-tense -- / so nothing would change.

(Pedantic note: of course neither of these is actually a haiku, which means
more than just 5-7-5 syllable count. I did manage a kinda-sorta-kireji,
though.)

------
Grakel
Makes me think I should start writing in future tense to get ahead of the
game.

~~~
kibwen
This will have made me think that I should have started writing in future
perfect tense to have gotten even further ahead of the game.

~~~
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