Please don't all talk at once...
Musing today while attempting to write (actually to rewrite - for the fourth time) a piece of narrative involving movement, dialogue, limbs, clothing, mead, getting up, falling down, hurling things across the room, and so on and so forth. Just an ordinary day in the Longhouse, in other words. But two things occured to me as I wrestled with points of view, pronouns, tenses...
Firstly, writing has the huge disadvantage of being a linear medium. You can only write or read one word at a time. So if there are several things happening at once, which you could capture in a photograph or a video clip or a sound recording, they have to be unravelled into a single sequence for the purposes of description. Well, I guess you can have two or more sequences and interleave them (although this can be very confusing) and you can cheat a bit by linking the ideas together so the text refers back and forth within itself and builds up some extra layers... but essentially it has to be 'this happens and that happens and then the other happens, or at any rate you notice that the other happened several minutes ago while that was going on...' And if people are talking all at once, you have to make editorial decisions as to whose words will appear on the page first. All of which can drastically affect how the reader reconstructs the story and sees the images you're trying to convey. Time and again I've had a lovely clear image in my mind which has had to be discarded because there was simply no way of making it work in words...
And then I started to wonder why I write so little fiction in the past tense. Is it because this imaginary world is so real - because I feel that I am there, observing the action as it happens? Is it because I'm usually working from the starting point of a visual image, so I'm describing it as though it is there, in front of me? It wasn't a conscious decision - it just seems to work better that way. Perhaps it's because there WAS so little fiction in this universe when I started writing, and much of it was already in the present tense, so I just kind of followed suit.
Hmmm. Maybe I should put my next story in the past tense just to see whether that changes anything...