Present Tense / Present Intense

Oct 13, 2022 12:55

I made one major structural change in my WIP (book three, In the Box): I converted it all from first person past tense to first person present tense.

The precipitating reason was that the internal monologues, the main character Derek's stream-of-consciousness stuff, was awkward to write. Obviously Derek isn't thinking in the past tense. I had written some of it in this kind of format:

Derek thought to himself, "Seriously, do I need this? It's been a long day"

In other places, I used italics instead:

The administrative staffer handed me another stack of forms and said, "Fill this out".

Whoa. The name of every prescription drug and when it was prescribed, going back ten years?? I'm supposed to just rattle that shit off from the top of my head?

Then there was the author's voice, narrator's voice. The book is autobiographical (I am the "Derek" character from my books; I change all the names but it's nonfiction memoir through and through). That meant I was sometimes writing some thoughts about the events being described but doing so as Allan Hunter, author, and that was being rendered in past tense along with the rest of the narrative. But distinguishing between that voice and the internal monologue of character Derek, my 23-year-old self who was in the situation at the time, was often complicated and challenging. Or arbitrary and random.

I realized this would all be so much smoother and integrated if it were written in present tense. I experimented and quickly found that I liked not distinguishing between Allan-author's voice and Derek-character's internal thoughts. It felt more intimate, with a single unified me telling you this story about what happened to me.

The other thing it did was enhance the sense of immediacy.

The goal with this story from the start was to immerse the reader in a rather claustrophobic suspenseful environment and convey as visceral a sense as I can of what it was like.

Is like. Be here now with me, hop on board and fasten your seat belt. The sections I did the experimental rewrite on did feel more immersive.

So I plowed through rewriting it up to the point I'd gotten to, casting it all in present tense.

For the first three or four days after that, as I went on to write new sections, I kept accidentally reverting back to the more conventional past tense narrative. He said, she said, bell rang, I walked down the corridor.

But it's been happening less and less often.

It's not that I've never written present tense before, but I've mostly done so in short stories. I've done a lot of interesting things in short stories. I once wrote a science fiction short that was all in second person: You wake up in an almost featureless room. You rub your eyes...

Novel-sized endeavors, though, for me at least, involve a lot of contemplation of the next chunk I intend to write, jotting down notes for the next few sequences, imagining the dialog or the descriptive narrative in my head while walking or cooking or whatever, then sitting down to it and pouring it into the word processor screen. So that makes it different from a short story, where I would most typically sit down and write the whole thing all in one shot.

All those broken-up writing intervals, different sessions at the computer, mean my regular habits tend to reassert themselves and knock me out of any variant groove I'm attempting. (This has also been a challenge for me with regards to my attempt to write the entire day, each day, instead of hopping out of a scene after making a plot-propelling point and skipping ahead to the next example situation or meaningful event. Part of the desire for immediacy and claustrophobia, but so hard to stick to it. (No, wait, that last conversation would have ended around two. I need to fill the rest of the afternoon before ending up in the dining room).

Anyway, it all seems to be working. I'm spewing a respectable amount of text onto screen and it's adding up.

Please tell me I'm not going to decide to write my next one in second person plural future tense or something...

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

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Index of all Blog Posts

fiction vs nonfiction, psychiatric oppression, writing, within the box (book 3), autobiography, language

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