Writing and all that

It is a dark and stormy night

The first time I read a novel written in the present tense, I felt annoyed and cheated. I was about 12 and it was a wonderful author whose other books I loved, so I excitedly turned to the first page… only to find it written in what seemed like a really weird way. My response was -  well, I can’t remember exactly, but it must have been the mid-eighties 12-year-old square’s equivalent of “WTF??”

 

I also can’t remember a single thing about the characters or plot, just the incessant drip-drip-drip of what I saw as pretentious “look at me, I’m so different and clever” prose.

By contrast, the last time I read a present-tense narrative I was so emotionally overwhelmed by the story that I consider it the best historical novel I’ve ever read – Sarah Bower’s beautiful, heart-breaking The Needle in the Blood.

These extremes of reaction are evident on a wider scale than just my own inconsequential likes and dislikes. The merits (or otherwise) of present tense tend to divide both readers and writers and make for some interesting discussions/arguments. No one ever says “Oh, God, I hate third-person past tense” and yet present tense comes in for quite a bit of stick.

I don’t hate present tense. I love writing it, and there’s a bit of it in Kill-Grief. These days I like reading it, too – but before I can really get into a present-tense book, it has to overcome my mistrust. I’ve been trying to work out why this is, and these are the main reasons:

•       Present tense can be a warning flag for what Susan Hill calls a ‘me book’, where the main character is a conduit for the author’s ‘ishoos’: ‘I roll over and reach out for the alarm clock, knocking the packet of fags onto the ash-trodden carpet. As I grope for them, my head pounds with the cold, black residue of twenty-five  double vodkas. My hands tremble as I flick the reluctant lighter again and again…” Cue 400 pages of self-absorbed angst that the rest of us are too self-absorbed to give a stuff about.
•      The in-built immediacy suggests a cheap trick to hoodwink the reader into thinking there’s something exciting going on when, frankly, there isn’t.
•       It sounds faux-literary – a form of virtuosity that tries to distract the reader from the book’s deficiencies.
•       Present tense implies that the story is happening in real time – but that’s impossible, because the author has finished it and set it down on the page. It’s difficult for the reader to make believe that the author doesn’t know what happens in the end.
•       The story might have worked better in past tense, but the writer thought present tense was trendier.
•      The present tense is so, well – present, reminding the reader that he or she is just looking at words on a page. It’s like those old submarine movies where the plink, plink, plink of the sonar is supposed to be authentic but just keeps reminding you that it’s a studio with some sound guy tapping away on a xylophone.
•       Present tense might be a growing trend, but trends can just as easily die, dating the work to the era in which it was written, like a mullet in an eighties TV version of Robin Hood.  Maybe present tense will be the mullet of the ‘noughties.’

Hmm, this is looking pretty bad. Surely the present tense must have some redeeming features.

Well, yes, actually – I think it has. If I talk about them now, however, this is going to be a mammoth post, so I’ll leave that for next time.