Present Tensions, part 2

Any discussion about the rules of writing can be cleared up by the catch-all solution: You can get away with anything, as long as you do it well. The use of the present tense is the perfect example.

In spite of all the reasons why present tense makes me wary, it is, after all, a natural way of telling stories. To take my favourite piece of overheard dialogue, which I remember from several years ago in a Chinese restaurant:

“The bloke who does my tattoos, right? He actually breeds scorpions, yeah? So anyway he gets this scorpion – it’s like the size of a baby rabbit  – and says he’ll give the kid a tenner if he picks it up by the tail…”

In real-life dialogue like this, the tense isn’t even noticeable – I just wanted to know what happened to the kid – and I think that’s the very difficult key to making it work on the page too. As if by magic, a great example appeared in the comments last time – Anne Brooke’s Maloney’s Law. Anne gave a fascinating insight into how her character’s voice simply would not be bullied into the past tense, so I went to look at the excerpt and was utterly gripped – I can’t wait to read the rest. Blimey, Anne, it’s brilliant.

The thing about this extract was that, if I hadn’t been reading with tense in mind, I couldn’t have told you afterwards that it was written in the present. The atmosphere, action and above all the wonderfully real, captivating, screwed-up main character are what leap out, and the assured writing is there to serve the story, not to clamour for attention. Amazon UK doesn’t seem to have it in stock at the moment, but you can get it from The Book Depository with free postage.

Sometimes it’s the character who demands the present tense; sometimes it’s the story. I can’t for example, grasp how The Time Traveler’s Wife could have worked in the past tense. From what point in the future would the narrators have been looking back? Past, present and future are so intricately shuffled that there is no room for reminiscence – the immediacy of the narration is necessary to the whole concept.

Although I’ve mentioned two contemporary novels here, I also think the present tense can work perfectly in historical fiction. One of the ‘against’ arguments I listed last time was that it’s impossible to believe that the author doesn’t know the end of the story. In theory, this problem is even more obvious in historical fiction. Not only has the writer already completed the book, but the actual events are supposed to have taken place in the past and it seems logical to narrate them in the past tense.

If that were the case, however, books set in the future should look like this:

On Monday, January 7, 2047, Darrell Beaderday will wake up nervous about his first day as foreman at the asibot factory. He will go to the window and will look down at the electric cars that will be queueing to be charged. Thousands of miles away, third-world children will be running on giant hamster-wheels to generate the power…

There are only so many times the reader can put up with the word ‘will’, so it’s perfectly sensible to write futuristic fiction in the past tense. Similarly, I don’t see any problem with using the present tense for historical fiction.

Perhaps time is not really linear. Perhaps all of history is happening at once; maybe our ‘now’ is also the now of a Viking silversmith and a destitute 16th-century crone, a Victorian actress and a 60s Beatles fan,  a 21st-century author, and the last two people finding something to fight about as the world ends. In all these layers of history, it is impossible to be sure exactly when ‘the present’ is. On Picnic Publishing’s blog today, author Kim Fleet uses the phrase ‘time as a palimpsest’ – an elegant image that reflects this idea of layers of time co-existing rather than following one another.

With this in mind, and with that cop-out proviso that it must be done well, I find that the present tense can add a moving realism to the voice of historical characters who experience their sorrows, frustrations, elations and fears independent of some inflexible linear timeline.