Last week I attended a stimulating book event at Bishop & Wilde (one of the new crop of carefully curated, Portland-area indie bookstores to pop into being in the last five years or so—this one particularly well-located beneath Tin House Books HQ). The event was a conversation between Michael Keefe and Kimberly King Parsons in celebration of Keefe’s debut, All Her Loved Ones Encoded from Running Wild Press.
Parsons was well-prepared with thoughtful questions and topics, one of which, the use of present tense, piqued my interest in particular. She noted that in her latest book, We Were the Universe, her initial draft had been written entirely in present tense. Even the backstory and the references to the past. Her editor suggested she change the tense for the past recollections so the reader could more easily navigate where they were in time.
“Duh,” she said of her own late understanding of the effect on the reader. But then she talked about her love for the immediacy of present tense. How using it invites the reader to experience the on-page happening along with the character. Keefe agreed, and the conversation took off, citing the pros (mainly), and cons of present tense.
Now, you all know by now, I’m a craft nerd, so author chats about the psychological effects of various syntactical decisions is totally my jam. The talk had me ruminating on this particular line of questioning for days. It made me examine my own reading experience with regard to tense. Aside from the obvious tension-building, the decisions regarding tense also have a relationship with pace, with ear-feel (think of mouth-feel, but involving sound), and the way in which we, as readers, process empathy for a given character.
That last one seems a bit of a stretch, so hear me out.
Let’s take a novel written in past tense, aligned with a particular character (first or close third, single POV). The contract at the outset is that the character has gone through something, and is out the other end. Ergo: the imparting of a certain brand of wisdom from having had the experience. This, my friends, is a central component of authority. If the story’s a good one, personal stakes are presented at the get go—so that factors in when considering the effect on the reader: this character overcame something. We don’t know yet if they are better for it, however. The driving force of tension here might look something like: The character beat the monster, but maybe in beating that monster, the experience resulted in something unexpected with regard to stated stakes and desires. Or, the character succumbed to the monster, but what then? How has the character changed for having battled that monster?
Example.
Jess Walter’s Town & Country, a short story built around a son’s experience trying to find end-of-life lodging for his demented, elderly father. The story problem/inciting event is presented in the opening line:
My father’s girlfriend came home from the casino a day early and caught him having sex with the woman across the street.
By the end of the first page, we learn that the narrator’s dad has dementia and an increasingly problematic relationship with impulse control. It’s up to the son to find a suitable care facility.
So, we know we’re about to be taken on a journey. A journey will unfold. We don’t know whether or not Dad will end up in an appropriate facility. We don’t know how the son will feel having undergone this journey. What emotional consequences will the son endure? What insights will be gained?
We are not experiencing the journey along with the son, we are instead the recipient of the son’s recollections both physical and reflective. We are mostly aligned, empathetically, with the dutiful son. But we don’t have a front row seat to his demons until a few pages in, when, set off with a space break, we get:
Every gay kid must remember the day he came out to his parents.
This is the lead-in to a purposefully revealing snippet of backstory. Because the “story present” is also in past tense, the trap some writers fall into is casting backstory to the purgatory of “past perfect” or “pluperfect” and a sea of “hads” pushing the reader further away from the action. Not only does such a move undermine authority, but in the syntactical snarl of verb abuse, the reader starts to lose the thread of alignment. Empathy is compromised.
Fortunately, Walter is way too good of a writer to fall into that trap. Instead, after a white space break, he creates a vivid scene—his own “coming out” experience with his parents, and, because it’s written in simple past, it’s equally weighted with the scenes in the main narrative. But, the backstory scene serves a major purpose. It takes the camera inward. Provides a new level of “heart authority” between the narrator and reader, by underscoring the heartbreak that defines the relationship between father and son.
These heart-centered backstory scenes are the basis of emotional infrastructure.
In the end we’ll find out that the son did gain something unexpected (no spoilers here, folks, get hold of the story and find out). Not only that, but he gained a new understanding of what he could and could not control regarding his father’s issues. Thus, a satisfying conclusion to the story problem and a way to see the son’s new understanding through a lens of carefully-crafted empathy.
Would present tense have worked for this story? I did a bit of substituting in my head as I read, and I have to say that, “nope.” The power of Town & Country (and, indeed, its brand of tension), is firmly rooted in a recalibration of what has already transpired. The wistful, yearning tone would sound whiny in present tense, but works perfectly in reflection because there’s ironic distance, humor, and processed wisdom rendered via active scene development.
A book I think does work well in present tense is Alison Espach’s new novel, The Wedding People. Let’s see why that is: