Hi Sam, I decided to take my 1st stab at writing fic. Its going great so far but Id love some advice from someone of your experience. I'm having trouble with tenses - Past tense feels the most natural for me to write in, but I hate how clunky it feels when I do action scenes (which I have many of). I LOVE how present tense feels more dynamic and snappy, real stream of consciousness effect...but I wind up having lots of weird phrasing. Idk, is mixing & matching tenses every few paras a bad idea?
Sorry to ramble, I guess my question is how do you tell if your writing is getting in the way of readability?
I think really there are multiple questions here â questions about judging the appropriateness of a style, about one style in particular, and about gauging a styleâs readability. All are tough but letâs dive in!Â
In terms of the appropriateness of a style, especially as a beginning writer, I tend to recommend going to books you really love, or writers you really admire, and looking at how their books are structured. Read not for pleasure (just this once!) but to see how they construct their paragraphs, how they use tenses and tense shifts, and how they convey information. This is a skill, so you have to practice at it! Look for passages that are mostly information, look for how dialogue is designed (are there a lot of dialogue tags? Are there none?) and pay attention to tense-indicating words like has, had, do, did, etcetera.Â
In terms of tenses in specific, you will find that almost no story has shifts between tenses in the way youâre describing, in part because it does confuse the reader â is the story happening now in the moment, or did it already happen? People really like linearity in their stories, and tense shifts disrupt that linearity. HOWEVER, lots of stories do have covert tense shifts â for instance, a story told in present tense may shift to past tense if someone in the story is telling a story, or if the narrator in the present tense has skipped something and is now backtracking to explain it. There are ways to make tense shifts work, though they may make life more difficult for you.Â
Lots of people will tell you that present tense is inherently not as good as past tense, and they are wrong; they just mean they donât like it as much. For every person who says to me âFirst person present, Sam? Really?â there are fifteen people who donât even notice because theyâre just enjoying the story.Â
This does make studying how to write present tense more difficult because you will encounter a lot of haters. However, because we use present tense more often in conversation than we do in literature, it can be awkward, as youâre finding out, to tell a story with it. The best way, again, to learn how to write less awkwardly in the present tense is to read in the present tense â find books that use the present tense voice and read them, studying how they handle wording that youâve found awkward in the past. You may even find that what you think is awkward isnât even that noticeable when youâre reading someone else say it.Â
I am a big fan of knowing the rules so you know how to break them BUT ULTIMATELY if you want to write a story shifting between tenses, do it and the hell with what anyone says. You are experimenting with style, and if it doesnât work it doesnât work, but while you can write for others to read, in order to satisfy the creative urge really you need to write for yourself first. Write the story you want to write, the story you want to read, and you will learn as you go. If other people donât like it at first, who cares? You told the story you wanted to tell.Â
I ran into this when I was learning the ukulele â I realized that the reason I didnât like playing music as a child was that my teacher was teaching me as if I was possibly going to be a concert pianist or play in a jam band. She had me learning a lot of musical theory and playing a lot of music that would give me technical skills â but they were not skills or lessons that were any fun for me, they werenât music I liked or the skills Iâd need to play the music I liked. And so I didnât practice much and when I did it was without passion.
Learning the ukulele, I got proficient really fast because I started out playing songs I liked and learned the chords I needed for them because I wanted to play them so badly. I was enjoying what I did and because of that I learned faster. Did I learn every skill I will ever need for the ukulele? Of course not. Some of those missing skills, like reading sheet music, may one day be important. But those harder, more boring skills can come in time, when I already have my passion for playing cemented and I myself am willing to take the next step. And without ever doing anything I didnât want to do, I learned how to compose songs of my own, because I learned how the chords from songs I liked fitted together.Â
Basically, a lot of times, we teach art of all kinds to children as if itâs going to be a marketable job skill. Itâs a very capitalist way we have. Very rarely do we let children find the parts of art they most enjoy without forcing them through the parts they donât, I think because it scares us that they might make something that doesnât fulfill some idealized potential. Art, in any form, is meant to be an expression of self, but even when we say âThe outcome doesnât matterâ we treat it like itâs an assembly line. You can make anything you want to make as long as you make it in one of these three proscribed ways.Â
So to your final question, how to determine when style is getting in the way of readability â thatâs a really tough one because we are never objective about our own work; we know what weâre trying to say and we think weâre conveying it, but because we have backstage knowledge, we can never truly be sure. One way, of course, is to have someone else read it and tell us what they think; âI understood this, I didnât understand that.âÂ
Itâs a painful process, being told what we âdid wrongâ. It does help us learn; knowing how other people see your work will help you a great deal in terms of self-knowledge. But itâs also a process thatâs only necessary once youâre already in love with what youâre doing, because at that point you WANT that self-knowledge that only comes from critique. So this leads back into what I said first: you have to love what youâre doing and do it from love first, and only care about other peoplesâ opinions afterwards. There is no tried and tested way to know how other people observe our work, but if we love to make things for ourselves first, then we feel strong enough to ask and internalize the answer.Â
Basically, write what you want to write, and if you find that you love doing it, keep doing it; soon enough youâll get bored of doing the same thing and want to expand, and thatâs where skills acquisition will come in â where reading, listening to readers, and self-reflection will be helpful, instead of just tedious. At that point you can explore the nature of tenses and how to write in a single tense with more skill â or maybe youâll write a crazy fun experimental novel with tense shifts and change the literary landscape. WHO KNOWS.Â
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