Now to a very simple decision. Do you want your story to take place in the past, the present or the future? Let’s deal with the last option immediately, since it really won’t take long. Let me tell you the answer: probably not, if you want to be published as commercial fiction. There’s always someone out there who’ll disprove the obvious one day. But books are rarely set in the future. As a narrative tense it’s too odd and too constricting. For a short story looking for a voice that screams ‘disconnect’ from the outset … possibly. A full-length novel? Best avoided.
Which leaves us with two basic choices …
Few books use the present tense throughout. It’s not as odd as the future tense for a narrative, but it’s not far off. It can also become distinctly wearisome after a while. Narrative tends to run to a rhythm, much like a piece of music. It will have slow and fast passages, loud and quiet ones. At times characters will be ruminating on the past or the future and giving the reader a chance to do the same in the context of the story so far. At other points the book will be making the story happen, moving more quickly, furiously even. It’s very hard to achieve that sense of a changing tone if all you have to work with is the present tense. The voice lends a distanced, dreamlike flatness to the story. It’s much like the first-person point of view in that respect, which is one reason why first-person passages often work best when set in the present tense.
There’s a clue to one of the most useful functions for the present. Imagine your novel is principally written in the past tense. From time to time your protagonist has dreams or flashbacks which start to illuminate the mystery as it’s revealed. The sudden jolt of the present can make these interludes more gripping.
It’s way past midnight and I’m walking down the alley to the pier.
Butcher’s Lane, they call it. Sally’s round here somewhere I think. Lost
and frightened. Maybe. Or something else. Something I don’t want to think
about. Up ahead I hear the sound. The bad one. Screaming. Fighting. Waves and water. I run to the beach. Run to her. And then … and then … beneath the moonlight I see it. The thing. The beast. The nightmare, flapping, screeching, waving its long shiny arms, beating the waves.
There’s something in its grip and I know what it is. The sea rises, the waves dash against my face. The water, the wind, the fury of the gale begins to consume me. I fight, I struggle, I beat the thing with my fists …
‘Charlie! Charlie!’
He came to in bed, head hurting, arms off the mattress, stiff in a foetal crouch. The window was open and through it beat the steady summer rain, battered by the chop of a gusty breeze.
‘Are you ever going to get up for school?’ his dad barked from the doorway.
‘Yes,’ Charlie muttered and climbed out of his creaky single divan, soaking from the rain, and the sweat of the nightmare too. The little alarm clock on the cupboard said eight thirty. He’d slept for twelve hours solid and still he ached from the night before.
In this example the first person serves to pass on Charlie’s nightmare. Note that I’ve put those few paragraphs in italics to emphasise that they’re outside the normal past-tense narrative of the book. We’ll look at italics in more detail later. They’re optional when used like this, but they can be effective, provided they don’t run on for more than a few paragraphs.
Another way to use the present tense is as a bookend closing a scene when something very significant is about to happen. This technique is similar to the shift of third-person perspective to a fresh character discussed earlier in the section on conformity of point of view. It acts as a relay, passing the reader into a different phase of motion within the narrative.
Charlie walked down the dark alley and called out her name. It was past midnight. He wasn’t supposed to be out. Nor was she.
He heard a noise ahead. A kind of sloshing sound. Like wellington boots full of water, moving laboriously through mud. There wasn’t mud around the footings of the pier. There wasn’t anything that could make a sound like that.
Somewhere in the black night ahead he hears a voice. Hers. A cry. A pained scream, muffled and distant.
Still he stumbles on, knowing this is the moment. There’s a penknife in his hand and he realises how very small and childish it feels.
You wouldn’t usually place this change of tense in italics. It’s at the end of the scene, an integral part of it, designed to be a tension-twisting hook that makes sure the reader turns the page and goes straight into the next chapter. The preface earlier serves a very different purpose and, since it begins the chapter, is more easily formatted in a different way.
There are no hard and fast rules, of course. There rarely are. I’d tend to italicise internalised thoughts used in this fashion and leave descriptive prose relating to the real world alone. There are plenty of variations on these two. You could have a character suffering from some intermittent flashbacks who hears or sees them midway through a scene written in the past tense (and they’d be italicised). You could try a version of the split-screen technique from the movies and, towards the end of the scene, intercut between characters in two different locations. In the latter case the shift from past to present signals to the reader that something new and different is happening here and, hopefully, ensures they stay alert to your tricky machinations. I’d italicise those just to make sure.
These techniques repay experimentation. But don’t get carried away. They’re best used sparingly if at all. If they become so repetitive that the reader begins to expect them, they’re liable to turn tedious soon after.
Most novels are written in what grammarians call ‘the simple past tense’. Don’t you love that word? Simple. Books are meant to look that way to the reader. Authors are there to deal with the complexity, then hide it underneath the carpet.
Grammarians also call it the ‘preterite’, which doesn’t sound simple at all though it’s exactly the same thing – the tense used by most authors most of the time. Stories recount things as they happen. The reader’s perspective is that of a remote viewer witnessing a series of events.
Charlie went to the pier.
Sally ran away.
Later the two of them met by the railway station.
Simple past. Readers who don’t even know what tense is, and probably think a preterite is something that falls from the sky, understand instinctively what’s going on when you write like this. If your audience has done part of the groundwork for you, a smart author says thanks and takes this free gift with gratitude. The reason we usually write in the simple past is because it works without any explanations.
You will use other variations of the past in your book. There’s the past continuous:
Charlie was swimming towards the pier when the wave hit him.
And the past perfect:
Sally had thought for a while that it was time to go back to the water. Then Charlie called and finally she knew.
If you want to write you shouldn’t need me to tell you what makes those two sentences past continuous and past perfect in turn. They should come naturally as part of the narrative flow, contained within the greater context of passages written in the past simple. I’m sure there are people out there who will attempt to write entire chapters, or even books, in the continuous and perfect tenses. All I can say is: good luck. We’re back in Dogme 95 territory again.
The past simple is the predominant voice of fiction, one you’ve been listening to all your life if you’re an avid reader. My advice to the first-time writer is: don’t buck the trend. Assume your book will be written in the lingua franca. Play with the present from time to time if you feel like it. Drop into other forms of the past tense when the demands of good plain English demand.