The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook

1. Which Verb Tense Should You Write In?

3 one Which Verb Tense Should You Write In? When a person sits down to write a novel or story, many decisions present themselves: when and where to set it, which narrative point of view to use, even what to call it (writers love to think up titles; it’s much easier than actually writing). However, writers don’t always consider one of the first and most significant decisions they’re asked to make, which is whether to use the simple past tense or the simple present tense. Many writers select the former because that’s what most books use. Others go with Door Number Two, the present tense, although they don’t necessarily make that decision with any more awareness; often people do it because they like how it sounds. So our first task will be to recognize that a verb tense should be chosen with deliberation and reflection, even if instinct will have something to do with it in the end. We’ll investigate the subject by looking at the past and present tense exclusively. Some have tried the future tense, but it contains so many difficulties I don’t think it’s worth getting into. The Past Tense It’s something of a simplification to say you can write a work exclusively in the past tense. To do so implies that every construct will be of the “I saw the tree” variety, when in truth any work that uses past tense will also use the past perfect (“The tree had stood for years”), the past progressive (“The tree was standing in the shade”), and the past perfect progressive (“The tree had been standing since 1888”). But most of the sentences in such works will be in the simple form (“The tree stood”), so we’ll stick with the term “past tense.” (By the way, you don’t need to know the names of the other tenses unless you plan to teach language arts in a Catholic middle school.) If you write in the past tense, the reader will probably not think about your decision at all. When we pick up a book and see “It was a dark and 4 | S t ylis t ic D ecisi o ns stormy night,” we do not have to make any mental adjustments. We’ve been trained to expect this formulation, because most of the narratives ever written have used it. The reason for its popularity, both historically and currently, is pretty straightforward. Most fiction writers want their readers to engage in the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Coleridge put it. This means that readers of fiction are meant to slip into a state in which they believe in the events and people they’re reading about. Readers know, of course, that Scarlett O’Hara and Tom Sawyer never existed, but for the length of the book they pretend not to know it. To encourage such a state, the writer must endow his work with verisimilitude, which means “a sense of reality.” (Etymologically it means “likeness to truth,” which may make you think of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness ,” and that’s actually a close synonym.) I’ll use that word (verisimilitude, not truthiness) a lot, so try to hang on to it. To further augment the suspension of disbelief, a writer must avoid anything that reminds the reader that she is consuming a constructed series of words and scenes. Such reminders may include mistakes, like bad spelling and confusing metaphors; or stylistic eccentricities, like word repetition and Comic Sans font; or odd grammatical elements, like non-standard verb usage. If you open a novel and read, “It will be a dark and stormy night,” you’ll start thinking about the unusual use of the future tense. You will thus be considering the work as an artificial construction, rather than as a testimony of truth. It may be a fun intellectual exercise, but you won’t believe in the story. The past tense, though stodgy and traditional, at least doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s the most popular form because it best protects the suspension of disbelief, which remains a cherished goal for most writers. Along with the past tense’s low profile comes an inherent authority. It is more declarative and assertive than any other tense, because it implies an immutability in what it describes. These are not images of Christmases-yetto -come, the past tense tells us, these events already happened, and thus they cannot be changed...