Tenses

[snorkackcatcher]

Can anyone think of any occasions when people normally use first person simple present tense in ordinary conversation? This sort of thing:

I swing my legs off the bed and slide into my hunting boots ... I pull on trousers, a shirt, tuck my long dark braid up into a cap, and grab my forage bag ... I put the cheese carefully into my pocket as I slip outside ... I can feel the muscles in my face relaxing, my pace quickening as I climb the hills to our place ... The sight of him waiting there brings on a smile.

Why yes, this post is indeed prompted by reading The Hunger Games (but not yet Catching Fire or Mockingjay, so no spoilers plz).

This use of present tense seems ubiquitous in fanfic, but unusual elsewhere. I'm not sure even Mike Doonesbury narrates his life in present tense! The reason I ask is that I found it rather distracting, and thinking about that, I wonder if that's because in any normal situation, you'd just use simple past tense to describe what happened? I gather it may be a common usage in other languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean it works in English.

The only uses that spring to mind other than literary ones are "Footballer's Tense" while watching a replay -- e.g. "I take the ball up the left wing and cross it and he heads it in" (although more usually "I've taken the ball up the left wing and crossed it and he's headed it in" -- present perfect?) -- and "RPGer's Tense" while describing something their character is doing -- e.g. "I climb up the rope and take the jewel from the plinth". Other than that, I got nothing.

Possibly because of such uses, for me it creates a sense more of abstraction or distance or (when written) of affectation rather than one of immediacy. Does anyone else have this reaction?

Comments

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I actually find present tense immersive and immediate when used correctly (emphasis on that last bit), but I think the example you're looking for is the historical present. I use it often when I'm relating an anecdote ("So I'm walking down the street, and this creep comes up to me and says...") and when I'm summarizing a piece of media ("There's this guy, and one day he finds out that...").

The present tense is hard to maintain over the course of a novel, but I wonder if the fanfiction/pro-fic distinction breaks down more if you're looking at short fiction.

[snorkackcatcher]

Yes, I'm not sure it's ideal for novel-length narratives, especially when you're having to describe a lot of other background things that happened in the past anyway. In this case it felt almost as if the narrator was talking to herself rather than talking to the reader, which is perhaps why I didn't get "immediate" from it?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. Present tense in and of itself, I like, but when you mix in the first-person, it's untenable for long periods of time. The main benefit of first-person is in having a very strong narrative voice. But present tense is about the aforementioned immersion, and strong narrative voice (external) and immersion (internal) are often at odds with each other.

It seems to me that the first-person historical present would work very well in intense action scenes, which might be why Suzanne Collins opted for it, but it can definitely be distracting when trying to relate more than sensory input.

[snorkackcatcher]

Yes, as I said to melusinahp, it just dawned on me that it felt 'off' at the start and end of the book -- while the actual kill-or-be-killed stuff was going on in the main part, it mostly worked fine (but that was largely sensory input and immediate reactions to events).

Actually, reading an article just now (nothing to do with the book -- this was an economist describing his lunch meeting with another economist), it reminds me that this style quite commonly seems to get used in journalism for writing up interviews and profiles. Still feels a bit "studied" to me, but it's another model to draw on, I suppose.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

We use the present tense quite a lot in ordinary conversation; "I dis/like the Eurovision Song Contest," "I tend to file as I go along," etc. But I agree that we don't use it in narrative in ordinary conversation, and that's a fairly big part of conversation. I don't object to it on principle in fic, but in practice it goes often along with not working as effectively as the author things it does - it's a cheap way of creating "immediacy".

[snorkackcatcher]

Yeah, I think what I'm thinking of here is narrative (I wasn't very clear there, probably because I was trying to work this out and formal grammar isn't my area) -- when used like you say (or indeed in this sentence) it's used more to describe a state rather than a sequence of events?

I agree it often doesn't work well -- at least, not for me.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

used more to describe a state rather than a sequence of events

I think this is quite a good distinction. For this purpose, it's an effective tool, but there's a reason that most fiction is not written in it. In fanfic, I wonder if there's an intersection with the dogma that only one tense should be used per paragraph or even per fic, and so if an author wants to use the first person present at any point she feels she therefore has to use it all the way through, whereas switching tenses would actually have been more effective. Something you've given 3 chapters of backstory in is de facto not immediate - a sudden leap to " I swing my legs of the bed and pull on my hunting boots" could be.

[snorkackcatcher]

I sometimes wish that modern authors didn't have such a hangup about simply stating necessary backstory up front, the way they used to. It made things so much simpler! And in this case the little bits of info we got about the history of the Games didn't quite convey the horror of being chosen, because Katniss had already volunteered by the time we got most of them, so it was less effective except in retrospect or on a reread?

[melusinahp.livejournal.com]

I found it really irritating at first, but I soon got used to it. The sad thing is it means almost all the HG fics are written that way, and I can't even justify complaining about it.

[snorkackcatcher]

Yes, once the action in the arena started up, the momentum of events meant it faded into the background for the most part (but it started annoying me again in the post-Games chapters at the end). One reason maybe is that it came across as odd when Katniss was dropping backstory into the narration -- not even "as you know, Bob" but more "as I, Bob, know".

[lazy-neutrino.livejournal.com]

I find it pulls me in, but only for a short piece of writing. It's more tiring to read, somehow, and I'm very unlikely to finish something more than a few pages long written like that.

(Also, I keep expecting it to be a re-telling of something that has happened to the narrator, maybe being relived under hyponosis - too much crime drama, I guess! - so I expcet it to stop and the 'real' story to begin)

[snorkackcatcher]

I seem to have got more used to it through reading many fanfics (writers are imitative creatures, right?), but it's still not my favourite style to read. I think the only couple of times I've written in present tense, it's been a deliberate attempt to match the prevailing style (third person, though).

[golden-d.livejournal.com]

It's actually really common in storytelling as what's called the "historical present". When you're relating a story to someone (usually orally, but often in writing), the story tends to start out in past tense ("So I was going through the woods on my way back to the cabin...") and switch to present tense at a certain point ("...when all of a sudden out jumps a BEAR! And I SCREAM as loud as I can and start running away in the opposite direction!").

< /linguistics nerd>

[snorkackcatcher]

Mm. Now it's been pointed out I can see that "historical present" does work verbally under those sort of circumstances, although I'm still not convinced it's as effective in a written narration, where there's a certain artificiality to it, perhaps, unless some sort of framing device is used. Especially if you start that way without setting the scene in past tense first. :)

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Yeah. This. (Not that I think this is how Collins is using it -- I assume she's going for present-tense narration because she wants to maintain ambiguity about whether Katniss survives or not, and it's a lot harder to make past tense work with a narrator who is going to end up dead. This is why I've used it in fic a few times.)

[snorkackcatcher]

Yes, it reminded me of the logic behind Running Close to the Ground when I wrote this! Collins doesn't quite seem to be using historical present in the way golden_d mentions, so this is very possibly the idea. Although given that the story is sequential with the occasional "described flashback", not hopping around from period to period like RCttG, I'm not sure it's as effective. Also, as Katniss is the only narrator it was always pretty clear that she was going to survive at least until the end of book 1. (The other two are on their way from Amazon.)

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess you lose a lot of the suspense as soon as people know there's a sequel!

[jdbracknell.livejournal.com]

I talk to myself in the present tense 'get it togther' 'finish this and then let's James Bond the To Do list' etc.

Generally I prefer the present tense. I find the past tense clunky and slow (I think on a fairly basic level it's because 'walks' is just a shorter word than 'walked' and that stacks up) but that's not to say writers can't clunk up the present tense too. The thing that pulls me out of the passage above is the adjectives/adverbs and the extraneous stuff like 'can feel'. Why not write 'the muscles in my face relax' (that's a personal bugbear - don't tell me there's a feeling coming, just give me the feeling)?

[snorkackcatcher]

Mm. The responses here have at least helped me clarify a bit what I was getting at, which boils down to the use of present tense in extended narrative. So while yes, we do use short stretches of present tense, we don't generally use it to describe to ourselves a whole sequence of actions over an extended period of time, with flashbacks, nor do that to anyone else without some sort of framing device to set the context? What pulls me out of the narration is I think (as I speculated above) a feeling that the narrator is talking to herself throughout, or even just talking into space.

As for adjectives and adverbs, well ... I generally don't mind at all, honestly. Yes, they can be overdone, but often they provide a simple concise way to say something that would require lots of writing around otherwise. For example, "long dark braid" helps set the appearance of the character, "carefully" establishes that the character thinks the cheese is a precious thing (which it is, in her world), and I can't think of a quicker way to get those things across.

Btw, in that "muscles" example, I think there's a different sense to the book example and yours? "The muscles in my face relax" is a simple statement about what the muscles do, "I can feel the muscles in my face relaxing" is a statement about the way the narrator notices a gradual process of relaxation of the muscles as she approaches her goal -- i.e. slow loss of tension rather than all at once?

[catkind.livejournal.com]

I was going to say narrating what I'm doing to the baby. But no, even that's present continuous ("I am getting you a drink ...").
How about a cooking programme? "I take three onions, I dice them finely, ..." Does that fit?

[snorkackcatcher]

It does, sort of, but I think now (the comments here have helped!) that what I was really trying to say I had a problem with was the use for narrating a whole story covering an extended period of time, rather than a current action or state of mind or even a short continuous tale. Does that make any sense? :)