A Gift of a Tense

*ba-dum tish*

So, I've probably left that post about penises up long enough (far too long, honestly, though that may be the first time anyone's said that in a sentence involving penises... >.>)

I saw this post by Ava Jae and found myself thinking about why I use present tense so much. Despite the fact that pretty much all the novels I've ever read (with only one notable exception that I can remember) have been past tense, I use present often and it comes to me rather more easily than past.

Ava's post is a great guide to the merits of the present tense, and really accessible. This being a me blog post, it's going to be a bit more abstract and weird, but bear with me. I'm going to talk about two different ways of thinking, why present tense helps with presenting (ha-hah!) one of them, and hopefully also a bit about why it's important to present that type of thinking in your characters.

So, first off, two types of thinking. I'm not drawing on any established body of psychological or philosophical work here, just a categorisation I've noticed and found useful. I'm going to call the two types 'reactions' and 'reflections' (alliteration is awesome!). 'Reactions' are the thoughts, emotions and so on that you get in knee-jerk fashion during and immediately after some event or other. 'Reflections' are the thoughts you have later about your reactions.

To give an example from my own life, let's talk about my embarrassing emotional fragility when it comes to receiving feedback on my writing. Let's say you've just sent me an email listing a bunch of problems with my latest masterpiece (unlikely, I know...). Shameful as it is to admit, my first response will probably be to shout at the screen about how you haven't paid enough attention, I definitely put that in there, no, that's just part of my writing style, clearly you're just the wrong beta for me and this whole thing was a mistake.

That's a reaction (arguably, several). I have learned not to act on my reactions when it comes to feedback. Even when the feedback is very positive, my reactions tend to be a bad guide to what to do. Usually after getting feedback, I will go and play piano for a bit (my number 1 'calm down and happy up' activity), get on with the day for a while, and then come back and re-read. Often, I'll send an email back asking for clarification on some of the points. In said email, I may well mention my reactions to specific points, not to say that you've got x wrong, but to highlight areas where your response to the manuscript doesn't match my intent. The way I describe my reactions to you in that email? That's a reflection. Technically, the reflection is the thought I have that I then write down in the email, but close enough.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. Write in past tense, particularly in first person, and you create the feeling that you're mostly dealing with reflections - measured, mature responses to the events, the thoughts and insights of a character who's had some time to get their head around what's happened. This is NOT A PROBLEM.

But write in present tense, and you get the feeling that you're dealing with a character's reactions. You get a less clear picture of what's going on, but much more visceral emotion.

There are times when getting a character's reactions is more important than getting their reflections. There are also times when getting both, and seeing how some rationalisation or self-delusion has led the character to misrepresent their actions, is key to a plot or story.

As an example of the former situation, 'Bad Romance' (my deeply weird, still unpublished first novel) is about a not-terribly-reflective lad, Joe, who gets into a bunch of deep but quite analytical philosophical debates in which he has a secret personal stake. Writing it in present tense (which I did out of instinct, but in this case the instinct proved a good one) meant that I could really get to grips with Joe's reactions, which allowed me to show him becoming more reflective as the story went on in a way that only having his reflections right from the start wouldn't.

I mentioned above a particular book which is the only present tense book to make a serious impression on me. I'm afraid I can't remember very much about it, except that the plot was about a boy whose mother disappears, into some sort of environmentalist protest group, and the boy spends a week trying to find her. The thing that really impressed me (and I can't have been more than about 10 when I read this) was that the main body of the story, written past tense, is tied up in a present-tense frame narrative as the boy makes a record of everything he did during his investigation, then says what he's going to do to find his mother. I can't remember whether he finds her or not, but I remember even back then being stunned by the simplicity and effectiveness of the technique.

Naturally, I stole it, in this case for 'The Non-Agency' (finally back with beta readers as of Wednesday). In 'The Non-Agency', the present-tense frame story is the main character's trial for all the crimes he's gotten up to, and the main narrative is his own testimony about what's happened. You can see why the reaction/reflection divide - and the accompanying present/past switching - is of use here, as Tom tries to put the best face on what he's done, while fighting the pressure of the courtroom.

By the by, I'm looking for a beta reader who hasn't read any part of 'The Non-Agency' before, just to check that it holds together to a completely new reader. If the preceding brief summary has interested you, please get in touch! ;) Also, if anyone can identify the mystery present-tense book, I'd really appreciate it.

Multiple enemy contacts

As in 'no plan survives first contact with the enemy'...

This is something like the third time I've changed my core plan since deciding in March to go the self-publishing route, so some explanations are in order. Particularly since I'm not sure whether I'm changing plans this time or not. Any and all opinions welcome (okay, this is the internet. Any and all relevant, considered opinions welcome ;D).

So I'm thinking of abandoning my plan to publish The Non-Agency as a trilogy and instead publishing a single volume version as soon as parts 2 and 3 are ready (basically, 'Heaven Can Wait' will disappear from Amazon, to be replaced with a single 200,000-word book 'The Non-Agency').

The key reason for this has to do with the problems, which I've mentioned but not yet discussed in detail, I've had with part 2 of the trilogy, 'Some Kind of Angel'. The first draft turned out lacking everything that made the first book good. One particular problem is that SKOA is bloated and sluggish, and I think one of the big reasons for that is all the work I had to put in in the first half re-introducing and explaining stuff that is introduced very smoothly in HCW.

The third part, 'Don't Fear the Reaper', has no such problem, because I made a conscious decision not to explain all that stuff in the first draft. As a result, it's much more streamlined and, despite being fairly slow-paced, it moves along a lot better than SKOA. As I've been preparing to rewrite SKOA, reading back through it, my inner editor has been screaming at me to chop out all that explanatory gubbins.

One of the things that has been a common theme in the feedback I've received (not that there's been a whole lot of it, what with having only sold 7 copies...) on HCW has been that people really enjoyed learning about how the world of the trilogy works. SKOA in its current incarnation spends too much time retreading that ground, not enough time breaking new ground, and the little bits of new ground it breaks are lost in the heaps of old stuff.

That's not to say there aren't other serious problems with SKOA. I don't consider myself an expert on the technical side of writing, so I don't normally do 'how to write' blogs, but SKOA's given me a whole lot of material for one or more potential 'how not to write' posts, which I may do over the next few weeks. Among SKOA's other problems are a lack of an arc for the main character, the third act being on back-to-front at the moment, and some deeply unlikable side characters (who, in fairness, are supposed to be unlikable; you've just got to understand why they can still like each other...).

That's beside the current point, though. I can do a lot to help SKOA by relieving it of the burden of being a book in its own right. There are other plusses to amalgamating the trilogy into one book (besides getting to use the word 'amalgamating'. Twice!); the collected version will come in at almost 200,000 words, which is much more the length ball-park for epic fantasy. I've blogged before about how lost I am in the field of YA fantasy, but at 63,000 words, 'Heaven Can Wait' sits quite uneasily in the 'grown-up' fantasy section. The collection will also look distinctly less pitiful as a paperback - more like 650 pages than 200 (which in 8' by 5' trade size looks more like a textbook than a novel).

The main downside is for the handful of people who've bought HCW on its own, particularly for full price. These folk - to whom, after all, I owe a great deal more by way of gratitude and goodwill than I do to the rest of the world - face having to pay for HCW twice. I don't know how I'd feel in their place, but I know there certainly are people in the world who'd object. Maybe the concerns of seven people shouldn't make much of a difference to what's essentially a commercial decision, but desperation hasn't yet stripped me of my conscience, so at very least I'm going to have to make some arrangement to cover the lapse.

Anyway, that's my thinking on the subject. Thoughts?