JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #14
August 20, 2020
I mentioned grammatical aspect when discussing the passive voice a few weeks ago. As a reminder, the aspect of a verb can indicate whether the action is perfective, that is, complete, or imperfective, meaning ongoing or incomplete. For example, "Richard drove his truck to the job site" has perfective aspect, while "Richard was driving his truck to the job site" has imperfective aspect. Imperfect verbs can be interrupted: "Richard was driving when his phone rang." Today I’d like to say more about verbal aspect as a way to discuss why it doesn't matter if you write in the past or present tense.
Whenever you choose one form over another in matters of craft, it's important to ask what the fiction gains by that choice. Quite a bit of writing advice will insist that writing in the present tense gives a story "a sense of immediacy." I don’t think this is correct, and we can see why when we consider verbal aspect.
Aspect can be thought of as the point of view we take on an action. I don't mean first, second, or third person, but whether or not we view the action or activity from the outside or from the inside. When we describe an action with imperfective aspect, we are looking at it from inside, and that's why it can be interrupted. The perfective describes an action that is already finished, and we necessarily view it from the outside. If we write, "Richard drove his truck to the job site," we see the completed act of driving as a unit. On the other hand, if we write, "Richard drives his truck to the job site," there is a bit of ambiguity. The present tense in English is often a marker of the habitual, another kind of aspect a verb can have. Hence, we might read the sentence as "Richard [usually] drives his truck to the job site." Or it might be contrastive: "Richard drives his truck to the job site [rather than his car]." Habitual aspect makes us view the activity as a collection of nearly identical actions. Like the imperfective, a habitual action can be interrupted: "Richard [usually] drives his truck to the job site, [but]/and today he drove to the lake." Notice in this example, the present tense form of the first sentence indicates habitual aspect, but the past tense form of the second sentence indicates perfective aspect in the past tense. We make this shift all the time without noticing.
On the other hand, there is an interpretation of the present tense that is akin to a sports announcer's play-by-play: "James drives to the basket!" We can employ this form to describe current, momentaneous actions: "Richard takes out his wallet and hands it to the mugger." But these are still completed actions viewed as a unit from the outside. The difference between past tense and present tense here is negligible. There is nothing about the past tense that says an action occurred more than twenty years ago rather than five seconds ago. All we know is that it happened before the moment of speaking/writing/reading. And because present tense with perfective aspect also requires that the action has been completed, we are viewing it too at a moment after its completion. Nothing distinguishes the conceptual immediacy of past and present tense. "Richard punches the mugger" has as much conceptual immediacy as "Richard punched the mugger."
So if we do not gain "immediacy" by using the present tense, what do we gain? For the narration, not much. On the other hand, we lose quite a bit, including the ability of a past-tense narration to slip easily to the present tense for description of propensities and habitual actions: "Richard punched the mugger. Muggers are not known for being calm. They are unpredictable. This one scrambled away and fled the alley." There is a reason the usual storytelling tense for English is the past tense. (Some languages actually have a reserved "storytelling" tense.) Writing from the present tense can sometimes cut off many of the natural moves we would make in prose to take on various temporal or aspectual points of view on fictive elements. Are there reasons to write in the present tense? Yes. But I don’t have space to discuss that here. Sorry!
(This essay is based on a chapter from my PhD Thesis. Let me know if it’s too esoteric to be useful.)