Office Hours

In which either "I" or "he" either "addresses" or "addressed" a question on point-of-view and tense.

Q.

Going back to your question about what we can cover in the next year: point of view came to mind. Can we discuss how to best judge which 'angle' to use to tell our stories. Is it a matter of experimentation, a proclivity towards a certain way of telling a story, hard and fast rule for certain subject matter?  All of the above, none of the above. And if that's complex enough, folding in the idea which tense to use, past tense vs present tense. When I sit down, my first go-to seems to be the more immediate present. Yet, most of the short stories I read are written as a record of a past experience. It's a huge area to cover, I know, but I thought I would just throw it out there. Thanks, George.

A.

My pleasure, although I am anticipating that my answer is going to be a bit personal and, possibly, insufficient.

I do it all by my gut, honestly.  Usually, I trust that whatever voice and tense the story first “arrived in” is the right one.

There might sometimes be a moment early on where I’ll toggle to another voice – from first to third, for example – just to see.  But honestly, not very often. In such cases, rare as they are, I just read the sentence, imagine it quickly in third-person or whatever – and go with what seems to have the most energy, or be for the best. 

As I’m thinking about this, I notice that, for me, these are two normal starting places: a first-person present-tense voice (as in “Ghoul,” for example) and a third-person, past-tense voice, which usually goes into what I’ve called “third-person ventriloquist” (as in “Mother’s Day,” say). 

These are just modes I like and have worked in successfully in the past.  But it’s never the case for me that I think, “Ah, I want to make sure to use first-person because of {insert conceptual rationale here.}”  And I’m always on the lookout for some variation – like, for example, in “Sparrow,” which is in third-person but one that seems to represent the collective voice of the larger community. 

But that voice came to me in a dream and I only realized it was a collective voice (or only decided to pronounce it one and continue in that vein) about halfway through.

I want to pause here to say that hidden there behind the phrase “do it all by my gut” is a vast world of things to discover, for each of us. We can spend an artistic lifetime learning to navigate by our instincts. 

That is the land where the real magic happens (or doesn’t), and once you get there, you may find that that’s where all the real work starts - learning the side-alleys and backstreets and so on.

For me, learning to be really attentive to that gut-feeling is about 90 percent of what I “have learned” about writing. 

Learning to be attentive in this way is akin to acquiring a microscope that then gets gradually fitted with finer and finer lenses.  That microscope is the thing I’m continually running over my prose during revision. 

The difference between me, now, and the writer I was when I first started is that now I can see more potential choices in a swath of text. I have a stronger, more reliable, system of preferences. And more trust in my gut response — more confidence that everything goes back to that.

The gut response to each of the nine million places in the story where we get to decide something…

So my short answer would be: don’t worry too much about choosing “the right” tense or point-of-view. Just take the opening sentence that comes to you and run with it, no theorizing necessary.

Because, when we “decide” something in advance, or by some theory, this can limit our choices as we proceed, thus choking off the communication between us and the story.

One of the hidden dangers of writing about writing is the constantly arising notion that there is some system to discover. 

There isn’t.  

Or the notion that any such system is universal. 

None is.       

(I know I keep saying this but it’s so true and central that I don’t mind repeating myself.)

It behooves us not to spend too much time in the land of Thou Must, or Hence It Is Usually Done.  And we might want to remember that the categories “What lights you up/is fun to do/feels right” and “What is good” are, for most writers, going to overlap pretty energetically.

It's comforting and anxiety-reducing (I know, believe me) to have a system.  But when we have a system, that means we’re giving ourselves permission to step back from the burden of line-to-line decision-making.

And those decisions, as I’ve said many times here before, are what make us uniquely ourselves.

It’s also good to remember that any choice we make (here, for example, about voice or tense) is going to mean giving something up.  In this sense, there is no “perfectly clean” choice – no “correct” choice.  There’s just the choice we make and then affably agree to live with. 

That is: there’s no free lunch, with regard to such choices.  Choose past tense, and you are going to discover certain hidden gems in that mode. But you’ll also find certain difficulties implicit in that mode. Certain effects will be gained and certain effects will be lost to you. 

But the way I try to think about this is, “Oh, well, it’s just one story.”

As I said a few posts ago: A story doesn’t have to do everything, it just has to do something.

Finally, we might think of the moment before we start a new story as analogous to the moment before we start a trip, the purpose of which is to have a wild adventure.  If we try to plan everything out, that implies that we already know in every detail what the trip is going to be.  And that’s no adventure at all.

When we just start out, we are essentially saying, “Let’s see what arises, out of which I can make a genuine adventure.”  We might even say that the lack of preparation is, for sure, going to cause us trouble (our choice of tense is going to present us with challenges/cage us in, at some point) but the adventure lies in how we respond to that challenge – in what spirit, with what resources. 

The reader feels this acceptance of hardships and feels the eventual overcoming of same.

Having said all that – I’m sure there are some of you who have more organized feelings, about how to start, about how you choose a voice or a tense, about the qualities or flavors of different voices and tenses. 

So let’s hear from you. 

Every one of these posts I write is just…the way things work for me.  The purpose, really, is to see if anything I am saying affirms something you’ve already considered, or lights up your creative mind in any way at all (even if that way is “in opposition”).

On Sunday, behind the paywall, we’re going to start an experiment, in which I (ahem) step forward and talk in detail about one of my own stories. Please do join us there, if this appeals…