Tapping you on the head with a teaspoon

Time seems to be on my mind. I’ve been preoccupied with tense this last couple of weeks and have to admit the book I’m working on is maybe not best served by the present tense. The ‘real’ time frame of the novel is 2 weeks. I wanted to create a sense of urgency, a character thrown back to face an event of fifty years earlier in light of unexpected encounters in the present. ED, I noticed, used the present in her new book Secret Alchemy, so I emailed, we had a ‘discussion’ and a phrase of hers sticks in my mind. The problem with the present tense she says is that it can feel as if,  “I'm being tapped repeatedly on the head with a teaspoon.”

Part of the problem of letting go of the present tense, is that I know it works well in my opening chapters but I have feeling the teaspoon effect is a problem later on. Mmm, no, don’t want that. So, back to the past. Ahh but now those moments of the character’s past that come as fragments - the heart of the book -  can be written in the present and become more vivid, not a teaspoon tap on the head but a heightened whisper – come closer, listen to this… Once again the realisation that writing it in the present tense was part of the process, to keep close that character's pressure until I had the story down…

Comments

[Emma Darwin]

Paradoxically, I think it can often work like that - the present-tense stuff is unanchored, free-floating, which suits the slippery wisps of memory, whereas past tense has a rootedness which you need for the main framework of the story. Did you know that I bounced a blog post myself off from our conversation? It's here:

(apologies for the ridiculously long URL - I forgot to give it a title before I saved it.)

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2008/11/a-writer-friend-doing-the-last-big-revision-of-her-new-novel-emailed-to-ask-me-what-i-think-of-present-tense-narratives-sh.html

[Pamela Johnson]

Yes, I did, that's what you should get when you click on the "I'm being tapped on the head..." head quote...should have worked. oh not techy problems?