I know it's been a quiet week around here, which you can bet means a crazy week for me away from the blog.
But I do have a substantive post on verb tenses up over at Romance University today. We're talking about the ways fiction uses verb tenses, and how that might be different from what you were taught in school.
Theresa
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4 comments:
Theresa -
As always, thanks for your fantastic monthly at RU! I can't tell you how much we appreciate you.
Kelsey
Kelsey,
I think for our appreciation of Theresa we're supposed to do the 'show, don't tell' thing. We need to think up some way to do that. Who has ideas?
It's a great article and I enjoyed it a lot. I'm so not a present tense kind of girl. I much prefer past tense. One argument for present tense I hear a lot is that it, like 1st person perspective, lends "immediacy" and "intimacy" to the prose and characters. Me? I find it very disruptive. I'm too aware of the actual writing and my brain is constantly trying to shift everything to past tense. I get very tired very fast. LOL.
JT
JT,
Yes, I agree that present tense can be straining. An author that goes that route should have a good reason beyond the desire to make it more "immediate" since I think it would strike many readers as off-putting.
At least it's not as bad as 2nd person. That's just plain annoying. :)
With either of those, if readers are feeling some internal "push-back" to your words, that's the opposite to "immediate".
Jami G.
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