Right Here, Right Now
Grappling with present tense narrative
I’m not a big fan of the present tense for stories. I’m not entirely sure why - it just feels awkward. Most of the time, I want the feeling that the narrator is telling me about something that has happened in the past. The events have transpired, the storyteller has learned about them, and they are now passing them on to the reader. With the present tense, it feels more like the reader is being invited to observe something, which is a very different relationship to the events. So I was very perplexed to find that one of my current stories, Mrs Patel and the Secret Agent, works much better in the present tense.
That particular story has been through many changes since I first conceived it twenty-plus years ago. Originally, it was set in Hong Kong. Now it’s in Mumbai. The protagonist was a young man. Now it’s about an elderly woman. It was going to be a short story, then it grew to a novella. And the first few drafts were all written in a conventional past tense narrative - but that’s changed too.
I fought it. I wrote a draft of the story in its current form in the present tense a few years ago, but decided I really didn’t want to do anything with it, so I shelved it. Then I rewrote it all in the past tense, and was even less happy with it. So a month or so ago, reverted to the present tense, and I had to admit, it feels more natural.
I think the reason why it works in this case is because the story is, at heart, a Kafkaesque character study. A terrible thing happens, and we’re dragged along, helplessly watching the events play out. Telling it in the past tense makes it feel just a little bit more remote and dispassionate, and as a result, the story loses power.
In the past tense, we know that the narrator knows how this story will end. The events have happened. They’re done. But in the present tense, the narrator knows as little as we do. He’s our window onto a real-time world, a fly on the wall, reporting live from the scene. Anything could happen.
It’s the difference between an elegantly shot and edited movie, and a bystander video shot on a mobile phone. One’s a documentary, the other’s a news story about something that’s happening right now.
Compare the following ways of describing the same thing:
“Did you see that video? This guy was driving along the road, and a truck lost control right in front of him. He must have had some really good brakes because he stopped just inches from the truck.”
And:
“Did you see that video? There’s this guy going along the road, and a truck loses control right in front of him. He jams his brakes on, and, I’m telling you, his brakes must have been awesome because he manages to stop just inches before hitting the truck.”
Same story, but the second version is more breathless, high-energy, and nerve-wracking. The first version is a simple recitation of facts: the second takes us right into the action, feeling like we’re there, in the car, with the driver, jamming our brakes on, trying to avoid the truck.
Okay, it’s not that different, but it’s only a three sentence story. But it’s an illustration of how we often tell stories when we speak - if we want them to sound exciting, we use present tense.
With Mrs Patel, I want the reader to feel like they’re trapped alongside her as her entire world falls apart. I want them to experience her pain and her frustration from her perspective. I tried telling it in the first person, but that was an absolute disaster, because I just couldn’t find the right voice and make it sound authentic: I can portray Mrs Patel’s world, but I can’t be Mrs Patel. So I had to try something else, and despite my misgivings, changing the tense seemed to work.
I still don’t like present tense in general, and I doubt I will ever (intentionally) do it again. but this has been a fascinating lesson in how writers don’t always get to shape the stories the way we want to. We give them life, but our characters and our worlds often get a say in how things turn out. Ultimately, I guess, our stories are a collaboration between ourselves and the voices in our head. In the case of Mrs Patel, the story was definitely the dominant partner in this creative team. I, as the author, just had to write it down the way it wanted to be told.