Tense and POV A Reminder, Or A Few

I was taken with How Do You Decide Tense and Point of View When Writing a Novel? Not without my own reasons, you see.

First, there has been a long ongoing discussion between KH and me on why everyone uses first-person. He thinks it is because no one wants to make the effort, and I think it is just fits the fashion for the confessional. 

It is not my go-to point of view. I spent over 20 years writing law-related materials. There is no first person allowed there.

But I keep worrying that I am missing something that will help my fiction writing

To the Writer's Digest piece!

Writing in present tense does have its technical challenges. My first traditionally published novel, Sweet Water (Thomas & Mercer), was written in first person, present tense. I still feel as though I should send the developmental editor an apology note, because while I loved how that novel sounded in present tense, I found it challenging writing in simple past whenever the main character had to reflect back on events. The novel had an alternating timeline… so there was a lot of reflecting.

The best piece of advice I can dole out here is that if you’re writing your novel in present tense, you will almost never use the word “had” in your novel. It will most likely be “was” when you are talking about an event that happened in the past.

In "Love Stinks", I wrote one character in the first-person present tense. The point was she did what she could to ignore her history.

First person is a great choice if you want the story told squarely through the narrator’s eyes. There is a oneness with the protagonist that creates an immediate connection to the character.

It is a great choice… with a couple of caveats:

Unreliable narrators are extremely hard to pull off in first person. Not because the voice doesn’t work, but because it’s harder to hide the character’s untruths when you’re so close to them.

My first-person character played off a character narrating in close third-person. Character was one thing, but the interplay was also to show how wrong both were about what they were both witnessing.

If you want to be closer to your character(s) – 1st person

If you want to create space – 3rd person

2nd person is a difficult point of view to master. I have snippets of 2nd person woven into my new book, The Wife at The Window (Bookouture). The protagonist in the novel suffered an episode that killed her child and when she reflects back on her life with her husband she refers to him as “You.” This sets up an eerie tone of a woman who can’t move past a terrible tragedy.

I used 2nd person sparingly and only when she was thinking of her husband. I don’t think I could carry out an entire novel in that point of view, but I think it’s a good point of view to use when one character is placing a laser focus on another, almost in a stalkerish way.

In my short story collection, "The Dead and The Dying", I decided to experiment with every variation of tense and POV i knew of. One story was told in second-person. I probably did not pull that off. No one has been at all interested in those stories.

sch 6/19