Present Tensions

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Browse a bit of writing advice, and you’re bound to come across the “done well, done badly” tautology: “Writing Technique X, if done well, works well. If done badly, it works badly.” In many cases, the stated or implied message is, “Avoid using this technique.”

A subject that consistently comes in for the “done well, done badly” treatment is present tense prose narration. There may be valid reasons to eschew the present tense, and below I’ll even cover one that I can buy into. But first, if I can, I want to discredit a few I find faulty.

Too Flat

In a blog post on Writer’s Digest, Brian A. Klems makes this claim:

Whereas past-tense stories often contain the majority of our language’s 12 tenses, most present-tense stories employ only four — the simple present, the present progressive, and a smattering of the simple past and the simple future — and many consist almost entirely of the simple present tense. Using fewer tenses reduces our ability to convey the full complexity of time relationships […] Present tense restricts our ability to manipulate time.

This is nonsense. There may indeed be authors who, in an act of literary theory gone wild, absolutely restrict themselves to the simple present tense. They probably have their reasons. But Klems jumps to a generalized conclusion that all present tense use robs…