The TENSION of TENSE Choice

 

I adore first person present tense.

Present tense takes me, as a reader, right in. I’m here, and here we go together, all the way until the story’s end.

 

When it comes to writing picture books for the very young, it also feels like natural language. Toddlers use present tense even when speaking of past or future events.

 

Here’s the kicker: what to do when a picture book is about something that is no more? Think, the past. Think, HISTORY.

Like the Milkman, or corsets, or rotary phones.

 

There are writers who can do it. I’m still struggling.  

DO YOU FEEL LUCKY?

 

It’s a tough question.

 

As a feeling, it forms our orientation every day. One day this way, and the next, that-a-way.

 

But the role of pure luck in life and history is a persnickety matter. Storytellers avoid it, because one can not make sense of lucky coincidences.

 

Historians, who are also storytellers when it comes right down to it, also avoid it for the most part. Their jobs and whole professional discipline would evaporate if luck is deemed central to events.

 

Philosophers and theologians have argued about the place of coincidence. The understanding of creation hinges on the notion that a thinker/great designer is behind it, or a chain of gazillion coincidences just had a lucky streak.

 

Some, like me, have come to understand that coincidences are few, but they do exist and do play a part in all journeys.  But how to tell this in stories, and in what proportion to place luck in a story?

 

Now, that is the question.

REAL REALITY, REALLY?

 

Friends of mine, living in Israel, told me their GPS has stopped working.

 

“It keeps insisting we are in Beirut,” they said.

 

They called their phone carrier and also the makers of the app, who gave them the runaround and finally admitted the IDF has been scrambling navigation in order to foil the GPS-guided missiles coming from the northern border.

 

Before they got the real answer, I suggested different possibilities, including an IDF action, as to why their phone set them in a neighborhood in Lebanon’s capital. My last suggestion, tongue in cheek, was inspired. “Perhaps,” I said, “you are in fact in Beirut and you’re the only ones who don’t realize it?”

 

This would make a good novel, I think.

 

This got me thinking about the real-life couple who followed GPS blindly, which led them to fall into a hole in the ground. Another family took Google Maps voice navigation straight into a dead-end desert road.

 

All of these would make good stories and should be developed further into tales of digital worlds replacing our flesh and blood eyes and ears experiences.

 

And speaking of the rare but real flaws of digital navigation, our schools have stopped teaching a new generation how to use printed paper maps. For all the real-time information they lack, they remain an important tool. For that matter, learning to orient with the stars should also be part of basic education. Just sayin’.

 

Because you never know when the next time the digital masters will decide to re-set our reality.

 

Oh, wait. They are doing it in many ways already.

Is the Writer’s VOICE the Same Regardless of Format?

 

Going back to Karen Jones’ questions for writers (see here)— I find this one intriguing.

 

If writerly voice = the personality of the narration, then something of the voice is the same even in different formats. It’s the same person who’s writing the picture book texts or the novels.

 

But somethings are different, because of the constrains that formats impose. This is why we often hear that an author had finally “found her voice” when author switched formats. I remember another writer in my picture book critique group who, after reading my first middle grade book, sent me a glowing email saying that I had “the perfect middle grade voice.” It was a new one she hadn’t “heard” from me.

 

But what I find differentiates voice even from the same writer (in this case, me) is writing in a different language. Languages have personalities, and even speaking them (real voice) I sound somewhat different. It’s been a long time since I wrote fiction in Hebrew, so I may confuse personal life chapters with writing voice. But even my letters in Hebrew and English have distinct personalities.  Not to compare, Vladimir Nabokov testified to same.

 

Personally, I like to stretch and have my feet in more than one format. From the world of commerce, this isn’t the ideal strategy. Marketers like to have artists as “brands,” and thus box us in. But for my own need to keep toned, this stretching is good for creative dancing.

“PAST IS PROLOGUE”

 

Editors, I’m told, don’t like prologues.

 

A story needs to start in the present. Prologue forces us readers to scroll back before we’re allowed to knock on the door. “Just let me in, blast the past,” the exasperated editor is saying, taking on the readers’ cause.

 

Books of yore had no such impatience. We live and read in a rushing age.

 

How do you feel about prologues?

 

My personal view is that short prologues pique my interest, similar to the back cover teasers meant to sell the story. Long ones, if well written, captivate. But then it’s a letdown when they end and it feels like I must now shift gears to a new, (as in the now) story. If I make the adjustment, I’m glad for the prologue. If I lose the thread right then, it’s a fail.

 

The current writerly wisdom is to sprinkle back story in bits throughout the narrative of the “now.”

 

That’s fine. But it isn’t the only way to make sense of the present.

 

"What's past is prologue" is a quotation of William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest. In contemporary use, the phrase stands for the idea that history sets the context for the present.

 

Prologues have a legitimate place in literature.*

*I used the Palatino Linotype font in this post on purpose. Old and relevant.