Write Better: Tips and tricks

What is the right tense and pov?

Two common questions I encounter among new and unfinished stories are as follows:

Help! Should this story be in past or present tense?

I'm not sure if this sounds better in first or third person. What do you think?

And then included with question is the same blurb, with either verb tense or pov inserted.

[I know this isn't really an editing problem, this is a story composition one, but a lot of people ask so I thought I'd spend a chapter to discuss it.]

Example:

With the Rhino barreling towards me, I veer left and duck behind an alley dumpster. My pants are hotter than a sack of coals, but at least I'm safe.

(Present tense/first person)

VS

With the Rhino barreling towards me, I veered left and ducked behind an alley dumpster. My pants were hotter than a sack of coals, but at least I was safe.

(Past tense/first person)

VS

With the Rhino barreling towards him, Mark veered left and ducked behind an alley dumpster. His pants were hotter than a sack of coals, but at least he was safe.

(Past tense/third person)

***

I can almost guarantee you that your answers will consist of the following:

Well, third person is easier to read. That's what I prefer, anyway.

I love first person stories.

That depends on what kind of a story it is. If it's a romance, I would say go with first person.

Choose whatever feels best/is easiest for you to write in.

Totally concrete and useful information for the author on the fence, right?

If you're just secretly looking for some support, you'll latch onto the answer you secretly wanted and claim validation and you may not even realize it. Sometimes people just ask things for praise (fishing for compliments), and sometimes they know the answer they want and just look for someone to agree with them. Justification and validation are important, and sometimes that's all we secretly want when we ask questions.

But,

THIS IS THE WRONG QUESTION TO ASK AND THE WRONG FORMAT TO ASK IT IN.

You may not think you're telling the story any different, but you probably are. There are a whole lot of subtlities, and that's why you really can't just convert from one format to another.

If you don't know which POV to write in, just changing verb tense and/or pronouns is not going to help you. Sometimes you can get away with it, but it's often the case that different perspectives notice different things and the wise writer uses that to create a more authentic view point.

In first person, the reader experiences the journey alongside the narrator (directly inside their viewpoint). The First person (or third limited) narrator isn't usually God, so they're stuck with the information that they have. If they don't know that the flower on the window sill is a Crystalline Orbis or that Jason was only helping to retrieve the sword because of a debt his parents owed Susan's parents, sorry. You're out of luck. If you need to tell the reader this, you've got to use other methods to convey the info.

In third person omniscient, you get that extra leeway to give your reader information outside of what the limited/first person narrator can. Your narrator has access to all the world's information to dispense however they desire.

The same applies to tense. A scene written as it happens (present tense) notices different things than one written after the fact (past). If you're in the moment and a rhino is bearing down on you, you may not be thinking to describe your thoughts about your ex boyfriend or explain about the history of the zoo the rhino escaped from. For all you know, your lizard brain is on autopilot and it's telling you to look for escape, not for flower pots!

If it's in the past, you can take the time to elaborate or detail this or that because time doesn't matter in the same way it does in the now. Often, only the important details are conveyed in the past and in fewer quantity, because they're what you remember instead of a hundred tiny details, while in the present, you don't know what is useful and what isn't yet (because you don't know the end result).

There's all sorts of ways to manipulate POV and tense, like having a surviving character narrate in present tense even though it's already happened, but I felt it was important to give you guys some direction when you're writing your story. When you're trying to figure out what POV/tense to use, try to think about what is you're trying to convey. You want to think about things like detail and senses and descriptions and what's important to convey. Just changing He and I and adding "s" to verbs won't help you write that.

Sometimes though, if you're trying to start over in a new tense, it can benefit you to rewrite with only those changes (Ex. She to I; Present to past) and then go back and think about what I've said here. Replay the scene in your imagination. Zoom the camera in so you're seeing, say, Frozen, through Elsa's eyes instead of the way it is now. What's different? What has to change?

***[Note: Third present doesn't occur very often outside of short stories, so we're leaving it untouched.]