David Alastair Hayden

They will tell you not to write with adverbs. In fer­vent whis­pers, they will warn of adjec­tives, too.

Bull­shit and bollocks.

Write how­ever the hell you want to. If it enter­tains, peo­ple will like it.

I spent many years try­ing to write the way they told me to. You know how they do, those Eng­lish pro­fes­sors, crit­ics, and copy-editors. If only I’d just writ­ten what was inside me instead of edit­ing so much, I’d have writ­ten a lot more.

All the adverb chop­ping they rec­om­mend won’t make a dull work enter­tain­ing, and it damn sure won’t make you any happier.

My rec­om­men­da­tions: Read a lot of good writ­ing. Read a lit­tle bad writ­ing. Learn from both. And try to find your style, your voice, the way the words flow out from you. Molest that style as lit­tle as possible.

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Some peo­ple need to chill out about it. By some peo­ple I’m mostly refer­ring to writ­ers and hard­core readers.

• The world will not end if you write a story in the present tense.
• The world will not end if you read a story in the present tense.
• No story will, in fact, ever end the world.

I’m bring­ing this up because I men­tioned writ­ing in the present tense in my pre­vi­ous post on Fast Writ­ing. I find it easy and nat­ural to write in the present tense. Doesn’t bother me to read it, either. But I have never used it in a story because of all the don’t-do-its I’ve heard over the years, start­ing in cre­ative writ­ing classes at university.

So I thought I’d google it and see how things have changed?

Well, it seems that it is both more accept­able and more vil­i­fied than ever before. Sigh. Life in the mod­ern world. Or is it only mod­ern Amer­ica with our increas­ing love of polarization?

The amount of vit­riol some spew over present tense writ­ing would make you think there is a short­age of past tense books they could pick up for their enjoy­ment. It makes some peo­ple irra­tionally angry. Fine, you don’t like it. It pisses yel­low in your mel­low. Okay, sure. Not your thing. But it is not kick­ing your kit­tens. It won’t hurt you. You don’t have to read it, or attack oth­ers over it.

I also saw numer­ous claims about its use hurt­ing sales. Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t help you get an agent or get your first book con­tract from a pub­lisher. It’s also killing Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Game tril­ogy. No one is buy­ing those books because…

Oh wait, peo­ple ARE buy­ing those books in mass.

Maybe the aver­age reader doesn’t give a shit about tense so long as the book is cap­ti­vat­ing and enter­tain­ing. This is prob­a­bly the case. Your aver­age reader doesn’t go online and bitch about writing.

Maybe she’d sell a few more copies, but I doubt it. First per­son present tense seems nec­es­sary for those books. And yes, one can find plenty of Hunger Games men­tions spread amongst the vit­riol. Often as an exam­ple of a book they liked despite the poor choice of tense. Took them so long to get used to it. Threw them off. Etc.

There are many argu­ments for and against present tense writ­ing. I will not recount them unless asked. I do not find them per­sua­sive in general.

What about you, dear reader?

Have a sane opin­ion on present tense writing?