Exercise Your InkTank
Retrospective Narrative
The last time we met, the proposal was made that we work somehow with the idea of tense. This seemed fairly straightforward to me at first. Folks often argue, for example, that the use of present tense enhances the immediacy of the prose. But about an even number of folks also argue that using verb tense to invoke immediacy is overused and out of style. I guess what I’m getting at is that the matter of verb tense often comes down to a matter of taste.
We can see in our own telling of stories how tense shifts things tonally. When I want everybody on the edge of his or her seat as I’m telling my latest pool-hall fight story, I’ll shift into the present tense. As in, “There wasn’t a ball left on the table that was mine. And I’m telling her, ‘There’s no way I’m paying that cleaning bill.’ And she’s all, ‘You are too,’ and I’m all ‘I am not,’ and then we’re rolling around in the peanut shells on the bar floor.” Because I want you in the moment, I make that shift in tense, probably without even thinking about it.
A longer work rendered in present tense can present some interesting problems. One of them, fatigue. Most writers will tell you that they sometimes ease into the progressive verb forms, but that they don’t shoot for the present tense marathon. Again, it’s a matter of taste.
I thought we might also look at a kind of time in stories that is often overlooked: the distance between the narrative present of the story and the point in time at which the story is being narrated. The relative thickness of the retrospective narrative can have a distinct effect on the meaning that is made of the events of the story. If the narrator is a child during the narrative present of the events of the plot, your choice of distance from those events is a significant one. The further away you get, the more time the narrator has had to process what has happened. He or she may be an entirely different person now. There is no need in a narration like that for the character to speak like or as a child. It’s almost as if two consciousnesses occupy the same voice. A young one and an old one. Let’s see how this works.
Rewrite the following passage from the distance of your choice. Perhaps your narrator (she’s twelve years old, by the way) is telling this story the day after she experiences the events of the plot, maybe we’re right there in the moment with her, or maybe she’s twenty years older. Your choice of distance will effect the metaphors you use, as well as other choices you make in terms of language.
Fire required privacy, a place where no one could see you. It was no trouble finding such a place, the closet, and no trouble at all finding a candle and a book of matches. The trouble was that the fire moved so quickly beyond my control. It was my father’s Sunday coat that caught. I tried to stop it with my hands. There wasn’t any help and I was scared. I went into my head, stood there like my bones were fused together. The fire came from the inside of the walls and went down the outside of them. I watched it move, watched it lift things. From the open trunk of old clothes, bundles of scraps emerged in flame and fell. The bed went up in a big raft of light. The drapes seemed to collapse straight to ash. And then it stopped. As simply as it started, it stopped.
