Tense? Point of View?
My writers often ask about first or third person, past or present tense and all the wonderful variations of those.
One of my favourite books of all time, and Mr Graham Greene's too, is Ford Madox Ford's 'The Good Soldier.'
The clue is most certainly in the title. 'The Good Soldier' is meant as in 'the good sort' or 'the good egg'. It's sly.
Ford Madox Ford writes as 'I' with what turns out to be knowing 'melancholy' about an event in the recent past, and the self-pity is pure cyanide.... it could not have been written in present tense, because he is an unreliable narrator.
He begins the book with formidable élan, unreliably, apparently with heartfelt poignancy. "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
As Julian Barnes put it 'What could be more simple and declaratory, a statement of such high plangency and enormous claim that the reader assumes it must be not just an impression, or even a powerful opinion, but a "fact"? Yet it is one of the most misleading first sentences in all fiction. This isn't - it cannot be - apparent at first reading, though if you were to go back and reread that line after finishing the first chapter, you would instantly see the falsity, instantly feel the floorboard creak beneath your foot on that "heard". The narrator, an American called Dowell (he forgets to tell us his Christian name until nearly the end of the novel) has not "heard" the story at all. It's a story in which he has actively - and passively - participated, been in up to his ears, eyes, neck, heart and guts. We're the ones "hearing" it; he's the one telling it, despite this initial, hopeless attempt to deflect attention from his own presence and complicity. And if the second verb of the first sentence cannot be trusted, we must be prepared to treat every sentence with the same care and suspicion. We must prowl soft-footed through this text, alive for every board's moan and plaint.'
In the Novel in 90 Plan, I ask my writers from the outset of planning their novel to begin by considering the magic trick they are about to perform, to make a pledge to the reader from the opening gambit and to be seen to 'deliver' upon it. But magic is sleight of hand. It's sly, and it beggars belief, because we are being made to look in the wrong place.
'My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.'
The reasoned tone of voice gains our trust within the first paragraph of the novel, but it turns out they knew a lot about Captain and Mrs Ashburnham and more than was fair.
If your narrator is unreliable in the telling of his or her tale, past tense is right.
If he or she is leading us 'live' down a garden path, possibly unwittingly as a bit of a dope, proceeding one might hope for a novel is a moral journey if not a literal one towards an awakening, then present is right.
In my work in progress, the narrator goes between present and past, in the former where she is becoming aware of herself and is a bit of a dope (!) and in the second, where she is telling a yarn to someone else which may or may not have happened as she describes it.
Enjoy not only the magic of your novel, but the music.
"Music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all,
but you are
The music
While the music lasts."
T.S Eliot.
