First person present tense — a convention that makessen...

First person present tense — a convention that makes
sense in French, which hates its preterite, but none in English, where our real
present is present progressive: Not “I pick up the envelope from the table” but
“I am picking up the envelope from the table.” Who could bear to read a story,
let alone a novel, in the true present tense of natural spoken English? So we
get stories written in this artificial, impossible voice. The voice we use for
jokes and anecdotes — “A guy walks into a bar, see” — but not the voice we use
for truth — “No, he really did.” As soon as we want to be believed, we move to
the past tense. But our most pretentious fiction is in the language of jokes.

Regular readers generally know they’re being excluded
when present tense is used for narrative. It’s a shibboleth for the
overeducated, the true believers.

The sad thing is that because young readers
don’t yet recognize the shibboleths, overtaught but underskilled writers of YA
fiction often get away with first person present tense. It worked for Hunger
Games because the story was so powerful; but the choice hampered the sequels.
It’s simply not a natural narrative choice in English; most writers confess
that they are faking it because they use pluperfect for the narrative past when
the past of present-tense narrative is the simple preterite or present perfect.

Orson Scott Card, interviewed