Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing

by Ursula K. Le Guin

DN: Can you discuss the cost/benefit trade-off when choosing past or present tense? You’ve talked before about how past tense allows for more ready movement back and forth in time, that it more closely mimics the ways our minds and memories work. UKL: And it is particularly connected to telling a big story, a story with some real depth. But it is a complicated issue. Obviously the present tense has certain uses that it’s wonderfully suited for. But recently it has been adopted blindly, as the only way to tell a story—often by young writers who haven’t read very much. Well, it’s a good way to tell some stories, not a good way to tell others. It’s inherently limiting. I call it “flashlight focus.” You see a spot ahead of you and it is dark all around it. That’s great for high suspense, high drama, cut-to-the-chase writing. But if you want to tell a big, long story, like the books of Elena Ferrante, or Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy, which moves year by year from 1920 to 2020—the present tense would cripple those books. To assume that the present tense is literally “now” and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve.