Narrative Tense

When I started writing fiction as a hobby, the first thing I learned was the use of narrative tense, and I found that writers tended to have very strong opinions about which narrative tense was used.  When I say strong, I mean powerful, nearly violent reactions to these different narrators.  There are at least a dozen different types of narrators you will find in literature, although the variety is more prominent in fiction.  I’m just going to go briefly over six of them in this post and expound on them more in the future.

First-person past tense:  This is my favorite way to be told a story.  I grew up reading K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series and I loved getting into the narrator’s heads and seeing the story told from his or her point-of-view.  It’s a limiting way to tell a story, but I find that that makes it more real and you can achieve some amazing depth in philosophy and character growth.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is an excellent example of this, and was by far the best thing I read in high school.

First-person present tense:  This one annoys a lot of readers.  I’m usually okay with it, but I will admit that in narrating stories, it feels unnatural.  We’re used to stories being told as if they were history; being told as if the story is happening now is jarring and takes some getting used to.

Second-person:  I won’t say present tense, because I’ve never seen second-person being written in any other way.  This tense is best-known for being used in the Choose Your Own Adventure stories and it is fun because it makes the reader a participant.  It seems to have few other outlets, although I have also seen it used effectively in David Klass’s You Don’t Know Me.

Third-person limited:  The most common way to tell a story these days.  It may be third-person, but it’s told strictly from the point-of-view of one character, so that everything told is colored by that character’s perspective.  I’ve also found it to be the easiest way to write fiction as well.

Third-person omniscient:  This used to be more popular.  In this one, there are no secrets from the reader, but there can be secrets from the characters.  The reader is privy to all the motives, actions, and thoughts of every character in the story all throughout the narrative.  This is a very demanding way to read and to write.  The reader has to keep a lot of information in their heads, and the writer has to be consistent or the danger of confusing the reader is higher.

Third-person present tense:  This tense annoys me more than any other, and a lot of that is because it’s the one I’m least familiar with.  I almost didn’t make it through the first chapter of Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub for this very thing.  It had the effect of distancing me from the characters and the story rather than making it immediate.  I’m glad I stuck with it but it took a lot of getting used to.