The Complete Guide to POV

First person singular present tense

This (‘I go’) is one of the most trendy Points of View. And that’s down to several interconnected things.

The first is the justified success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Her story begins:

‘When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the Reaping.

I prop myself up on one elbow. There’s enough light in the bedroom to see them. My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together. In sleep, my mother looks younger, still worn but not so beaten-down. Prim’s face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the primrose for which she was named. My mother was very beautiful once, too. Or so they tell me.’

You can see here, as in Teju Cole’s first person past tense, the modulation from what’s happening — ‘is cold’ — to what’s happened or what’s probably happened — ‘must have had’.

We receive the signal: This isn’t going to be flat, minimalist writing. I see I feel I think. The narrator — Katniss Everdeen — needs easy access to the past, if she’s going to be able to tell her story and the story of her country, Panem.

What’s difficult and dangerous for her, throughout her life, is access to knowledge of the present. For most of the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss has no sense of her own importance in the world. The reader knows she is far more special than she does. To convey her growing power, the film adaptations break away from close first person to third person scenes. These allow us to see how Katniss has become a revolutionary leader without knowing that’s what she is. They show the forces plotting against her.

Although I love both the books and the films, what I love most is Suzanne Collins’ brilliant use of first person singular present tense to keep us close to Katniss whilst allowing a much vaster political story to occur, almost entirely offstage.

The next interconnected thing is a general sense, among beginning writers, that the present tense is better because it’s immediate. They want their readers to say, You really put me there. It’s like what’s happening on the page is happening to me.

I’ve even examined a whole PhD — a very good one — on this topic. The writer was Graham Guest, and the title was “Consciousness in Fiction.” (University of Glasgow, 2012.)

My concern is how a novel writer places us into the mind and body of his protagonist as it operates in its present moment, the manner in which he allows us to perceive as his protagonist perceives and to think as his protagonist thinks.

Guest calls what Suzanne Collins is using ‘the instant present’.

The instant present readily lends itself to mimetic presentations of consciousness because “‘the problem of writing is purely and simply bracketed out’” (Cohn, 1983, p. 175). “‘[Immediate discourse is] neither written, nor even spoken – mysteriously captured by [the novel-writer]: it is the peculiarity of immediate discourse that it excludes the narrative instance which it constitutes’”(Cohn, 1983, p. 304). It is, in other words, writing that acts as if it were not writing.

(Cohn is Cohn, D. (1983). Transparent Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Which I haven’t read, but should.)

Writing that gets rid of writing seems ideal for our visual times.

The third thing that has encouraged the rise of present tense narrative is the Creative Writing Workshop exercise.

Although lots of people are now, without thinking too much about it, writing using this POV, most creative writing tutors will — at some point — encourage their students to explore narrative manners and tones they haven’t tried before. And most people haven’t written in all that many different POVs.

I’ve had new students say, ‘I’m a first person writer — it’s all I do — I just can’t help it.’

A very common and worthwhile experience for any writer is suddenly to find flowing out of them a voice they didn’t know they were anywhere near.

Present tense narration can do this, especially first person.

If you haven’t tried it, do.

Here’s another good example.

Ali Smith, ‘Erosive’, from The Whole Story and Other Stories

‘I see someone in the mirror in the hall. I look again. It is me. It is the first time I have seen myself for days and I look as if I have been sleeping in my clothes. I go into the kitchen and I see how the piled-up dishes are coated in rot. I can’t remember eating off any of them. I come through to the living room; the books are all over the floor.’

This shows what this POV can do. As Bob Dylan sang, ‘I’ve got mixed-up confusion/ Man, it’s killing me.’ It’s great for bursts of now-now-now surprise and wonder. Over the longer run, you’re going to have to ring a lot of changes. Are you equipped to do that?

If I’ve sounded a tiny bit grudging so far, it’s because what’s less obvious is what this POV can’t do, or what it makes difficult and clunky.

Present tense narratives can very soon become like jogging along inside someone’s head. Jogging, jogging and more jogging. Without expert modulation, this can become a trap. As Bono sang, you’re ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’.

Narrators in this POV are likely to be much more reactive than strategic. And there’s only so much Eek! a reader can take.

I hear a loud bang and start running towards it.

That comes far more naturally to the instant present than:

I decide to start planning a revolution. I sit down and about how such a thing might be achieved. I make notes and then more notes.

Narrators will also have difficulty generalising, at giving us a wider view of the world. That’s why it’s the perfect POV for Katniss, trapped in the arena.

Sam the Editor at Galley Beggar, my co-editor (along with Elly at Galley Beggar), has — due to frequent exposure — developed a severe allergy to the present tense. (Fair warning, if you were thinking of submitting your present tense novel to him.) I know this because I had a third person present tense section in my memoir Wrestliana.

Sam said no.

I was not happy.

I made the change, and saw it was the right change to make.

In summary:

First person singular present tense.

Likely upsides:

Immediate, vivid, clear, embodied.

Possible downsides

Breathless, myopic, claustrophobic, uninformed.

p.s.

Galley Beggar has a sale on for the next few days. Wrestliana and Patience and the original A Writer’s Diary are all available for £5.99. Also on sale are Ducks, Newburyport, Mordew, After Sappho and their other amazing books. Here.