The Complete Guide to POV

First person singular future tense

For this tense (I will go...), I had at first to make up an example. Because I couldn’t find one to share. This is an example of how this POV is most often used:

When the money comes through, the first thing I will do is go out and buy drugs. I will buy lots and lots of beautiful drugs, and then I will go home and take them all. And once I’m high, I mean really high, I will start ordering stuff online – all the stuff I’ve ever wanted. The last thing I need to do is approach this shit rationally. I will spend whatever I need to spend in order to feel my life hasn’t been spent entirely in deprivation and frustrated envy.

As you can see, this is a tense that seems to split. In one reading, it is describing the narrator’s rational plan for the future (this is what I intend to do), but in another reading it anticipates compulsive behaviour (knowing me, what I’m bound to do is).

The best example I could find, from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (Picador, p174), is not great.

Soon I shall not know where Sapo comes from, nor what he hopes. Perhaps I had better abandon this story… But there seems no other solution. After that mud-bath I shall be better able to endure a world unsullied by my presence.

Beckett uses shall instead of will. I learned this difference years ago, when teaching English as a Foreign language. But I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look it up now.

The difference is that will implies volition, whereas shall implies necessity. (‘I will marry the handsome prince’ as compared to ‘You shall go to the ball!’) However this implies speculation or wishfulness rather than certainty about the future.

Going back to the first example, try to feel what a will to shall change achieves:

When the money comes through, the first thing I shall do is go out and buy drugs. I shall buy lots and lots of beautiful drugs, and then I shall go home and take them all.

I’d say, it shifts class upwards. The narrator is now posh. They’re in one of Edward St Aubyn’s novels (Bad News), not one by Tony O’Neill (Digging the Vein).

When I did some research online, in preparation for today, I found that the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ novel Aura is in the First person singular future tense — in the original. There’s some disagreement over whether the English translation sticks closely enough to the original Spanish. It varies, it cheats.

And that’s understandable.

Why would you want to spend a very long time writing in a form of storytelling that forces you to include the same word (will) in every single sentence?

It’s bad enough with the past perfect (all those hads and had hads).

If you’re not writing will, then you’re desperately trying to vary it with shall, intend to, wish to and perhaps won’t.

The best example of this POV I’ve found (please help me out with others) is Amalgememnon by Christine Brooke-Rose (1994). It begins:

I shall soon be quite redundant at last despite of all, as redundant as you after queue and as totally predictable, information­ content zero.

This is a nicely bastardized version of the opening of Beckett’s Malone Dies:

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.

Here’s a chunk of Amalgememnon, to show you what this POV — in the right hands — can achieve:

The telephonist will ask what about and cut off my reply then come back and say hold on and I’ll hold on but what to, then I’ll have to repeat what about anyway when I’ll get through to the wrong man, creating a false opposition as to the rightness of the right one and a false impression of relief when I finally get to him. And he’ll invite me out again, the repay­ment for his trouble and expenditure will be sexplicit, he’ll talk of my emotional desert presumably that he might do me the great favour of invading and irrigating it at will, apparently assuming a wilish game of playing hard to get rather than simple anxiety and a sceptical curiosity, or at most a redundant vague desire wholly unfocused therefore unfeminine until his fashioning passion should turn me into a captive on a small pigfarm I shall owe partly to him, super idea, your bankloan your severance pay my help with same, your courage your handywomanship and craftswomanship my car our brains our pleasure our fun. And I’ll come down often, you’ll cook me one meal and I’ll take you out for the other, we’ll explore the region, then we’ll make love, all night, all night.

In practical terms, Brooke-Rose is truncating I will to I’ll to minimize the obtrusiveness of will. She chucks in the odd shall. But she’s also playing around with the incessance by including ‘irrigating it at will’ and ‘a wilish game’. She is making a virtue, like Will Shakespeare compulsively punning on his first name, of the repetition of a sound, a shape on the page and an association. I will suggests that I is a creature of wilfulness.

I will is also a physical threat.

If you lot don’t stop making that racket, I’ll come up there right this moment and…

Or King Lear’s vast:

I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!

Or like Violet Elizabeth Bott in the Just William books.

I’ll scream and scream and scream until I’m sick.

You can tell, maintaining this POV is very technically demanding, and requires that you accept 1. a limited readership with an appetite for experiment and 2. endless comparisons to Beckett and Brooke-Rose.

In summary:

First person singular future tense.

Likely upsides:

Original, exploratory, uncanny, compulsive.

Possible downsides

Repetitive, frustrating, repetitive, undramatic.