A recent novel, Dizz Tate’s Brutes (Faber 2023), uses this insistent POV.
First person plural present tense — We [both/all of us] go…
When we wake up, the sun has just appeared, a thick red muscle bleeding low across the lake. We rub our eyes and stare. The women have returned to the ground. The hot air blurs around them. They seem deflated and move slowly through the morning’s pink haze. They have abandoned their instruments and seem to be calling her name over and over. They look desperate, their determination lost. We giggle. We focus our binoculars on their mouths, the lowering and widening of their pleading jaws. ‘Sam-my, Sam-my, Sam-my.’ We can hear more sirens on the highway, and the faint noise of tourists let loose from the hotels and into the theme parks across the lake.
Before I discovered Brutes, I was busy making up my own example.
We run down to the water’s edge, feeling so great at finally being here. We’ve been stuck at home inside so long, and now we’re here. The sky is cloudlessly blue. We shout as we splash one another. Then we swim out and further out. We feel the water getting colder and then, for a fake moment, warmer.
I was imagining children, whose sense of individual self has collapsed into the joy of a shared activity.
We giggle.
This POV, like the past tense version, enforces the sense we are witnessing a cohesive group in action, and hearing it report to us. But because it’s present tense, it becomes less about moral opinion and more about physical sensation.
Given what we’ve seen so far in the Complete Guide of a general move (because of Creative Writing Courses, because of the influence of film and social media) toward immediacy in narrative voice, and a willingness to explore both you and we POVs, the first person plural present tense might seem one of the most of-the-moment ways of telling a story.
In the past, it might have been avoided, or only used fleetingly, because it was clearly overinsistent and offputting.
We bounce and we encounter and we speak.
Isn’t it just like being surrounded by a litter of a dozen cute puppies, all identically looking up at you and wagging their tails, all wanting your loving attention?
What could be nicer than happy cute puppies? And what more wearying, after ten minutes?
Of course, a technically adept writer can find ways of bringing variety any POV, whilst still exploiting its charms.
However: Beware the cute puppies.
In summary:
First person plural present tense.
Likely upsides
Alongsideness, momentariness, certainty, simplicity
Possible downsides
Bumptiousness, puppyishness, shallowness, alienating