3 ms·

First person present tense is on the rise, but third person present tense? One solid example I know of is the Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's "Books of Jaco

First person present tense is on the rise, but third person present tense? One solid example I know of is the Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's "Books of Jacob". And even there it is justified from the very prologue as everything there is POV of a person who dies or falls into a comatose trance, be it real or magical, I don't want to spoil you.

kibwen 6y ago
That's a good point, the best argument that the OP gives for present tense is that it removes the idea of there being an invisible narrator who is physically removed from these events and characters, which feels true for first-person present tense, but third-person present tense feels like a voyeur who watches but never engages, which doesn't feel like any interesting distinction from the typical third-person past tense narrator. (The reason why I like third-person past tense is that I like to imagine that I as a reader am not just reading the book for myself, but reciting the book to someone else as a form of active storytelling. I don't find the "invisible future narrator" to be a problem because to me, that's me! But maybe that's just, er, me.)
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I don't buy any of this - for myself at least. Tense (mis)used like this is like talking about the colour of the paper - "we used green for this section because it shows they're in a meadow". Reading is far too high-level an interpretation to be affected by tenses except where the tense is part of the story. When I read I don't see words, it's much more like a cinema playing in my head, and I'm watching. It's a process of filtering (discarding), synthesising and reconstructing. You might as well play with font size or typeface - it won't make a whit of difference to me in the end because it's low level stuff that gets discarded.

3 ms·

First person present tense is on the rise, but third person present tense? One solid example I know of is the Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's "Books of Jaco

by danpampelon2 6y ago

kibwen 6y ago
That's a good point, the best argument that the OP gives for present tense is that it removes the idea of there being an invisible narrator who is physically removed from these events and characters, which feels true for first-person present tense, but third-person present tense feels like a voyeur who watches but never engages, which doesn't feel like any interesting distinction from the typical third-person past tense narrator. (The reason why I like third-person past tense is that I like to imagine that I as a reader am not just reading the book for myself, but reciting the book to someone else as a form of active storytelling. I don't find the "invisible future narrator" to be a problem because to me, that's me! But maybe that's just, er, me.)
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I don't buy any of this - for myself at least. Tense (mis)used like this is like talking about the colour of the paper - "we used green for this section because it shows they're in a meadow". Reading is far too high-level an interpretation to be affected by tenses except where the tense is part of the story. When I read I don't see words, it's much more like a cinema playing in my head, and I'm watching. It's a process of filtering (discarding), synthesising and reconstructing. You might as well play with font size or typeface - it won't make a whit of difference to me in the end because it's low level stuff that gets discarded.