He scratched his head and patted his belly, as if playing that kids’ challenge of combining two different motions. Obviously, he wasn’t convinced, so I redoubled my efforts.
“Some will be saved,” I said.
“Like Noah and the Ark,” I said.
“The waters will recede,” I said, “And the earth will be cleansed.”
“Praise the Lord,” I added.
A long silence followed, in which he shuffled his feet awkwardly. At last he said, “I think Noah had a bigger boat. An inflatable isn’t going to cut it.”
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Whether or not to use present tense is ultimately a stylistic choice. Despite what I say below, there is nothing that a gifted writer can do in one tense that they can’t accomplish in another.
The present tense is often said to add “immediacy”, a sense of being in the narrator’s present moment , like a movie. This can help to keep the reader on the edge of their seat.
Younger readers, brought up reading novels like The Hunger Games, may come to expect the present as the normal tense for writing. Older readers, brought up on a tradition that used to favour past tense, may find the present tense irritating or contrived. An analysis of submissions to #pitchwars found use of the present tense was more common in YA writing.
For those who think the use of present tense is an annoying modern fashion, it’s worth remembering that Charles Dickens Bleak House, published in 1852, is written in present tense. Neither past nor present tense are inherently right or wrong. But there are consequences to the choice of present tense:
Apart from flashbacks, the use of present tense constrains you to follow the flow of events. This need not be a problem but structures that play with time become harder or impossible. You’re prevented from anticipating and making use of the future (since you’re carried along on the stream of the present) and it’s more difficult to make use of non-linear time, breaking up the sequence of events. The inability to manipulate time can lead to characters who are simpler than they need to be, because the reader has less sense of the past which determines choices and actions in the present. HOWEVER, like all writing strictures, a gifted author need not be limited by this, as shown by the discussion of Sally Rooney’s writing below.
Creating suspense becomes more difficult, because the narration can’t take into account things that have not yet happened or are outside of the characters’ current awareness. The “little did he know” device is unavailable.
Unless you’re careful, you can feel forced to overload the present moment with trivial events and sensations that have no real bearing on the story, just because such events would happen in the natural flow of time.
I would suggest that, apart from impulses of fashion, you let your characters’ situation determine the choice of tense.
Does your character live in the present moment? Joyce Carey’s novel Mr Johnson is written in the present tense because the central character lives in the present moment.
Does the past fill the present for your character? Have you ever noticed historians have a habit of talking about the past in the present tense? (“Churchill is now facing his defining moment as Germany prepares for invasion.”) If the past fills the present for your character in this way, then present tense may suit you. Matt Bell talks about the reflective present tense, as being “the way in which memory and trauma often work.”
Are you using an unreliable narrator? Unreliable narrators deny the reader full information by reporting incorrectly or missing out key details. Present tense can work well here and intensify the surprise when the truth is revealed.
Are reflection and insight important aspects of your story? Past tense may be better suited here because it allows the story to be told from the distance of time.
Does your character have a complex and important backstory? To avoid lots of jumpy flashbacks, past tense may provide a better choice.
And yet. Sally Rooney explained in a 2019 interview that her choice of present tense was driven by a grammatical preference: her characters’ frequent reflections on the past would have had to be written in past perfect if she’d been writing in past tense. and she found past perfect ugly.
He feels his ears get hot. She’s probably just being glib and not suggestive, but if she is being suggestive it’s only to degrade him by association, since she is considered an object of disgust. She wears ugly thick-soled shoes and doesn’t put makeup on her face. People have said she doesn’t shave her legs or anything. Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself in the school lunchroom, and she went to the girls’ bathrooms and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink.
Of course they arrested me, but there was justification and surely the court will understand. It went down like this:. last year I enrolled in a genetic survey. Dr Franklin told me I carried a hereditary predisposition to obesity, so I joined a gym. Hour after hour of weights. How I hated those workouts!
Today, Franklin revealed it had all been a joke—or, as he put in, I was in the control group that received a fake diagnosis.
Wouldn’t you have decked the bugger?
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I could see him contemplating completing the old comic one-two. Except the man next to me at the counter really was collapsed face down in my plate. The waiter looked around anxiously. Was he worried the goulash caused it, and checking how many patrons had noticed?
I nudged the fellow. “Oi, mate, you okay?”
No response. But he was breathing.
The server brightened—someone else had assumed control. I batted responsibilty back to him and asked, “Can you call an ambulance? And bring another goulash, please.”
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
There’s a footprint in the rock, and a tingle as I tentatively step my own foot into it. The fit is perfect. A long stride, and then another—this person was running. Towards something, or away? In hope or in fear? I’ll never know. Their tracks are here, fossilized across millennia, but the emotions have dispersed in a puff of chemical breeze.
“Ben,” I say, wanting to share this ache of ignorance with him. And then I stop, looking at him in a piercing moment of loneliness. I have no clue what this living, breathing man is feeling either.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Someone went to considerable trouble to build this. It had a purpose. There are projecting shelves, enclosed areas, and a solid base. Was trade transacted here? Perhaps this was a wet market, or maybe citizens shared beverages and faced each other across gaming boards.
Without knowing what these creatures looked like, it’s hard to guess. Assuming they sat at these shelves, they may have been a little under three metres tall. Why no skeletons, not even a scrap of clothing (if they wore clothes)?
Where did they all go? What might this lever do if I…….
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Not so bleeding clever now, are you with your big house up on the hill? Well, it’s falling down, innit? Ooh, you have had the cowboys in. Can’t get the workmanship these days.
You thought you’d just build that sodding castle up there where you could look down and intimidate us. Who’s looking down now? Sod off back to France, you Norman gits. And take them Romans with you. England for the Anglo-Saxons, yeah.
Come to think of it, take your Angles and your Saxons too. Britain for the Celts, I say. Not so bleeding clever now, are you?
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
My uncle was a headmaster and an English teacher by profession. I once asked him if he knew the poet, e.e. cummings. He replied “No, I haven’t had that pleasure. If you mean, do I know of him, the answer is yes.” We’ve all encountered grammar snobs and writers’ inboxes bulge with well-meaning suggested corrections from friends and colleagues. The interesting thing is that, often, the suggestions invoke rules that don’t exist.
Rule 1: Never start a sentence with a conjunction
Can you start a sentence with a conjunction? Many people believe the answer is no. But, grammatically, it’s fine. See? I started that sentence with the conjunction “but” (“and” is another common conjunction and “or” another).
What was effect of using “but” there? I could have written it as “Many people believe the answer is no, but, grammatically, it’s fine.” Separating the thoughts with a full stop rather than a comma is a way of emphasising the contrast (“On the one hand this. But, in fact, on the other hand, that”).
The truth is you can start a sentence with a conjunction if it feels right. Bear in mind, though, that some people will think it’s a grammatical mistake and be pulled out of the flow. Also (another conjunction), don’t overuse it, or your writing will start to seem choppy.
Rule 2: Never end a sentence with a preposition
Ending a sentence with a preposition is a mistake up with which you should not put. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? It’s much more natural to say “Ending a sentence with a preposition is a mistake which you should not put up with.” Again, this is perfectly grammatical. There is no rule that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. It’s simply less formal. Prepositions are words like to, up, at, in, of, for, with, etc. They show the relationship between one thing and another. If you are writing formally (such as in a report) you might want to avoid ending sentences with prepositions. For example, you’d probably be better advised to say in court “That’s the town in which I live”, rather than “That’s the town which I live in.”
Ruler 3: Never split an infinitive
This rule is an odd one. It wasn’t introduced formally until the nineteenth century and was gone by the end of the twentieth. Three generations were taught that it is grammatically incorrect “to boldly go”.
An infinitive is a verb with its “to” suffix. When an adverb is inserted into between the ”to” and the verb, the infinitive is “split”. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says “”the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis.”
Rule 4: Never use adverbs
Don’t even get me started on this one. Stephen King famously said “the road to hell is paved with adverbs”. Yet, across 51 books, he used an average of 105 adverbs per 10,000 words. That’s more than Ernest Hemingway (at 80 per 10,000 words. Also more than six other famous writers, but less than E.L. James at 155 per 10,000 words. The rule is silly. Adverbs do a job—modifying verbs, as adjectives modify nouns. Of course, they should not be used where all they’re doing is strengthening weak verbs. Enough said.
Rule 5:
There really should be fifth rule to debunk, if only for reasons of number magic. Five sounds complete, whereas four sounds slapdash. Oh dear.
There were lives here once. If you listen, you can still hear the honkytonk with its out-of-tune F sharp. If you look, you may half-glimpse the flounced skirt of a bar girl.
A house, sure—a house can disappear. Fires catch easy, and carpenter ants will gnaw through a building in days. Even whole streets vanished in the war. But towns, towns shouldn’t just blink out.
I turn to Tommy. He’s long gone too, of course. “The main street were right here, weren’t it, mate?”
And he shakes his head and says, “Till the seam ran out.”
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
She hung on my every word. Oh, I was glorious, compelling, charismatic. “If I put this next to that, see? Harmony emerges.”
“It’s a cruet set and a glass in a pipe.”
Brushing aside a twitch of irritation, I found patience and explained. “Yes, but curated, composed. The context is everything. It’s all about the act of bringing them together. That’s what makes it art.”
Now, surely now, I had her. I leaned closer. “And if I put this next to here….”
The slap seemed unnecessary and unkind.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Neil MacDonald Author 