The Language of Fiction

A Writer's Stylebook

Brian Shawver

• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611683318
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Grand themes and complex plots are just the beginning of a great piece of fiction. Mastering the nuts and bolts of grammar and prose mechanics is also an essential part of becoming a literary artist. This indispensable guide, created just for writers of fiction, will show you how to take your writing to the next level by exploring the finer points of language. Funny, readable, and wise, this book explores the tools of the fiction writer's trade, from verb tenses to pronouns to commas and beyond. Filled with examples from the best-seller lists of today and yesterday, it will help you consider the hows and whys of language, and how mastery of them can be used to achieve clarity and grace of expression in your own work. Here, you'll find Encouragement and advice to face the big questions: Past or present tense? Comma or semicolon? Italic or roman? Should your dialogue be phonetically rendered, or follow standard rules of grammar? (And where does that pesky quotation mark go, again?) Warning signs of the betrayal of language, and ways to avoid it: Unwitting rhymes, repetition, redundancy, cliché, and the inevitable failure of vocabulary How-to (and how-not-to) examples: The grammatical "mistakes" of Charles Dickens; ambiguous pronoun usage by Nathaniel Hawthorne; the minefield of paragraph fragments found in one of today's most successful authors.

part one

Stylistic Decisions

one

Which Verb Tense Should You Write In?

When a person sits down to write a novel or story, many decisions present themselves: when and where to set it, which narrative point of view to use, even what to call it (writers love to think up titles; it’s much easier than actually writing). However, writers don’t always consider one of the first and most significant decisions they’re asked to make, which is whether to use the simple past tense or the simple present tense. Many writers select the former because that’s what most books use. Others go with Door Number Two, the present tense, although they don’t necessarily make that decision with any more awareness; often people do it because they like how it sounds.

So our first task will be to recognize that a verb tense should be chosen with deliberation and reflection, even if instinct will have something to do with it in the end. We’ll investigate the subject by looking at the past and present tense exclusively. Some have tried the future tense, but it contains so many difficulties I don’t think it’s worth getting into.

THE PAST TENSE

It’s something of a simplification to say you can write a work exclusively in the past tense. To do so implies that every construct will be of the “I saw the tree” variety, when in truth any work that uses past tense will also use the past perfect (“The tree had stood for years”), the past progressive (“The tree was standing in the shade”), and the past perfect progressive (“The tree had been standing since 1888”). But most of the sentences in such works will be in the simple form (“The tree stood”), so we’ll stick with the term “past tense.” (By the way, you don’t need to know the names of the other tenses unless you plan to teach language arts in a Catholic middle school.)

If you write in the past tense, the reader will probably not think about your decision at all. When we pick up a book and see “It was a dark and stormy night,” we do not have to make any mental adjustments. We’ve been trained to expect this formulation, because most of the narratives ever written have used it. The reason for its popularity, both historically and currently, is pretty straightforward.

Most fiction writers want their readers to engage in the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Coleridge put it. This means that readers of fiction are meant to slip into a state in which they believe in the events and people they’re reading about. Readers know, of course, that Scarlett O’Hara and Tom Sawyer never existed, but for the length of the book they pretend not to know it. To encourage such a state, the writer must endow his work with verisimilitude, which means “a sense of reality.” (Etymologically it means “likeness to truth,” which may make you think of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” and that’s actually a close synonym.) I’ll use that word (verisimilitude, not truthiness) a lot, so try to hang on to it.

To further augment the suspension of disbelief, a writer must avoid anything that reminds the reader that she is consuming a constructed series of words and scenes. Such reminders may include mistakes, like bad spelling and confusing metaphors; or stylistic eccentricities, like word repetition and Comic Sans font; or odd grammatical elements, like non-standard verb usage. If you open a novel and read, “It will be a dark and stormy night,” you’ll start thinking about the unusual use of the future tense. You will thus be considering the work as an artificial construction, rather than as a testimony of truth. It may be a fun intellectual exercise, but you won’t believe in the story. The past tense, though stodgy and traditional, at least doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s the most popular form because it best protects the suspension of disbelief, which remains a cherished goal for most writers.

Along with the past tense’s low profile comes an inherent authority. It is more declarative and assertive than any other tense, because it implies an immutability in what it describes. These are not images of Christmases-yetto-come, the past tense tells us, these events already happened, and thus they cannot be changed or mitigated. Although millions of works use the past tense, whenever I think of examples, I come up with big, omniscient, nineteenth-century novels that ooze authority in their other elements, too: Vanity Fair (“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate . . .”) and Middlemarch (“It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange . . .”) and so on.

Further evidence of its authority can be seen in the fact that when we need people to believe a story we’re telling, we use the past tense (“Mr. Farnsworth, I missed the client meeting because my wife went into labor . . .”). You may argue that we use this tense whenever we describe anything from the past, but that’s not actually the case. Stories and anecdotes about past events are often related in the present tense (“So I’m at a bar, and I see this girl looking at me . . .”), because the style adds a sense of intensity or irony. News headlines use the present tense as well (“Scientists discover new species of badger”), because it contains a jazzy immediacy, and a headline’s main job is to grab the reader’s attention. But these tonal advantages come at the cost of authority. The past tense may not be flashy, but using it is a way of saying, “I assert that these things actually happened; either you believe me or you don’t.” In short, it’s another method of establishing verisimilitude.

THE PRESENT TENSE

Conversely, there is something absurd about using the simple present tense when telling a story in written prose. Its very formulation implies a simultaneity of word and deed, yet the works themselves usually don’t want us to believe in that simultaneity. For example, in Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief,” when the narrator tells us, “Selfishly I break away from Kusum and run, sandals slapping against stones, to the water’s edge,” she is obviously not telling the truth; she couldn’t be running along the beach and writing about doing so at the same time. (Well, she could, but we’re not supposed to think she is.) In almost all instances of present-tense narration, such as when Barry Hannah’s Ray tells us “she covers me with kisses” or when the narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Where I’m Calling From” says, “I push the curtain away from the window,” the author does not actually want us to believe the character is recording his actions at the moment he’s performing them. Thus a present-tense work, especially those written in first person, asks the reader to adjust for an inherent artificiality.

In narratives with a third-person point of view, the contradiction is not as overt, because the narrator is not saying that he/she/it personally performed the actions. But even in these works, the verb tense stands at odds with the author’s meaning. Let’s look at a passage from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake:

In the autumn of his sophomore year, he boards a particularly crowded train at Union Station. It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He edges through the compartments, his duffel bag heavy with books for his Renaissance architecture class, for which he has to write a paper over the next five days.

Technically, the verb tense implies that the third-person narrator observes these events in real time. That is, the narrator appears to describe the protagonist, a young man named Gogol, boarding a train at the moment he does it. Then the narrator remembers to tell us it is Wednesday. Then the narrator sees — and simultaneously describes — Gogol edging through the compartments. And so on.

But of course Lahiri doesn’t want us to think her narrator is staking out Gogol like some FBI agent, describing the subject’s movements into a walkie-talkie. We know that’s not the intention because Lahiri’s novel, like most narratives, contains a sense of order. The narrator reveals a structured, coherent, and suspenseful story, and thus we get the sense that the narrator knows, at every moment, what will happen later on.

The present tense as a narrative form rarely makes sense when you think about it for very long. Part of its problem is that it doesn’t cover any ground, chronologically speaking, especially compared to the past tense. I might say, “Neanderthals roamed southern Europe,” or “I lived in Vermont as a baby,” or “Today I ate lunch early,” and the past tense works for all of them. The present tense has a much smaller window. It would no longer be accurate, for example, if I were to write, “I now write a sentence that includes the phrase ‘smaller window.’” Yes, I recently wrote such a sentence, but that was ten seconds ago; it exists in the past. It doesn’t matter how far or close — if it’s already been accomplished, the past tense is the appropriate one to use. (NB: for the purposes of this chapter, I’m painting these tenses with a somewhat broad brush. Nuances and qualifications will be dealt with in chapters 6 and 15.)

But that’s not the only way the present tense is removed from authenticity; there’s a stylistic discrepancy going on too. I mentioned earlier that, although Mukherjee surely didn’t intend such a reading, it’s possible that the protagonist of her story, Mrs. Bhave, would be able to run along the beach while simultaneously writing about it. Perhaps she runs very slowly, scribbling a description on a waterproof notepad. Yet even if she were performing this odd feat of multitasking, she still wouldn’t use the simple present tense; she would use the present progressive.

Think about how this works in real life. When you’re on a cell phone, trying to meet up with someone, you say, “I’m turning left on Elm, now I’m going north, that’s me, I’m waving at you.” In other words, you use the present progressive. You don’t say, “I turn left on Elm, now I go north, now I wave at you.” The simple present tense is usually reserved for conditional statements (“I wear green on Thursdays,” “Tim eats egg yolks when he trains”) or statements that are true in a general, indefinite way (“I hate Mondays,” “Dogs like ham”). When we describe limited, distinct events that are happening in the present, we say or write, “I am wearing a green shirt,” or “Tim is eating an egg yolk,” or “My dog is revealing his love of ham by drooling copiously.” So fiction written in the present tense isn’t just removed from reality by content, but also by style.

This dual separation from reality means that readers are more likely to notice the artificiality of the tense. If they think about it too much, it’s harder for them to suspend disbelief. This point has many implications. In fact, it’s the foundation for everything else that matters in terms of what you should think about if you’re tempted to use the present tense.

For one thing, it’s why the present tense is more popular, and probably less risky, in short fiction as opposed to novels, and in short novels as opposed to doorstops. Every time a reader picks up a present-tense narrative, she has to accept the bargain the writer presents her with: you must try to suspend disbelief in spite of the artificiality of the verb tense, and I will try to make my use of this tense pay off. If, as Poe suggested, we read a short story in one sitting, then we only have to make this distracting adjustment once with short fiction. Perhaps we make it seven or eight times when we read a short novel. But consider how many times you put down and pick up a book like Moby-Dick or Oliver Twist in the course of plowing through it. If Melville and Dickens had written in the present tense, those works would have asked the reader to make the bargain dozens of times. Of course, some long novels do use the present tense to good effect; Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Richard Ford’s Independence Day are all over four hundred pages. But it’s worth considering what a writer risks when she attempts the present tense in a long narrative.

So, if the present tense endangers suspension of disbelief — that sacred goal of most fiction writers — why use it at all?

One answer is that, paradoxical as it may sound, in some circumstances the present tense can actually augment, rather than detract from, a work’s verisimilitude. We can see this in a passage from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone:

My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far. She remarks that it is beautifully written, and every word of it true. But she points out one objection. She says what I have done so far isn’t in the least what I was wanted to do.

In the pages that precede these lines, the narrator, a butler named Gabriel Betteredge, has used the past tense to describe events that occurred many years earlier. He’s doing so, he tells us, at the insistence of the woman he serves; the narrative we have been reading, and which used the past tense, is the one he will turn in to his boss. But at a certain point, his daughter Penelope appears in his office, and at this moment Gabriel switches to the present tense (she remarks, she points out, she says) and stays with it until he returns to the memoir section.

Technically, Penelope’s remarks are past events — we may imagine that Gabriel jotted them down right after she left — so they should be related in the past tense. But Collins thinks it would be misleading to use the same tense for such different parts of the narrative. After all, one section describes events that occurred decades earlier. Plus, the work is meant to be a historical record for his employer, so he would want the formal authority of the past tense. The other section describes remarks that are minutes old, and since the description is presumably intended for the reader’s eyes only, a more casual tone seems appropriate. In short, Collins needed a way to separate these narratives, and the mechanism he used was verb tense. He violated the grammatical rule because he thought that following it might lead to even greater distraction and confusion on the reader’s part.

Another way the present tense can create a heightened sense of reality appears in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In the following passage, Darl, a member of the Bundren clan, tries to cross a swollen river with his brother:

We submerge in turn, holding to the rope, being clutched by one another while the cold wall of the water sucks the slanting mud backward and upstream from beneath our feet and we are suspended so, groping along the cold bottom. Even the mud there is not still.

In this case, it might be useful to reverse the question — instead of asking why the present tense works, we should ask why the past tense wouldn’t.

When a first-person narrator uses the past tense, the style usually implies that the words you’re reading have been written down in some future moment, after the conflict has been resolved. Sometimes this is done overtly, as when Humbert Humbert admits he’s writing the manuscript that we know as Lolita from prison, or when Robert Walton tells the story of Frankenstein...