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  ESCAPING THE BASE TENSE

  Whatever the base (main) tense of a story, earlier and later action must be expressed in other tenses. Knowing the grammatical names of these tenses is less important for writers than mastering the sounds of them. The models that follow should help you to leap from a base tense into past or future actions:

  Escaping The Present Base Tense:

  She fires the shotgun. She has loaded it just minutes before. Tomorrow she will remember nothing. She will have lost all sense of time.

  Escaping The Past Base Tense:

  He fell wounded. He had never expected her to shoot. Tomorrow they would ask him what had happened. He would have already asked himself a hundred times.

  In either case, if the past action goes on at some length, the “to have” auxiliary verbs are usually dropped after two or three sentences to avoid monotony:

  The neighbor appeared. She had heard an argument, had feared the worst. But when had it begun? Something seemed amiss yesterday when she spoke to the woman.

  For full flashbacks from the present tense, writers commonly jump to the simple past tense, without the “to have” forms:

  She fires the shotgun. She has loaded it just minutes before.

  (Flashback) She was just seven when her father showed her how to handle a firearm. One Sunday morning he took her and her brother to the upper pastures, and . . .

  Now she has shot a man. She lowers the weapon.

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  BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TENSE

  Certain authors try to create a wired ambience by using the present tense: “Tonight I slice my arm on the inside of my left bicep,” goes a short story in River City. Sometimes the effect is like prose on speed, an effect institutionalized by William Burroughs in his Naked Lunch (1962). But it grows speedily tedious if the inventiveness flags. A writer cannot simply superimpose the present tense to make a narrative piece sit up; its use has to make some functional sense.

  In poetry, for example, the present tense can function as a natural emotive voice, as it has done for millennia in poems of lamentation, exultation, and passion. “Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes / all my limbs,” wrote Sappho of her love trance in the sixth century B.C. But outside of stage directions and soliloquies, storytelling sailed through some three thousand years displaying minimal interest in the present tense—yet suffering from no lack of immediacy. After all, a reader skillfully drawn into the past is as good as sitting in the present.

  So what has spurred use of the present tense in recent writing? Some credit the rise of motion pictures, noting fiction’s frequent imitations of the forms of the screenplay. You-are-there radio broadcasts might also have played a part, though use of the present tense was still unusual in 1939, when British writer Joyce Cary felt he owed the world an explanation for using that tense in a novel. In his preface to Mister Johnson, the story of a charming but self-destructive African clerk at a colonial outpost, Cary wrote that until critical judgment sets in, the reader feels at one with a book’s characters:

  [I]f they are in the past tense, he is in the past, he takes a part in events that have happened, in history, over there. . . . But with a story in the present tense, when he, too, is in the present, he is carried unreflecting on the stream of events; his mood is not contemplative but agitated. . . . As Johnson swims gaily on the surface of life, so I wanted the reader to swim.

  Cary saw the present tense as a narrow beam of light that intentionally leaves a vast darkness unilluminated. Its use, say some modern critics, still requires that narrow beam—perhaps an intimate connection with a single character. John Updike did it with Harry Angstrom in the Rabbit quartet, and Walker Percy with Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. A number of autobiographical memoirs, such as Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, also beam their way through dark history via the present tense.

  Ursula Le Guin told interviewer Amy Sterling Casil that the present—this “special-use” tense—can “freeze” events as if in a single moment of happening or being. Anne Beattie found the present tense a natural way to transcribe quickly conceived images. Anita Shreve recast her manuscript of Fortune’s Rocks in the present tense to make its nineteenth-century ambience more immediate and less sentimental. And in the opening of their present-tense thriller Black Horse, Stephen King and Peter Straub announce their disquieting intent: “Right here and now . . . we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.”

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  PRESENT (TENSE) COMPANY INCLUDED

  Past-tense narratives often include present-tense passages to create special effects. In such cases, the present might be used for emphasis, for general commentary, or to set a stage. It is used to create distance—from the main action (as in flashbacks), the narrator (as with a switch of voice), or the normal state of the characters (as in dreams, interior monologues, and so on.).Sometimes the effect is a strobe-like intensity—past-present-past-present—a potentially jerky style that is not for every writer.

  These excerpts offer a glimpse of the many effects:

  A prologue, preceding the past-tense narrative:

  All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain many-ness of things that can’t be counted. It is all falling indelibly into the past.

  (—Don DeLillo, Underworld)

  Non-conscious state:

  [The fever] burned deeper now. He lost consciousness. And now he floats above the bed, he can see himself. Water rushes from his skin, pooling, it begins to move, it is no longer sweat but ants that crawl out of his pores and swarm.

  (—Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner)

  Flashback:

  He looked across the lobby, trying to see his father. . . . Roscoe, at this moment staring across time, finds his father sitting in this corner. It is a chilly spring afternoon in 1917.

  (—William Kennedy, Roscoe)

  Commentary:

  The woman at Macy’s asked, “Would you be interested in full-time elf or evening and weekend elf?”

  I said, “Full-time elf.” . . .

  I am a thirty-three-year-old man applying for a job as an elf.

  (—David Sedaris, “Santaland Diaries,” Barrel Fever)

  Intensity, lyricism:

  They kissed delicately. Sleep, my love. Sleep, she repeats to him. He says he cannot sleep; he is too happy. Talk to me, he said. I love your voice.

  (—Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover)

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  TENSE AND GENRE

  One’s rationale for using the present tense may be simply that it works (and sells) in a particular genre and is not yet a cliché. So far it seems to work for that breed of giddy urban novel in which characters gad about between meetings, lunches, and liaisons:

  On the first day of our life together (in the office, of course) Adam calls a staff meeting. And as he is telling his account managers about his expectations, I cannot help but think about my own expectations as his foot accidentally finds my leg.

  (—Michelle Cunnah, 32AA)

  It works for disease-of-the-day stories, reading like the writer might not make it to the end. It works for accounts of certain on-the-spot interviews (“He blows his nose and orders a Bordeaux as we begin.”). And even in past-tense literary fiction, it works as a change of pace—as stream of consciousness, dream, prologue, epilogue, character-narrated story, freeze-frame event, climactic scene, and the like. (See sidebar, “Present (Tense) Company Included.”)

  Rationale or none, writers should tread cautiously in such genres as gumshoe detective fiction and apocalyptic sci-fi, where overdone present tense sounds like parody. Romance publishers give the thumbs-down to present tense, claiming reader resistance to anything that dilutes the sense of beginning, middle, and end. As for poetry, only a poem’s intent should govern tense. According to the late poet and poetry editor Peter Davison, too many poets are “clinging feebly” to present indica
tive as a fashionable tense. But judging by the preponderance of that tense in such select anthologies as The Best American Poetry, other poetry editors are more amenable to its use.

  And while past tense has dominated the works appearing of late in best-short-story collections, present tense has still been very much present. Those using it have chosen the edgy spouse over the self-controlled one; and in these cases at least, the risky partnerships have worked.

  EIGHT

  DICTION: WE ARE THE WORDS

  “[W]e are the words that tell who we are,” wrote Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galleano. He could have been talking about diction, because nothing so quickly defines people as the words they choose from all the levels and shades a language offers. Humbert Humbert, Lolita’s urbane narrator, will never be confused with Huckleberry Finn, any more than Don Quixote could emerge from the diction of Sancho Panza.

  Diction, or overall word choice, is a partly natural, partly conscious effort for most of us. From such early models as parents, teachers, and peers, we acquire our functional vocabulary and various stylistic choices. Gradually or with a concentrated effort, we embrace certain choices to become, say, plain-spoken, super-cool, or silver-tongued. When our favored diction falls flat with an important audience, we tend to alter it—to put on a verbal costume. “A pleasure to meet you” is the dressed-up diction for an employer. “Yo, wassup?” (or the latest streetwise salutation) goes down with da homies.

  For writers, diction is always purposeful, always a costume donned for one effect or another. In each new work, it proclaims the narrator’s intended personality and point of view. It spins characters out of thin air, shades everything that is spoken about. It sets the mood of the performance and shapes responses to it.

  For example, in Graham Smith’s novel Last Orders, the author’s natural, Cambridge-influenced diction is set aside as the novel unfolds through the dictions of its working-class narrators. Among them are earthy Ray and lyrical Vic:

  [Ray:] Bernie pulls me a pint and puts it in front of me. He looks at me . . . with his loose, doggy face but he can tell I don’t want no chit-chat. . . .

  [Vic:] [A war ship] would rear up howling and hissing, ice like marzipan on the forward deck, the bows plunging and whacking . . . the swing and judder of steel.

  DICTION BY TYPE

  As members of a society, we share a common and constantly changing lexicon: thousands of everyday words and idioms, plus the most popular terminology from much-heard subcultures, such as teenage, ethnic, corporate, religious, or rural. As we go outside the shared lexicon, we develop individual patterns of diction according to which subcultural locutions we habitually choose. Among dozens of ways to say “calm down,” for instance, such habit-based choices might yield:

  Put a lid on it, for cryin’ out loud.

  I will not respond to these stressful and unproductive outbursts.

  I think you need to, like, channel that negative energy?

  You best chill, sucka.

  One’s overall vocabulary is usually a blend, hard to categorize as one single type of diction. But key choices can be tracked along any number of spectrums, including vulgar-to-eloquent and concise-to-verbose. We may hear of good and bad diction, correct and incorrect, but such judgments smack of elitism. Right versus wrong diction has to do only with purpose. High-flown diction might be right for a sermon, but plumb ridiculous for a manual:Conjoin securely the flare nut with the fitting lest they come asunder. Not under my sink.

  Much of the old class prejudice against “lower” vocabulary has faded, and many writers—perhaps most these days—pepper educated diction with colloquialisms and slang: “Yeah, what an antiestablishment wackjob,” wrote Arianna Huffington in Salon. And observed David Denby in The New Yorker: “When Giamatti goes over the top, he transcends Everyman schmuckiness and attains acting immortality.”

  Dictions also range along the spectrums of formal/informal, warm/cold, concrete/abstract, and assertive/timid, to name just a few. Scholars document these ranges (including male/female) in a given work, and readers sense them. But authors, as free as gods to choose any diction, must decide which will yield the desired effect.

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  DICTION AND AUDIENCE: THE RULES

  Should authors pump up the diction for an erudite readership? Write down to others? Ape the imagined diction of an audience? Or should art alone determine the diction of a work?

  Much depends on the type of writing. In several categories, rules or conventions govern diction as they do other style elements. The unwritten rules of academic writing, for example, decree a diction characterized by complex constructions, cautious vocabulary, and passive-voice dryness. One can buck the model, but at the risk of losing credibility and peer status. Likewise, popular media have their own models—some dumbed-down, others bright and inventive. Most family newspapers keep to a vernacular in the pre-teen range of intelligibility. Trend-driven slicks shape diction around fashion blab, valleytalk, gangsta-ese, and other extreme idioms, while fanzine writers adopt one version or another of geekspeak. Television pressures its writers to address the inner juvenile potato.

  Writers of literature for actual young people are told not to downshift to some perceived juvenile diction, which youthful readers reject. By fifth grade or so, most book-loving youngsters favor the elegance and force of a full-throttle grown-up voice. Consider this passage from a work that middle-schoolers read with ardor:

  Balthamos was slender; his narrow wings were folded elegantly behind his shoulders, and his face bore an expression that mingled haughty disdain with a tender, ardent sympathy, as if he would love all things if only his nature could let him forget their defects.

  (—Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass)

  While diction in such genres as romance do sometimes require a nod to audience, literary authors are free to follow aesthetic intent. Whichever dictions rise out of theme, content, setting, character, and so on, are generally considered the appropriate ones in literature.

  There is no artistic sellout, however, in echoing the diction of an intended audience— if, in the author’s view, it helps make a connection and communicates meanings. A writer like Sandra Cisneros shapes ethnic-influenced diction—“Ay, girl, I’m telling you”—into high art. Even the hard-edged diction of a wave of hiphop novelists, horrifying to some traditionalists, does for its readers what egghead diction does for eggheads: it engages, stimulates, and gives voice to feelings and ideas. Listen to Sister Souljah, who, like gangsta-lit writers Renay Jackson and Shannon Holmes, built an avid following of hip-hop readers:

  After my hair was butter, I left with Natalie to go check my Aunt Laurie. . . . We had plans to go to Big Moe’s, the local bar and dance set that be banging on Friday nights. . . . There was never no problem about Big Moe or his bouncers getting in your business. . . . I bet none of these chicks lived in an apartment as laced as Souljah’s. When you get a bill in the mail it ain’t a “we” thing. When I buy clothes they ain’t for “we” they for me. I live for me. I die for me.

  (—The Coldest Winter Ever)

  Still, those who tilt diction to audience face certain pitfalls, among them the appearance of condescension and pandering. When preppies speak in rap, they hip-hop on thin ice. When speech writers feed folksy diction to politicians headed to the hustings, it can backfire with those down-home voters. Columnists ring false when they force their diction to mimic the working stiff’s or inflate it in some surge of moral passion.

  One interesting technique of diction is to flip it against the expectations of an audience. Readers might expect fastidious, curmudgeonly diction in a book defending rigid standards for English punctuation. But in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss frames her case in chatty colloquialisms, with outbursts as unrefined as “argy bargy” and “cock-a-hoop.” Concluding one chapter, she remarked that beauty of composition is “not to be sneezed at in this rotten world.” And the rotten world—language sticklers included—loved it to the tune of sales i
n the millions.

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  THE WRITER’S CHOICES OF DICTION

  Ah, those exhilarating choices writers face at the outset of a work!Past tense or present? First-person or third? Omniscient or limited point of view? And now, add the matter of diction.

  “Speak, that I may see you,” Socrates was said to have told a youth who visited him. How will your fictional characters make themselves seen by their word choices? How will author-as-narrator speak and thus appear? In an intelligent vernacular? With a street-smart eloquence? In a politically correct academese? Should the author’s own diction be natural, mixed, or alien?

  For writers, the main challenges are to:

  Choose dictions that are appropriate to the topic and audience.Breezy slang in a history of smallpox? Ugh. Literary diction in a sports story? Yes, but for sophisticated audiences. (Poetic diction, by the way, in the sense of bower, quoth, dovewinged, and other archaisms, has been pretty much ruled inappropriate for any purpose other than laughs.)