Pullman’s article drew sympathetic responses from many readers who shared his dislike of novels written entirely in the present tense. In the interests of full disclosure, I confess that often I too experience an involuntary feeling of resistance when I confront a novel written in the present tense.

What is it about novels written in the present tense that makes some people so irate?

And why is it that for many people, the past tense is the default tense of the novel? What does the tense of a novel tell us? And why in the past few years have we seen such a proliferation of young adult novels written in the present tense?

In the middle of last summer, in the middle of Fargo, North Dakota, in the middle of an oil crisis, in the middle of six lanes of pickup trucks, SUVs, 4x4s, semis, and minivans, all busy idling, I understood.

This is about not connecting yesterday with tomorrow, I thought. It’s about “it’s all happening now.” About looking neither backward nor forward. It’s about being in an adolescent’s head—a head of hyperbole in which “ruin my life forever” and “worst hair in the history of the world” (say) are statements about Now and only Now.

But writing in the present tense is also a political, even an ideological choice—just as writing in the past tense is a political choice. For many years, virtually every novel was written in the past tense. It was, in a way, how the author, through the narrator, asserted authority: I am a historian, even if of a fictional universe. This is how it happened, the author declares:

The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen.

—Diana Wynne Jones, Archer’s Goon, 1984

On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, Pepper had been awake for fully two minutes before realizing it was the day he must die.

—Geraldine McCaughrean, The Death-Defying Pepper Roux, 2009

It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips.

—Rudyard Kipling, “Mowgli’s Brothers” in The Jungle Book, 1894

These lines don’t invite us to respond, “Oh yeah? It did? Sez who?” There’s nothing provisional about them—they state the day, the age, the very hour. They establish a world; they make a claim. The narrator may be reliable or unreliable, but in either case, he or she is making a statement about something that has happened, and in a voice of authority.

But the past tense does much more than that. The very past-ness of the story acknowledges that the story has been shaped. The past tense shows the narrator, perhaps even the author, quietly admitting responsibility for the way the story is told, admitting that it’s a product of looking back and seeing the threads of cause-and-effect. It’s a silent declaration on the author’s part: this is an act of interpretation, of art, with what I see as the meaningful bits included in the story. In a sense, the past tense is the author acknowledging that to write is to take a stand, to come up with a reading. To put this and that together: to discern cause and consequence.

Of course the story in the present tense is also shaped, but the present tense hides that influence. It doesn’t admit to the determining hand of the writer or narrator, so readily available in the interpretation in retrospect. We don’t have the past-tense assurance that the narrator has made sense of what’s happening, nor the tacit acknowledgment that some bits are included, some left out, and what is mentioned is fundamental to someone’s interpretation of the story, of turning it into a meaningful idea. In this way the present tense is a layer of concealment over the writer’s influence on the way the story is told, and on the fact that to tell it, the writer has taken a stand. The present tense is reportage or live drama: every present tense verb is a step into nothing, into a tale that must make itself up from moment to moment. A Tweet, perhaps. A Facebook comment. Or even reality TV—happening right before your
very eyes.

No wonder, then, that Suzanne Collins uses the present tense in the enormously popular The Hunger Games (2008)—because Collins’s first-person narrator, Katniss, is fighting for her life in a deadly, Survivor-inspired game show. Everything happens now: suspense, fear, breathlessness, nasty, nasty violence, and an intensely pitched uncertainty about the outcome.

As if in a last-ditch effort, Peeta raises his fingers, dripping with blood from his leg, up to Cato’s arm. Instead of trying to wrestle his way free, his forefinger veers off and makes a deliberate X on the back of Cato’s hand. Cato realizes what it means exactly one second after I do. I can tell by the way the smile drops from his lips. But it’s one second too late because, by that time, my arrow is piercing his hand. He cries out and reflexively releases Peeta who slams back against him. For a horrible moment, I think they’re both going over. I dive forward just catching hold of Peeta as Cato loses his footing on the blood-slick horn and plummets to the ground.

Here the present tense gives us one movement after another—raises, veers, makes an X, realizes, cries out, releases, slams back, dives forward, catches hold, loses footing, plummets to the ground. Action after action builds the suspense: will our narrator survive to the next paragraph? The reader is mesmerized: it’s all happening in front of our eyes!

Collins is a canny, effective writer; she enfolds simultaneous action and split seconds into her narrator’s perceptions, intensifying the nowness of it all, the life-or-deathness of it all. Captive to the motion of the moment, walled into the arena in which televised Katniss fights for survival, we are transfixed in the present. Ironically, Collins provides us with the very kind of entertainment she is trying to critique: we have become enraptured viewers of a reality show, and are pumped with triumphant, sickened relief when the other guy falls to his death.

And like viewers of a reality show, we aren’t being shown that the fix is in. We hear Katniss’s eloquent, simultaneous reporting; we see through her eyes. In the immediacy of her account, Collins doesn’t tip the shaping hand of the story-maker—narrator or author—but instead intensifies the Now through dramatic enactment in the present tense. Is there a moment after this moment? Nothing about the words promises one.

It’s that difference, partly, that makes present-tense naysayers irate. Whatever the pretense of your fiction, acknowledge your part in it! Tip your hand; remind your reader that this is artful invention, not reportage! Don’t compose your story as a momentary blip followed by another momentary blip; pretend that it will last until the present is past!

After all, the present is so fleeting that it barely exists (and really, the pretense that a girl like Katniss has the leisure to compose her story so eloquently under the circumstances is laughable). The present is over in less than the time it takes to read a word. It has no duration, but it does ensure that the story will always be happening now: no young adult reader will be able to pick up the story and say, “It happened long ago; it’s irrelevant.”

It’s the video aspect of The Hunger Games that clues us into the proliferation of present tense novels, I think. For the present tense is the tense of Twitter and Facebook; but even more it reflects the experience of video culture. With present tense verbs, video culture finds its way into the written text. If every second of a film or YouTube clip can happen again and again in front of our eyes in real time, perhaps we have given up the notion of pastness as well as the notion of conclusion. Re-viewing makes the past present, after all, and the scrolling motion of film that used to accentuate the brevity of the time (now you see it; now it’s over) now allows us to stop the image and live in an endless present. The present is the tense of motion but, ironically, it’s also the tense of arrested motion, of stasis:

The rest of us link our arms for warmth and let our feet lick at the sandy bottom. We’re like a band of floating nomads.

—Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty, 2003

I turn away from the railing. I cannot stand this any longer.

—Veronica Roth, Divergent, 2011

maura: i am isaac, will.
me: don’t be stupid. he’s a guy.
maura: no, he’s not. he’s a profile. i made him up.
me: yeah, right.
maura: i did.

no. no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

me: what?

no please no what no no please no fuck no NO.

maura: isaac doesn’t exist. he’s never existed.
me: you can’t—
maura: you’re so caught.

—John Green and David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, 2010

The verb drops out and there it is: the eternal present. The tense of live drama, enactment, improv, adolescent nowness, being stuck in traffic, and lifting a foot to step forth into a future that may or may not exist.

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Roger, Maurice, Sergio Ruzzier, Frann Preston-Gannon, Ali Bahrampour, Denise Saldutti, photo by Richard Asch

I was of course kidding when I characterized the Sendak Fellowship as a reality show, but there are some aspects of it that are similar. Four people whose only things necessarily  in common are  talent and an interest in creating picture books share a large house for a month. They also share access to an eminence gris down the road. (I’m already thinking of The Magus.)

But the great thing about the Sendak Fellowship is that there is no competition, except maybe around the Monopoly game I spotted in the living room. The fellowship is its own reward: each artist (Sergio Ruzzier, Frann Preston-Gannon, Ali Bahrampour and Denise Saldutti) gets a room and a month to do his or her work, and counsel–if they want it–from Sendak. There are no expectations, and I noticed that each illustrator was working on at least a couple of things, resurrecting old projects and beginning new ones. The house is huge and airy and would be perfect except for the fact that it is in the middle of (a very beautiful) nowhere, next-door to Sendak’s house (“next-door” having a rather more expansive definition than you or I are used to.) The artists were kind enough to share their works-in-progress and, wow, great things are happening. The Fellowship seems to provide three things helpful to getting stuff done: time, room, and peer pressure. Maurice is also at work on a new book; all I can tell you is that it’s very funny.

I’ve known Maurice for thirty years now, and while at eighty-three he is physically fragile (and I noticed at dinner that he, Richard and I are ALL getting deaf) he is still the most vivid raconteur I have ever met. Nobody enacts scandalized outrage better. I don’t envy his biographer, though, as Maurice is completely capable of telling the same allegedly true story five different ways, all equally convincing.

Maurice, his Kids, and I, (along with program director Dona Ann McAdams and Maurice’s longtime assistant Lynn Caponera) spent several hours talking about picture book publishing and reviewing, the balance between art and commerce, and how to make a career out of creating children’s books. Maurice and I had a bit of an argument about whether he was romanticizing the 60s. (Of course he was. That’s what people do with the 60s.) Although we did not completely agree about the ways publishing has changed in the last half century, I was left wondering if a young illustrator  starting out today could build the same kind of career that Maurice did in the 1950s and 60s, with a mixture of to-order illustration, pictures for other people’s picture book texts, and wholly original work. He asked me if someone today could do a book like his first (Kenny’s Window) that was not successful, but still be allowed and encouraged to do another (and another). I don’t know the answer to this but maybe some of you do. More pictures tomorrow.

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And can we talk about that title for a minute? In my opinion, “The Lost Symbol” is right up there with “When You Reach Me” for unmemorability, and by that I mean my inability to remember it correctly. The Secret Symbol? The Lost Code? When I Reach You? When You Get Here? Some years ago I had similar trouble with the beautiful picture book Night Driving by Jon Coy and Peter McCarty. In the space of one issue of the Horn Book I think I referred to it as Night Ride, Drive at Night and Night Drive Home (oops, that’s Joni Mitchell).

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I compared fiction for ages 12 and up reviewed in the Magazine in the September issues of 2009, 1999, 1989 and 1979 (October issue; we were on a different schedule then).

Average number of pages in books for teens reviewed in 1979: 151
1989: 157
1999: 233
2009: 337

Now, part of this is the current preponderance of fantasy, which has always tended to run longer–the longest book reviewed in the ’79 issue was Robert Westall’s (fabulous) Devil on the Road, at 245pp. But when I took fantasy and sf out of the 2009 sample, I still came up with 280 pp. average for realistic YA fiction, almost twice as long as it was thirty years ago.

The success of Harry Potter must take some of the heat for this; another factor could be that YA has gotten older: there is much more published for older high school students than there was even ten years ago. Plus, realistic YA seems more character-driven than it used to be in the old problem novel days, and while this has given the genre undeniable depths, it may also have encouraged a certain amount of yammering on. And people are also blaming the nexus of word-processing, larger lists, and smaller editorial staffs combining to mean less pruning. What else? I suppose we have to consider the possibility that the current crop of Horn Book editors and reviewers likes longer books, but surely you know us better than that.

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Here’s a taste:

“Fuck that Amy, Give me the bottle.” Beatrice had just downed her third shot that night and was reaching for the entire bottle of Jack Daniels as her drunk friends looked on, laughing their heads off. Her alcoholism had just begun that past month. It was two twenty am and she was already high, getting drunker by the second.

She was a victim of unrequited love.

She had fallen into a downward spiral of depression, and only one man could pull her out.

-

Winifred Foster went to work every morning, no matter how hungover she was from the previous night. 7:00am at the local diner, close to where the spring used to be. She was now 107 years old. But to her ‘friends’ and colleagues, she was 17 year old Beatrice Allen, new to the town of Treegap since a year ago, when she had grown tired of Tokyo. Winnie had dyed her naturally chocolate hair black, and bought some hazel contact lenses to hide her vibrant green-blue eyes. She did this in fear that somebody should recognize her, over time. She kept a low profile, and traveled around a lot, blown off lots of replaceable friends, but she did this because she could not risk the secret of Tuck Everlasting.

The spring had survived, she was still the rightful owner of the wood, she refused to sell it. Even if she had wished to, no buyers would be able to track her down. So many years of aliases, and fake IDs. Her actual identity was a mystery to anyone who wanted to find out. She only faintly remembered the ‘Man in The Yellow Suit’ now, but he was still there, taunting her somehow. Maybe it was her remorse, for not being there when her mother died, for faking her death and leaving everyone behind. It wasn’t her fault she had begun getting older and not a thing had changed. She had no choice but to run. She had a new life to expect then. Now? After nearly one hundred years, and still no Tucks. She had no idea what to expect.

And as she poured some water for a kind gentleman in his booth, she wondered if she could make it another day, in her meaningless existence. She contemplated drinking herself into alcohol poisoning; but ‘of course’, she thought with a bitter laugh she would never die.

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I told you Martha and I were writing a book, but apparently somebody, um, beat us to it. More than a century ago.

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Bellini’s Norma is something of a Mount Everest for sopranos. She’s an allegedly virginal Druid priestess who has in fact been getting it on with with one of the occupying Romans with two children resulting. Then she finds out that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with her number-one handmaiden, Adalgisa. They sing a duet of “Does He Love You (the Way He Loves Me)?” later popularized by Reba McEntire and Linda Davis. Then Norma thinks about killing the children but instead decides to kill herself, and the boyfriend, realizing how good he had it, joins her in self-immolation.

It’s passionate stuff, as you can see, but the challenge comes from marrying the drama with the sheer technical difficulty of Bellini’s bel canto music–lots of fast scales, trills and other coloratura magic coupled with tons of close harmony. You need a big but agile voice and those are rare. There haven’t been any hugely acclaimed Normas since Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland (although I’ve been hearing good things about a recent Edita Gruberova recording). But every big-girl soprano has it in her landscape if not in her sights: will I do it? Can I do it? Will I disgrace myself? etc.

But writers have to make it up for themselves every time; we don’t say, “yeah, Holes was great, but when’s he going to write Walk Two Moons?” I do know that children’s writers, particularly, face the “so when are you going to write a real book” question, but only from amateurs. Is there a mountain a writer is expected to climb? Do you feel the need to write a Big Book? We’ll leave the question of whether you should kill yourself, your boyfriend, your best friend, or your children for another time.

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