OK, now getting close to the end of Week One of the book edit. I’ve hit all the 6 a.m. mornings, so feeling quite proud of myself. However, the problem of voice and style, and in particular tense have been troubling me much.
I have four narrators and they refuse to stick to one time frame. They keep talking about the past, the present and sometimes even the future, so I find myself exploring the depths of every verb tense in the English language. There are many. I looked them up, just to see how many I’d used; there are 16 in total.
Now, I have always believed (up to now) that ‘tense’ is an important choice in the voice of a narrator, and that ‘voice’ is the most critical thing in a book because it is the first thing a reader receives completely from any piece of writing. Readers get a ‘complete’ understanding of the ‘voice’, long before they are fully introduced to any character, plot strand, theme or any other parameter of the narrative structure. Failure to communicate a strong hook within the voice is a fatal flaw in terms of ‘selling’ the work; failure to get the voice in line with what follows is also a fatal flaw, but one which may take the reader a while to recognise. So now, I have to do some thinking: How does tense really fit in?
Suddenly it is clearer. It does not seem to me that when I say, “Today, I am writing this blog; yesterday I sat on the M1 for two hours,” that I have changed my narrative voice halfway through, so maybe the tense I write in is not such a strong aspect of the novel’s ‘voice’ as I have previously considered.
More thinking on this is clearly required.
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