I’m going to apologize in advance to anyone who ever has to read my novel later, but I wanted to try something out. Most of my novel is written in past tense, with snippets in present tense where memories are concerned or flashbacks or dreams to make the past tense seem more vivid and fluid. But I threw in a whole chapter — a prologue really — written in present tense. And I love it. But it’s set about thirty years before the start of the novel. What this amounts to is that the present is written in past tense and the past is written in present tense. I thought that was clever. In hindsight. Really, I just wanted to mess around with a scene in my head, and the best way for it to come together was just as it did.
A lot of this is due to my chronology. I really set myself up for confusion by starting one of my prologues (there are three because I am ridiculous) twenty years before the first chapter, and tacking on each consecutive prologue before the first. So, I suppose, instead of covering eighty years in thirty chapters, I’m covering about ten years in twenty seven chapters, and the relevant bits of the past in three prologues (spread out over three books). In terms of skimming the story down to the immediate action, that is very nearly the best I can do.
I really like present tense, but I feel like it’s easy to abuse. I use it sparingly, because if I didn’t have any reserve with it, I would keep writing chapters in present tense and lose track of my plot entirely. In this particular section, I thought I’d use it to give one of my characters a memory from her own point of view — you don’t really get to see a lot of her in her own mind, or with her family. Here’s a snippet:
Sanctuary
They stand before her like other men — not her boys, not the babes she taught to read, to walk, to sing. Fera — Feruq, after his grandfather — is taller, but Ithas is built stronger. Morica laughs with them, straightens their tunics. Even at fourteen, she stands tall enough to meet her brothers’ eyes, and Rema, outside this triangle of her children, sighs in contentment. She has them now, all three of them. But today, the war begins, and nothing will be the same after this. So she treasures this, and does not close her eyes. Still, somehow, she misses them, and when the boys turn to go, she realizes that she has not said a word to them at all. It is almost too late now. The horses are clattering their way down the hill into the valley. But she cries out above the wind, above the clamor of her cowardice, and they return: her boys, always her boys. There are too many words to say, too many fears that she will not name. Ithas will return and take his father’s title. Fera will become a statesman, a Paladin perhaps, for all roads are open to him. Morica, she will have into her old age, a little longer than the boys, reckless as they are, trying to sieve glory out of a war that has not yet begun. Not yet.
I haven’t quite finished this chapter, so I don’t know what the last third will hold. Something about war and intrigue and such — nothing huge. I’ll keep you posted!