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mollyringleI feel like I've been too quiet lately and ought to say something. Sorry about the general lack of commenting, by the way.
One of the things keeping me busy is the latest novel. It's now over 60,000 words long, and probably three-quarters done. So, naturally, now is when I've decided to stop writing in present tense, as I've been doing since the start for some unknown reason, and change it all to past tense like you find in normal narrative fiction. Present tense, though it nicely captures the current feel of a situation and therefore crops up frequently in short stories and poetry, often strikes people as pretentious or distracting in novels. And, really, why throw down another roadblock in my own path to publication? Having a weird plot that doesn't neatly fit any particular genre is going to make things hard enough.
So, past tense it is.
But this is not as easy as it sounds. It's a mind-numbing, long, tedious task. You can't just hit a button in Word and make it convert all present tense to past. For one thing, there is no such command. For another, you don't want all present-tense verbs changed to past. You just want the narrative verbs changed. The dialogue needs to stay as it is. So you have to search and replace on individual words, and look at each and every instance that Word turns up, and opt whether to change it or not. And that is where the massive time-consumption enters.
We all have several hundred verbs in our everyday working vocabulary, to point out just one problem. To judge from the workload so far, I apparently use most of them. To point out another problem, some verbs, in one form or another, double as other words. For instance, say you use the present-tense verb "remarks," as in "she remarks..." If you tell Word to replace all instances of "remarks" with "remarked," then you may end up with a sentence somewhere that reads, "They made several remarked." Woops. So, thanks to the 3rd person singular present-tense morpheme in English happening to take the same form as the regular plural for nouns ("-s"), you've got to watch out for the nouns and not change those. (Hmm, I think I just freaked out everyone who doesn't like linguistics.)
I'm nowhere near done with this process. I'm wondering if there's any language in which this would really be easy to fix. Maybe one in which tense was expressed by a separate particle, unconnected to the verb root, which always stood alone and never blended with the form of any other words. Yeah, dream on.
Moral of story? When you start writing a long piece of prose, be very sure which tense you want to write in, be prepared to defend your decision, and then stick with it. It's fortunate that in English we only have two tenses to choose from. Imagine the damage I might do if the imperfect were an option...
One of the things keeping me busy is the latest novel. It's now over 60,000 words long, and probably three-quarters done. So, naturally, now is when I've decided to stop writing in present tense, as I've been doing since the start for some unknown reason, and change it all to past tense like you find in normal narrative fiction. Present tense, though it nicely captures the current feel of a situation and therefore crops up frequently in short stories and poetry, often strikes people as pretentious or distracting in novels. And, really, why throw down another roadblock in my own path to publication? Having a weird plot that doesn't neatly fit any particular genre is going to make things hard enough.
So, past tense it is.
But this is not as easy as it sounds. It's a mind-numbing, long, tedious task. You can't just hit a button in Word and make it convert all present tense to past. For one thing, there is no such command. For another, you don't want all present-tense verbs changed to past. You just want the narrative verbs changed. The dialogue needs to stay as it is. So you have to search and replace on individual words, and look at each and every instance that Word turns up, and opt whether to change it or not. And that is where the massive time-consumption enters.
We all have several hundred verbs in our everyday working vocabulary, to point out just one problem. To judge from the workload so far, I apparently use most of them. To point out another problem, some verbs, in one form or another, double as other words. For instance, say you use the present-tense verb "remarks," as in "she remarks..." If you tell Word to replace all instances of "remarks" with "remarked," then you may end up with a sentence somewhere that reads, "They made several remarked." Woops. So, thanks to the 3rd person singular present-tense morpheme in English happening to take the same form as the regular plural for nouns ("-s"), you've got to watch out for the nouns and not change those. (Hmm, I think I just freaked out everyone who doesn't like linguistics.)
I'm nowhere near done with this process. I'm wondering if there's any language in which this would really be easy to fix. Maybe one in which tense was expressed by a separate particle, unconnected to the verb root, which always stood alone and never blended with the form of any other words. Yeah, dream on.
Moral of story? When you start writing a long piece of prose, be very sure which tense you want to write in, be prepared to defend your decision, and then stick with it. It's fortunate that in English we only have two tenses to choose from. Imagine the damage I might do if the imperfect were an option...
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 05:06 pm (UTC)Why not send out chapters for people to edit for you? Break up the workload, as it were.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 05:51 pm (UTC)And don't even get me started on the imperfect. I've been taking Spanish three years and I still can't get it straight.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 08:58 pm (UTC)The worst about the imperfect is that it doesn't end there. There's something called the imperfective in some languages, which is slightly different than the imperfect. Don't ask me how; I blocked that from my mind.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 09:34 pm (UTC)Huh? Just because some of them use auxiliary verbs doesn't mean they aren't tenses....
no subject
Date: 2004-05-12 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-13 01:05 pm (UTC)Although honestly, I think calling them "aspects" or "moods" rather than "tenses" is a distinction that doesn't make a difference.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-13 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-13 06:17 am (UTC)60,000 words
Date: 2004-05-13 09:36 am (UTC)My first thought was "She's writing The Lord Of The Rings!" - then I re-read and saw 60,000. Whew . . .
Best of luck to you - I'm about 25,000 words into my first novel (I've been working on it longer than I care to admit) - Can't wait to be at the point you're at.
Thinkling Bill
Re: 60,000 words
Date: 2004-05-13 04:43 pm (UTC)It does seem daunting to finish a novel, but there's no magic to it - just perseverance. With this one, I did a little math and told myself that if I could just try to write 300 words a day, more or less, most days, then by the time one year has gone by, I'll have 90,000 words: a novel. I haven't quite worked at full speed - this 60,000 words has taken me about 9 months, which comes out to an average of 222 words a day - but every little bit helps!
Best of luck.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-13 09:09 pm (UTC)Best of luck. Sounds about as much entertaining as watching paint clip its toenails. :(
no subject
Date: 2004-05-14 08:17 pm (UTC)