McEwan on Present Tense

I was in my thirties and helplessly uninformed when I joined Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons for a workshop in Spoleto, Itay. In a small room whose contours I remember still, among people whose faces I won't forget, we talked tombstones, genre, and the trick of tense, among other things. Past versus present versus future. What one loses with each, what one gains.

It's the tense conversation that always floats its way back to me, especially now, as I return to an historical novel that unfolds via multiple voices and tenses.

This morning, I picked up ATONEMENT and leafed through for the sound of it, for insights into its making. I was surprised to find this passage on page 294, surprised I didn't have it stored somewhere in my obviously increasingly sieve-like brain. These instructions to a young writer come from a publisher whom Briony, the book's heroine, has contacted. He has something keenly smart to say about the use of present tense:

"The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement."

Note to self: Don't ever forget the forward movement.