J. E. Landau

For a while now, I have been thinking about the way that I write. This is mostly because I think I am a mediocre writer, and I would like to be a better one. One interesting dimension of this is that people write in ways that are mechanically different.

People who paid attention during English class in school (or who play video games) are likely familiar with the distinction between first, second, or third person points of view, as well as the difference between past, present, and future tense, but in truth, these are not the only points of view and tenses that are available.

Everyone who reads fiction has encountered first and third person, they are the bread and butter of writing. Third person can be limited or omniscient, but the important thing that distinguishes it is that it is written using pronouns other than “you” and “I”, even if it takes place in the perspective of one of the characters.

Second person sees a little bit of use. If you’re a fan of interactive fiction or choose-your-own-adventure stories, you’ll know that it’s common there. You tell the game to do something, like “pick up the torch”, and then the game tells you, “you pick up the torch”. Already, we’re getting a bit out of the comfort zone of most writing. The only novel I’ve read that was mostly in the second person is Anne Leckie’s The Raven Tower, which I would highly recommend. The novel is told in the form of one character narrating to another, who is being addressed directly, and this gives it a highly conversational, and then conspiratorial tone.

In terms of tense, past and present are most commonly used in fiction. I believe that the vast majority of English-language fiction is written in the past tense, but it’s been more common for young adult novels to be written in the present tense, such as the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Tense tends to be a lot freer in writing than perspective, and I think that it’s not as simple as it may immediately seem. First of all, grammatical tense actually has many more options than past, present, and future. Actions can be complete or incomplete, they can happen in an abstract more-distant-past (“he had gone to the market, before the bomb went off”), and they can combine different attributes. You can also use one tense as another, such as the common storytelling technique seen in standup comedy where the present tense is used to describe past events, boosting their immediacy: “so I come up to this guy, and I tell him…” is grammatically present, but as readers we instinctively know that we are being told a story about the past.

Time can also be abstract or concrete. For example, you can say, concretely, “she kicked down the door and stepped into the room, pistol drawn”, and that gives you two events that are closely correlated in time. But we can also get a lot more abstract, and say something like “the brunch club met a few more times, but eventually disbanded.” This takes us out of a specific chronology, and lets us skip over large expanses of free-flowing time.

Now, we’ve talked about the past and present, but not the future, and that’s a little funny, isn’t it? After all, I write and read mostly science fiction, which are stories set in the future, and so it seems natural to say that the events in them will take place. I think part of the reason that this isn’t done is that it can feel extremely clunky and awkward. Michael Martone’s short piece Future Tense exploits and notes this directly, saying “the people of this small Johnson County town are planning events that will have happened (is that even a tense?)” when discussing the town where, according to Star Trek’s history, Captain Kirk will someday be born. English’s future tense relies on prepending the word “will” before every verb, which is a copula that robs even the most vigorous language of its impact.

I think that another major obstacle to the use of the future tense in fiction is that it already has strong associations. To us, the future tense implies a “prophetic mode”, which great solemnity, certainty, and religious tones. To take my earlier example of kicking open a door and stepping into a room, in the future, it becomes: “she will kick down the door, and step into the room, pistol drawn”. There’s that will at the front, which makes it sound like a prediction, and if you keep going with wills, “the brunch club will disband,” “I will come up to this guy, and tell him,” “you will pick up the torch”, it starts to feel like commands, or predictions, or future visions, and not like ordinary description of events.

This isn’t to say that people never use the future tense. Because tense is flexible within works, and serves a variety of informational purposes, it’s not uncommon to shift to it to emphasize a point. For example, after a book of describing the past actions of a character, you could use the future tense to show off their intentions: “Ethan realizes that he’s been wasting his time for years. He will do better, someday.”

Of course, in the past tense, it would probably go something like “Ethan realized that he’d been wasting his time for years. He would do better, someday.” Note that instead of “will”, it’s “would”, and this is an example of irrealis writing, describing events that will not necessarily come to pass. That is probably why the future tense can feel so strong—it implies that it’s not just an intention, but a real, future that will certainly happen.

Irrealis writing could be a way to write a story, but I suspect that like the future tense it would wear on an audience and really rob itself of its own impact. Perhaps it’s better left as its own grammatical category.

Returning to perspective, however, I believe that there are perspectives beyond first, second, and third person that can be used grammatically in a work. The first one, which I have been experimenting on for some time, is narrative plurality. For “I” there is “we”, for “you” there is “y’all” (or just “you”), and for “he/she/it/they/etc.” there is “they”. Of course, you may note that only “we” is properly, unambiguously plural in every dialect, as the English language has eliminated the “thou” vs. “you” distinction and “y’all” is considered informal, while “they” has taken on a not-so-new-but-certainly-more-common life as a gender neutral pronoun for single specific people.

Nevertheless, I feel like there is significant potential in using these plural forms for narrative effect. One thing I have been experimenting with is narratives of joining with other people mentally, for example, in a hive mind or as a part of some kind of assimilation story. There, I think, you could have a revealing switch from “I” to “we”, or from “she” or “he” to “they”, giving a little bit of punch without disrupting sentence structure by emphasis.

I think that this sort of shift could be useful for writing stories of transformation and personal change, as well, and I have some ideas for how I might want to use it when writing fiction exploring gender and transhuman topics.

Another use of “we”, I think, might be for a conspiratorial story. “We” implies that the narrator and the reader are both involved in the events, and so the reader can be put in the place of a character. For example, two criminals are discussing a crime they committed, and one is narrating to the other, using “we” to try and spread the guilt between the two of them. Alternatively, it could be used to confront the reader, involving their real self in the narrative after beginning with first or second person addresses.

For a more abstract, less-traditional narrative, maybe something closer to worldstate literature, you might be able to literally describe “us” and “them” feelings of crowds with plural narration. You could convey some sort of sweeping, generalized perspective.

It’s not exactly what I want, but I think that second person plural, “y’all” narrative, sounds like an address to a crowd, which is also a time-honored literary trope, both in the form of narrative soliloquy and Greek choirs, and in the form of actual political speech.

Another strategy that I haven’t seen, but I think could be interesting, is writing a conventional multi-viewpoint story, from the perspectives of a variety of characters, but some of them use different points of view. Perhaps a trio of characters, using first, second, and third person perspectives, and exploiting the differences between them and using it to highlight the differences in the way they feel. Maybe the third-person-perspective reflects a degree of dissociation while the first-person perspective is for someone more in tune with their own feelings, or perhaps it’s used to hide or reveal information. Second person perspective tends to reveal less than the first person about a person’s outward appearance, and first person tends to reveal less about their appearance than the third.

For another use, perhaps these perspectives could be combined to give different perspectives on an event, or different ways of feeling about the same perspective on an event. I have been lightly experimenting with this, but so far, I am not very happy about the results, and telling stories with repetition can make it hard to keep the audience engaged. For something even more experimental, it might be interesting to explore writing in a three-column format, perhaps acting as a form of prose poetry.

Still, I think that in any of these forms, an author using plural or nonstandard narration will be swimming upstream, because it will not be possible to rely on the audience’s assumption for the style. That could be good for breaking the mold and pushing the limits, but, as someone I spoke to online about this said, “I don’t think that English language is designed to do what you want it to.”