I’m having a synapse refusal today- I’m trying to remember what you call this style of writing.
Example: He walks into the room, picks up the ocelot, and puts on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records.
The opposite is this:
Example: He walked into the room, picked up the ocelot, and put on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records.
Is the first one just present tense or is it more specific than that?
Also, which do you prefer when reading a novel?
They’re also both third person perspective. I prefer the second when reading, because I like to feel like I’m being told a story that already happened.
Yes, I would say that there in no particular difference in the style of those examples other than the tense (present versus past.)
The first is sometimes called ‘the continuous present’, i.e. a narrative structure in which all verbs are present tense. The master of this style is Damon Runyon, whose short stories are ALL written in the continuous present (he wrote ‘The Idyll Of Miss Sarah Brown’ which became the musical ‘Guys and Dolls’ and which is IMHO one of the greatest short stories ever written). Apparently in the complete canon of Runyon’s work he slipped up ONCE and wrote a verb in the past tense, but I’ve never found it.
Use of the present tense has been something of a trend in fiction for the past 20 years or so. Traditionally, most fiction was written in the past tense.
The first one sounds like stage directions, which are always written in present tense.
This may sound odd, but what’s the difference between continuous present and any other significant use of the present tense in writing fiction?? I suppose that some stories that are mostly written in present tense would occasionally slip into past (the same way that stories written in the past tense would slip into past perfect.) Does continuous present never do so?? (It’s a little hard to tell from the limited sample if the style Sampiro is thinking of is really continuous present, because everything happens about the same time.)
Can you provide an example of continuous present versus another use of the present tense??
I’ve seen the term *historic present * used (in both English and French grammars) to describe this usage of making past events more real and immediate by describing them in the present tense in a narrative.
At least 40 years. Although you can certainly find many earlier examples, the present tense became prevalent in 60s fiction through modernist writers like Donald Barthelme and editors like L. Rust Hills, who championed many such stories.
No story written in a present tense should ever slip into the past tense. That would be something a good editor should pick up on and correct unless it was done for a specific stylistic point.
And the continuous present is the same as the present tense, at lest in terms of Damon Runyon, who wrote Guys and Dolls in the simple present tense. There are other types of present tenses, however. You could have a story written in the present progressive tense - He is walking into the room, picking up the ocelot, and putting on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records. - or the present perfect tense - He has walked into the room, has picked up the ocelot, and has put on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records. - but most people would find that extremely awkward.
As with any other style, the use of the present should fit the story to which it is paired. I have a recent story that is all about memory and so I wrote it in the present tense because it heightened the characters tension between what was currently in their lives and their memories. If I had set it in the past tense the story just wouldn’t have worked.
Hmm, not sure if this counts as a stylistic point, but how about a story with the main ‘stream’ of the plot, 85% of the narration or so, being in present tense, with a few flashback scenes that are written in the past tense to emphasize that they happened ‘a long time ago’??
Flashback scenes are entirely separate. I was objecting to chrisk’s statement that stories may “occasionally slip into past.”
IOW, it wouldn’t be proper to write: “He walks into the room, picked up the ocelot, and puts on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records.”
Okay, I guess we have different opinions on what it means to slip. 
How about… (just for another example)
“He walks into the room, picks up the ocelot, and puts on his mother’s burka while dancing to Roy Acuff records. A week ago he entered the room so drunk that he could barely stand up, but now he seems entirely in command of himself.”
I suppose this is a slight hijack, but it occurs to me that the historical present is also the natural tense of joketelling, at least in English. I mean, you never say "A lawyer, an ocelot, and a rabbi walked into a bar . . . " – it’s always present tense. I guess it’s to do with the inherent “you had to be there” nature of jokes --things are much funnier when you see/hear them happen than when someone tells you about them, so keeping them in the present tense helps generate a spurious sense of immediacy and, well, presence.
This style of using the present tense to describe something that happened in the past is frequently used by scholars when discussing historical events. “In the early 1800’s, Beethoven begins to branch out into other types of harmonies. By 1830, he finds new uses for secondary dominants…” blah blah. I am an NPR junkie, particularly Odyssey, and I frequently hear guests use this form of narration to describe the flow of something that occurred in the past. I don’t think I’ve seen it written as often as I’ve heard it spoken. xo C.
I disagree.
“Did you hear about the cannibal who passed his friend in the woods?”
“When I was a kid my Mom had to tie a porkchop around my neck to get the dog to play with me.”
“We were so poor when I grew up…”
“I knew this guy once that…”
“Jesus and Moses were playing golf one day when…”
There are lots of jokes told in the past tense.