Showing posts with label tense and fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tense and fiction. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2008

no time

I've been wrestling with tense. Tense about tense. Unintentionally when I started writing September 10th I was working in the present tense then somewhere along the way I realized what I was doing and had to question it. There's a reason for it. Time compressed into a single moment--a metaphor for the compression of Brian's life--how the magnitude of a single event can implode an entire life. In pursuit of anonymity the past doesn't matter anymore and the future doesn't exist.

The mechanics of doing this have been problematic. Like a cinematographer shooting live I was capturing it documentary style yet I (the omniscient narrator) was no longer present. So how can the conjugation change midstream, the tense reverse course? I go back and forth and in the editing find myself constantly adjusting. This is my dilemma. The dilemma of invention, I guess.