Musings: A Tense and Perspective Merry-Go-Round

I discovered a long time ago that the surest way for me to never finish a project I'm working on is to edit as I go. It just creates an endless feedback loop from which I can never escape. Unfortunately that's exactly what I find myself doing on my current work in progress because I decided to change my mind twice about a couple fundamental things that I really wish I'd known I wanted to do from the very beginning.

Until recently everything I've used a third person perspective for everything I've written--at least everything I've tried to seriously go anywhere with. I mean, the advantages of third person are obvious, right? The ability to hop between viewpoint characters makes it much easier to build a bigger, more expansive story and world. And of course you get to hop in to different characters' heads depending on whose point of view you want to see events from.

So when I started the book I'm currently engaged in hand-to-hand combat with I defaulted to third person. In retrospect I recognize the foolishness of this choice because I knew going in I was only going to have one viewpoint character. I was never going to switch to anyone else. But I had this notion that there was an advantage of being able to describe events from some kind of detached point of view rather than through the eyes of my main character.

Boy, that was stupid. What was I thinking?

So I changed to first person. It's really amazing that that idea escaped me. Aside from the obvious narrative reasons to do it, the story is detective story that just happens to be set in future space faring sci-fi setting. All my favorite mysteries are investigation stories told in the first person from the point of view of the detective (or detective-esque) character. Needless to say this improved things immediately. It's much easier (and makes way more sense) to have the character editorialize than some disembodied narrator that has no actual connection to the story.

In addition to that obvious benefit, there's the ability to lead the reader down the garden path because the main character is also operating under the wrong misapprehension. Or maybe the reader, having the same information the character has, comes to a different conclusion. And of course the opportunity to have an unreliable narrator.

So yeah, I was dumb.

Unfortunately, the moment I switched to first person I found the story surprisingly boring because telling it in the past tense meant that all those awesome benefits I just mentioned became much harder to employ. So I switched to present tense.

I have never written in present tense before, so it's been an interesting learning curve. The biggest danger I've found is the possibility of going down rabbit holes of description, dialogue, and shoe leather than grinds story advancement to a painful stop. But on the other hand, when the story is moving along at a good clip I find it has a greater sense of urgency than really anything else I've ever written.

Assuming anyone that accidentally clicked on this post is actually still reading it, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with my initial comment about my resistance to going back to edit while still writing my first draft. It turns out that I decided to make both of these changes about halfway through the book. And as interesting as it is to see what happens to the story as I make these changes...good lord is it tedious. I did think about changing horses midstream and fixing the first half on my first pass through editing, but I've found that changing tense and perspective in some instances can effect story beats that come after it.

So that's my little bit of stream of consciousness for the day. Hopefully I'm not the only poor fool that has stumbled into this particular problem. I very much look forward to writing new material. I'm so very, very close.