How to Write in Third Person Present Tense - exactly one writer's optional guide to the process
Hi, this post is for a friend, but I thought it could also be for all my friends, and also anybody else, too.
I was never a present tense person until a few years ago when suddenly I was, so if you've never been able to get it to stick, no worries! You just have to be desperate enough. Or something, idk.
Okay! The main different between past and present tense for me is how you're looking at the character, and how you're experiencing the story with them.
So for past tense it feels like you're just over the shoulder, a bit to the side, and leading them into things. You push them along so they've already done the things as you're writing them. But with present, I imagine myself right between their shoulder blades, fused to their spine. You're really sitting in the moment with them. Nothing happens until you're feeling it and doing it, right along with your POV character. Even if you're omniscient, or some variant of floating pov, you only ever occupy the same breathing space. You're never ahead or behind. It's all just happening now.
My longest draft is the one I inexplicably decided to write in third person present, and I've come to really love it. Some stories really benefit from that feeling of being up closer to the characters. It can aid in making time progression feel more real. It can help the reader understand a more difficult character, where just the proximity can alter the ability to relate in a perhaps unrelatable situation.
If you find yourself constantly reverting back to past tense, then you've also reverted back to wherever you usually stand in relation to the pov. If you do typically sit pretty close to the character anyway, even while writing past tense, then exercise the notion of pulling the character behind you in the narrative, so that you write what it is they're about to do/feel/say, and then they can act it, right now. And it is now, not right after. You're not telling how something happened, you're in the thick of it right now, as it is happening. You can barely keep up with the things that are just now happening.
A fun thing you can do when you're in present tense and it feel natural is to state more things. Like, just say what the character is feeling. That they're angry, or stressed, or whatever. You can get away with some of this bluntness because it doesn't feel - doesn't read - like you're just stating the fact to get it out of the way. In present tense, that emotion is happening around the reader rather than existing in the nebulous previously. So if you establish an emotion quickly, it continues to simmer and sit while the next part of the scene rolls on. It's happening now.
It's because of this sneaky trick and other related factors that present tense is my favorite for draft 0 stuff. It's easier because I don't need to know what already happened. I'm writing what is happening. I don't have to stress about not knowing stuff yet. I'm not supposed to! Ha.
Anyway, hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions, and happy writing stuff in the now.
@forthesanityofstorytellers
