Tense Problems in Writing Memoir

This past week I did a manuscript edit for a fellow who is deeply involved in scientific research and is writing a memoir about his experiences. He has been having a great deal of trouble with his tenses. I thought I would do a post on this subject because this is a very common problem for memoirists, especially those trying to recapture the intensity of the past. There is a constant urge to move into the present tense, and then there is trouble moving back into the past tense, which usually is how the main story is narrated.

To start with, let's examine why there is this urge to drop into present tense in the first place when we are writing memoir and personal narrative. I think the urge arises from the fact that we are often retelling very important and visceral personal stories, and we want to capture the immediacy of what we went through--and the sense that we have brought that immediacy forward with us through memory into the present. Present tense seems to capture this for us, and it feels as if it is putting us squarely in the middle of the remembered dramatic scene that we are trying to render for the reader, and so as we compose we find ourselves slipping into the present tense. It just seems a natural thing to do. However, because this is material that actually happened in the past, the reader will read our present tense scenes as being in what is sometimes termed "the historical present."  So, for example, the reader may know that a scene happened back in 1996, but they read it in the present tense feeling that they are being placed back there, into that scene, and into the immediacy of that past moment. 


So is there anything wrong with doing this?  That seems to be the question the writers I work with want to ask. The short answer is "no"--the historical present is a very useful device both in memoir and in fiction, especially to recapture an intense dramatic moment, and it's something that a lot of well-published authors regularly do. However, there are some rather specific pitfalls that you need to be aware of as a writer if you are going to engage in this technique.

You need to beware of putting your whole memoir or first person narrative into the present tense. The reason for this is that the present tense basically gets you "running alongside" the drama as narrator, and when you compose this way it makes it very difficult for you to "step back" and provide the kind of background and summary narration that most memoirs and first person narratives are going to require. So that means that if you are going to use the "historical present" you are probably going to be talking about having to move in and out of the present tense, and for the most part will be writing your memoir in the past tense, where summary narration and movements through time are going to be easier to handle.  And here's where most memoir writers get into real trouble:  Because of where your narrator is standing, it is actually very easy to make the move from past tense into the historical present. However, it is quite difficult to get back out again. 

This is because the narrator, as we have noted, starts to "run alongside" the dramatic narration in present tense. (I do this, I do that, she tells me this, she tells me that.) But then when you shift back into past tense, the narrator suddenly has to move back to narrating about all of it in the "past" of the story, which has the effect of changing where the narrator is standing relative to the story and the reader. Readers often have a very difficult time making this switch. They feel a jolt when you shift where the narrator is standing, and they recognize that "something awkward is going on here." A big oops for the writer.


So what can a writer do about this problem?  One answer is simply to force your whole manuscript into past tense and just not use the historical present at all. This is certainly is an answer if you are having a lot of trouble with this issue. Many memoirists in fact end up doing exactly this. However, I think this is an unsatisfying answer, because the "historical present" is such a useful device. I think a better approach is for the writer simply to be aware that the switch out of present tense and back into past tense is just a hard switch to make, and to try and do it somewhere that the reader expects a switch in time or narration mode, such as at a white space break, a section break, or where one chapter ends and another begins. Sometimes you can pull off the switch at the end of a paragraph, or where there is a run of dialogue that puts some distance between the present tense and past tense material. For an example of an author using both past tense and present tense, but mostly segregating those different modes in separate short chapters, take a look at Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Also take a look at the short memoir story "Bonanza" in that collection, where Beard begins in the past tense, and then switches to the present tense to recall an intense memory and stays there for the remainder of the chapter. (This is clearly an author who understands the problem.) 

Another approach that has been successfully employed by memoirists, is to put everything happening in the present time into present tense, and to put all of the past material into past tense.  For an example of this, look at The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.  There is a sort of naturalness to this approach, because the stuff that's "happening now" is in the present tense, and the things "that happened in the past" are in the past tense. However, this approach doesn't capture the effect that we have been talking about, of things that occurred in the past--and sometimes the distant past--of having a sort of real present immediacy when they are recalled.  And that, of course, is why we all get into this trouble in the first place. 


Hopefully this post has given you some different possible approaches to try.  With each memoir, I think it's helpful to try different things and see what seems to work best.  Just beware of those shifts out of present tense and back into past tense. They are tough to pull off.

Please note that this is an update of an older post.