The Power of Person & Tense
Iain Reid’s 2016 horror novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read.
It’s not that long – under three hundred pages – but something about it creeps under your skin from the very first page. The title of the book also forms the first sentence of the book:
“I’m thinking of ending things.”
We are told three things in this first sentence.
One, the book will be told in first-person. This means the story will be told from the limited perspective of one character, and their experiences will be relayed to us as they experienced them.
Two, the book will be told in present tense. This character is not reflecting on a past event, but on something happening to them “now”, whenever “now” is in the context of the story.
Three, this character is considering terminating something. The way it is phrased seems odd, jarring. It’s not clear what the first-person narrator is thinking about ending. To “end things” could mean quitting a job, a breakup, or even suicide. None of that is clear to us from this first sentence. It’s disquieting.
In the following pages, a few things are established: The narrator is a young woman. She is taking a trip in the car with her boyfriend, Jake, to see his parents at their farm. It’s cold, and the area around the farm is strangely desolate.
Things just feel a little off.
The narrator notices a deserted property with only a foundation left after it burned down. Yet, on its grounds stands a new swing-set. She asks Jake why there would be a new swing-set on an abandoned plot of land. He changes the subject.
And it goes on like this. The novel has a weird, dream-like quality. There’s a realism to it, but, like a dream, things don’t seem to add up under scrutiny. The rhythm of the narrator’s conversations with Jake feels stilted and disjointed, as though operating on some dream logic that neither we, the reader, nor the narrator are entirely privy to.
Person, Tense & TError
In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King differentiates the three types of fear.
First, there’s the gross-out, the most base level of horror, that intertwined with the visceral and disgusting – blood, entrails, severed heads, slime. That primal fear of disease and sickness, of rot and putrefaction. We encounter this type of fear only a little bit in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but it’s used effectively: Jake describes how a pig on his parents’ farm once got an infected wound on its belly that was crawling with maggots. The film adaptation by Charlie Kaufman, being a visual telling, revisits this image a few times.
Then, King says, there’s the horror, a more sophisticated, but still quite primordial fear – the fear of the unnatural, of the upsetting of all that we understand to be true and real. It’s the dead returning from the grave, the sight of insects the size of dogs, of encountering something lurking in the dark at night. In Reid’s novel, we encounter this in the form of the dark, the cold, and the snow, the oppressiveness of the atmosphere.
But the final type of fear, and the worst, is the most sophisticated. Terror. It’s fear that plays on our capacity for thought and reason. It is coming home to find everything moved just slightly. It is feeling the presence of something, something real, and terrible, and unimaginable, and being unable to see it.
It is this final fear at which I’m Thinking of Ending Things excels. The dread and unease builds throughout the story. Something isn’t right, and not just with Jake and his parents, but with the narrator herself. Perhaps more perturbing to the reader is that the narrator seems unaware that anything is amiss. She almost doesn’t feel whole, like something is missing from her.
And as the plot begins to unravel, the terror becomes almost unbearable. The wrongness of the entire narrative moves inexorably towards its climax, and you cannot help but shudder. You feel as if you are reading the story of someone slowly going insane, and you are trapped in their head, powerless to do anything about it. And, well, that may just be the case.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things would not be as effective in creating this sense of terror as it is, had Iain Reid not written it in the very particular way that he chose to write it.
Person & Tense as a Style Choice
I am a writer by trade, and I know that at least a basic understanding of style and grammar is key to having control over a narrative. How a writer uses person and tense gives us an insight into their intentions for a story; the emotions they are trying to evoke.
Let us imagine, for a moment, that I’m Thinking of Ending Things was titled She Thought About Ending Things.
The first chapter of the story would have a very different feel. Instead of opening with the line, “I’m thinking of ending things”, putting us right in the character’s head, it would instead be “She thought about ending things”. What would this line tell us?
One, the main character is a woman, something we don’t learn until a bit later on in the first-person story. So, we are already getting more information than we got before – something was withheld from us in the first-person version. Perhaps there was a reason for that.
Two, the book is being told in third-person, past tense. This is how most novels are written – as a report from an unseen narrator, of events that transpired in the past, and that we are now getting caught up on. This line may be written in third-person limited or third-person omniscient. We don’t know yet.
Three, this character is thinking of terminating something. Same as what we learned from the first-person version. But notice how the first two steps here have changed. We are a degree removed from the woman, we are not with her but standing apart from her, having her thoughts relayed to us by an unseen third party (the “third person”).
What’s more, these events are happening in the past. Suddenly, there’s less tension, less suspense. “She thought about ending things” is a great opening line for a crime novel, perhaps. But now there’s no immediacy, no uncertainty. Whatever happens to this person happened away from us and in the past. There is no intimacy.
Person and tense are perhaps the first things an author decides upon when they start writing out their novel. They are stylistic choices that change the whole feeling of a story, in the same way that, say, the timbre of an orchestral piece changes depending on which instruments are placed front and centre.
The violin can play the sweet melody of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, but it can also play the shrieking eek-eek-eek we associate with knife murders, thanks to Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack for Psycho.
The feeling of terror is enhanced by the way Reid chooses to write his novel. He does not remove us from the narrator, he puts us in her head, and he forces us to experience events in the story as they happen to the character, rather than reporting them as past events. This creates anxiety as it gives us a feeling of uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen to the narrator. She tells us, the reader, how frightened she is, and we feel helpless.
Now, perhaps, if Reid was especially adept at writing in third-person past tense, he might find other ways of making us feel that terror. There are plenty of horror writers who write in third-person past tense, including, well, Stephen King, for one. And Clive Barker, for another.
But Reid’s story is most effective because it is a story of uncertainties, of grey areas, of being unsure of yourself. Note that the title is not I’m Going to End Things. It’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It is a story about not really knowing what to do, what is happening or why.
And in the end, when what is happening becomes horribly clear, there is no comfort, because we are just as bewildered and terrified as the protagonist. The uncertainty is the point.
Person & Tense in My Own Writing
In my own work, I tend to write almost exclusively in third-person limited. It has always made the most sense to me, particularly when writing science fiction and fantasy. Writing in third-person limited helps me to stymie the urge to explain every intricate detail of my world. People, generally, don’t go around thinking about the five hundred years of history that led to the modern flush toilet before they take a leak in the morning, so I don’t think it’s realistic for the captain of a spaceship to spend very long thinking about how propulsion works.
My first novel, The Malcontent of Mars, is written in past-tense, third-person limited, focusing on the perspectives of various characters in the main cast. There are advantages to writing this way: It allows a degree of intimacy without requiring the author, or the reader, to follow just one point of view. The A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin uses the same style.
The prequel, Vengeance on Venus, is also in past-tense, third-person limited, though focused only on one character, Evan Fleuri. It feels a lot tighter as a result, and I will go on record as saying it’s a better story than The Malcontent of Mars.
An unusual story in my repertoire, A Report from the Trial of Finlay Peters, is written in the style of a news article. It is therefore written largely in third-person omniscient, as is befitting the writing of an unseen journalist who has taken the time to study the facts surrounding a controversial trial. The tense is a mixture of past, when describing the circumstances of the crime, and present, when dealing with the consequences of the crime.
I do not consider my own web novel, Rollerskater, to be a horror story, though it certainly could be called dark fantasy, which some consider a kind of “sister genre” to horror. Certainly, it has horror elements. There are vampires, eldritch abominations, and the real possibility of violent death that stalks all the characters. But it is not horror, at least to my mind, because I did not write it to terrify.
Rollerskater is written, for the most part, in past-tense, third-person limited, which means that it is written as a report of past events, but from a person’s limited perspective.
Towards the end, however, Rollerskater starts to dip a little bit into third-person omniscient, to communicate the enormity of the events that are affecting the entire cast, and everyone beyond that. Events to which none of the characters are observers are described by the unseen narrator, as they are now on an epic, world-affecting scale that goes beyond a mere limited perspective.
The power of person and tense is in setting the tone of a story, how a story feels to read. It is perhaps a detail that some writers overlook in their work. Many writers choose to write only in the way that other writers they enjoy choose to write. But it is an important choice to consider.
Some Examples
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien flip-flops a bit. It is written in past-tense third-person, mostly from the perspective of Bilbo Baggins (and skips over a major battle scene at the end because Bilbo is out cold for most of it), but the narrator does stop to explain aspects of the world to us. The destruction of the dragon Smaug does not involve any of the major characters at all, but it is often considered one of the best moments in the book.
The post-cyberpunk novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is written in third-person limited, present tense. This feels appropriate for the fast-paced, technologically advanced society in which the novel takes place – things are Happening All The Time. Past-tense simply wouldn’t do, it would be too lackadaisical, too academic, too far removed from the action. The reader needs to know that when a racist gets their head lopped off with a katana (that is a thing that happens), it’s happening right now.
The novels Resolution Way and Eminent Domain by Carl Neville are also written in third-person limited, present tense, but in a different way. The two novels are also written in near-future worlds, one utopian and one dystopian (with a through-line connecting both of them, which is why I mention them in tandem).
In Eminent Domain, the point-of-view character is named at the start of each chapter or part of the novel, while in Resolution Way, each section of the novel has a different name, and a character associated with it. In either case, we follow the named character’s perspective specifically.
Sometimes, we only stay in the mind of a character for one chapter, sometimes we stay with them for many chapters. In this case, though, it’s less about action and more about psychology. We come to understand who these characters are and how they came to think the way that they do.
One of the most interesting examples of how person and tense can be used, however, is in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. Another strange and dream-like novel, the story shifts in perspective between two characters, one living in a dystopian cyberpunk society, the other living in a surreal fantasy world. The novel was originally written in Japanese, which presents a challenge to English translators, as many concepts do not translate neatly from Japanese into English.
To wit: The entire novel is written in first-person, but in the sections set in the cyberpunk world, the narrator refers to himself with the formal first-person pronoun 私 (watashi). In the sections written in the surreal fantasy world, however, the narrator refers to himself with the more informal and childlike first-person pronoun, 僕 (boku). This has no direct translation into English, of course.
The translator, Alfred Birnbaum, decided to instead put the cyberpunk sections into first-person past-tense, and the surreal fantasy sections into first-person present tense. This therefore gives the two sections a distinctly different feeling, with one narrator sounding more experienced, and the other sounding more like he is encountering things as they happen to him for the first time. This starts to make more sense as the two plot-lines converge.
The Power of Person & Tense
To repeat a hackneyed old cliché, the medium is the message.
Often, it isn’t just the stories we tell, but how we tell them.
You can have a story in which very little really happens, but it could still be memorable because of the way in which it is told. Incidentally, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favourite films.
You can also over-tell a story, removing implication and space for interpretation, which can utterly ruin the experience for the audience. Which is why the original cut of Blade Runner, with its absurd, pseudo-noir narration and tacked-on happy ending, is so rubbish compared to the 1992 “director’s cut” (which was made without the actual involvement of Ridley Scott, by the way).
This very simple stylistic choice is powerful. It changes how your story feels to read. It can make a story more terrifying, more exciting, more immediate, or it can make a story feel distant, more contemplative, removed from the events of the story.
As a final note, I ask you to consider the role that third-person past-tense originally played in our collective canon. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, for example, are told to us in past tense, as they were originally oral storytelling. It was a functional necessity to tell the story in past tense, as the narrator would have been speaking of legendary events from times past.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Darmok, is one of the best science fiction stories ever written. It features the meeting of Captain Picard with a race of beings whose language can be literally translated by the future technology of the Federation, but the contextual meaning cannot be easily gleaned. The language depends on references to events from mythic history – oral storytelling and language are, to these people, synonymous.
We do not live in a world where our storytelling is so restricted. On the stage and in film, we accept the immediacy of events that take place. In tabletop role-playing games, all storytelling happens in present tense, even if minutes of battle take hours to play through mechanically in real time.
Fiction is not bound by time and memory, even if our own experiences are. We do not have to tell stories as though we are oral storytellers, telling of ages past. We can tell stories in any way that we see fit.
That is the power of person and tense.
The illustration for this essay is based on photographs by Jeremy Bishop and Benjamin Sweet on Unsplash.