A question Bran Fan asked a while ago, but I see I never got around to answering, was this:

I was wondering about present vs. past tense. Since about 90 percent of popular fiction is written in past tense, we are taught to read stories that way. Present tense is harder for me to read and harder to write. Wondering why you went that way for Benighted and if you're also writing new work in present tense.

Sorry for the delay, Bran Fan, I only just spotted it. It's a good question, but regrettably I don't have a very good answer. I'll do my best...

I've written in both past and present tense; currently I'm writing in the past, but for other writing projects, I've got no particular plans. When I wrote Bareback/Benighted, I didn't sit down and decide that I was going to write a book in the present tense, or consider very much what tense would be appropriate. I wrote the first chapter in a breathless rush, and Lola's voice started spilling out; in order to capture that voice, I had to use the present tense, because that was how Lola speaks.

In retrospect, my analysis would be something along these lines: Lola is an entirely subjective narrator, generally in a high state of emotion about something, very sensitive to certain things but blind to others. Because of that, it felt somehow right to be hearing her describe things as if hearing an internal monologue. The story is told entirely inside Lola's mind - she's an unreliable narrator, and you have to pick up cues from other characters to realise she's being unfair - and her mind is extremely reactive. Everything that happens triggers an emotional response; every moment is lived intensely; she broods, but she doesn't exactly reflect. For her, the past is always considered only insofar as it has an effect on how she's feeling right at this precise moment, a time to be relived rather than remembered. There is no 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' for her; she feels a reasonable variety of emotions, but tranquillity isn't one of them. To quote Wendy Cope, 'I have emotion - no one who knows me could fail to detect it -/ But there's a serious shortage of tranquility in which to recollect it.' The past tense has a degree of distance that the present leaves no space for, and as a result, it was part of Lola's personality that she should think in the present tense.

But having said that, I like writing in the present tense. That sense of up-close, vivid emotionality tends to trigger a good writing mood in me. I may well use it again. It just feels comfortable. When I read Bran Fan's question and considered using the present again, it seemed less like a challenge and more like a siren call: write in me, write in me... Hopefully this doesn't make it impossible for people to read, because I just like it.

I think one reason why the past tense is more popular is that, when we tell stories in real life, we generally use it, because we're talking about stuff that's already happened. Hence, the past tense is probably the natural one to use in storytelling. It has verisimilitude.

In speech, there's something casual about using the present: 'So I go into this bar, right? And there's this guy wandering around, and what does he do but step on my foot! So I go up to him, and I say to him, I say...' In fiction, it doesn't quite have that effect. It's hard to give a general rule, but I'd say that broadly speaking, using the past tense gives a sense of space, whereas the present is more claustrophobic. You can, in fact, move backwards and forwards in the present just as much - in fact, it can be easier to distinguish tense that way, as anything that's a flashback is automatically indicated by the use of the past tense - but it puts you right here in the action, right now: there's no distance between your 'now' and the narrator's.

I'm not sure why I enjoyed using the present so much. Perhaps I found that up-closeness cosy rather than claustrophobic; it feels warmer, somehow, than the past. Possibly it comes from reading Margaret Atwood. Possibly I was imprinted in English classes, where essays teach us to say 'Hamlet tries to kill his uncle' rather than 'Hamlet tried to kill his uncle,' that is, the sense that fictional characters exist only in the words that their creators use about them. They have no past, because they aren't real; everything they've 'done' hasn't really happened. Hence, using the past tense when talking about them isn't completely accurate - and if that's true in talking about characters, why shouldn't it be true in creating them? Then again, I don't always write in the present tense, so who knows?

I've had people convinced that writing in the present tense is much more difficult; I've even stood there saying, 'Well, no, for me with this character it was easier' and had them still insist that it was incredibly clever of me to write an entire novel in such a difficult form. It's always rather embarrassing when people attribute undeserved admiration to you for taking the path of least resistance, so hopefully this post will resolve it once and for all, and if it happens again I can run away without looking too rude.