Comment by mola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mola | Hacker News Reader

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the novel is a different medium than casual conversation, it has proven to be much more sophisticated. For example, you can have multiple narrators, diagetic and non diagetic. Etc.

If we expect novels to mimic nothing more than casual conversation, we lose a whole depth of creativity. While us readers lose sense making tools.

I believe new writers are gravitated towards present tense mainly because their cultural world is in present tense. I bet they are exposed to twitts, blogs, films, TV, etc much more than to novels.

So I believe they adopt the style of these media, because of naturalization via immersion. Even in the article, most answers of writers to why present tense, are 'it just happened' and then rationalized.

For me, it is another proof of the "medium is the message" theory. I believe we are losing thought technology.

You know what will really lose us a whole depth of creativity?

Prescribing that novels should only be written in a particular manner.

Yes, when there’s a new way of doing things, we can’t think everyone will shift to that. It’s very often that the distribution shifts somewhat. Let’s say we introduce a new color (haha), and it rises in popularity, then we shouldn’t be fearing that everyone is going to adopt the new color as their favorite. The distribution is changing.

We should really recognize that individuals have valid feelings and thoughts for whatever they gravitate towards.

So, present tense, let’s do it I’m interested! However, we won’t lose the past tense.

That's a pretty harsh interpretation of what I said. (And very far from intended)

I often think of Yeats' lines from Adam's Curse:

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

* I believe there are exceptions, but in general writing should feel like casual conversation. The author can do all kinds of tricks while making it feel like casual conversation, but if they deviate from the feel of spontaneity, they should have good reasons to do so.

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