Do you dare...write in present tense?

A challenging but worthy pursuit

Ah, to experiment with time and the moment…to immerse my readers in the minds of the protagonist(s) as life happens…this is the dream of writing in the present tense!

I set out to do this in my latest story and changed it back to the past tense several times. With three parts from different first-person perspectives, I thought about creating a more postmodern approach to time that included three different tenses — present, past, and…that’s where I had trouble…future?

Eventually, it simply became a challenge to keep present tense, and I even had to go back and edit my third and final installment after publication when I realized I had switched to past tense for a couple of sentences. Oof.

Photo by Catrina Carrigan on Unsplash

I won’t get into a list of the pros and cons specifically here. If you want to take a look, this Writer’s Digest article sums those up nicely. Today, I’m more interested in the feeling of moving through this process as a writer.

I found myself wanting something simpler, I guess; something that would take away the complexity of time, make it collapse on itself. The French made somewhat of a solution sometime around the dawn of their impressive literary history. The ‘simple past’ tense is still - yes - in the past, but it sounds slightly continuous, I little bit like the imperfect past, as you can see below —

⌛️ Past tense [passé composé] - normal/conversational - for I ran — j’ai couru

📚 Simple past [passé simple]- literary - I ran — je courus

⏳ Imperfect [l’imparfait]- I was running — je courais

You can see all the beautiful tenses and conjugations of courir [to run] here. Just click on the tense to see an explanation of it as well. It’s hard to explain a feeling of a word in another language, but when I read literature in simple past, I feel like I am moving with the story in a different way than past tense.

Ok, so back to the language of my writing — I guess I feel the need to have something like this in English. It’s more elegant than the past tense. In fact, as the name suggests, it simplifies the tense, making it a little more ambiguous, dreamlike, imaginative, and even dramatic.

This was my desire in using the present tense, but I found it rather problematic. Sometimes, explaining an action in the present from the perspective of the person doing the action just felt odd. This is probably how I ended up with mostly dialogue in the third part and a small flashback scene in the second part.

In moving around the phrasing and trying to place action and understanding in the dialogue, I considered that this is a little (or a lot) like writing a play or film script. Many of you out there are well-experienced in this. I, however, have yet to write either one. And why not? This was my thought. Even if the purpose is not performance, the act of reading a play script is the presence one desires through this narrative perspective. Soliloquies can then speak directly to the reader if desired, and stage directions can be used additionally for background information (much like Miller in The Crucible). (I’ve been considering writing a play since reading the remarkable and inspirational biography of Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee a couple of years ago.)

Another solution is, of course, to use an omniscient narrator in the present tense. Even just a single first-person narrator would make things easier. Dickens’ Bleak House does a beautiful job of present-tense omniscience in the third person:

The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young—and wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself. He never converses when not professionally consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless but quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half the Peerage stops to say “How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?” He receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with the rest of his knowledge.

The perspective also allows for authorial judgment. The voice is intimate but distant; it has power of observation and an abstract wisdom we allow of non-mortal beings.

I guess this was perhaps my mistake for this particular story; a simple change to omniscient third person could have achieved the effect I was looking for without all the headache and some added reflective moments. Dickens kept it up for hundreds of pages, so it can’t be all that hard! Next time.

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questions & discussion

🧪Have you written in the present, and how did it go? What did you discover along the way?

🧪What are your favorite works of fiction written in the present tense? What effect does the tense achieve on the reader? How does it change the story?

🧪Do you read or write in another language that achieves an effect similar to passé simple or has a unique quality of expressing time?

This post is part of a series called Creative Lab — behind-the-scenes essays on the process of making fiction: what I’m reading, noticing, and shaping into story. Join the discussion and share your projects.

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further reading

More examples of present tense literature — Lit Hub: “No Tense like the Present.”

Some related writing sketches from me: Presence & I am Time

Goodwin, Sarah Webster. “Emma Bovary’s Dance of Death.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 19, no. 3, 1986, pp. 197–215. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1345630. Accessed 13 Nov. 2025.

The passé simple which ends that sentence-”elle s’arrita”-removes us from Emma’s point of view. As if to insist on the issue, the narrator removes the couple bodily from our sight: “le vicomte ... disparut avec elle....” For an instant we may wonder where we are: with Charles, perhaps, watching them silently? But the narrative stays in the passe simple, its neutral tense, and recounts briefly the rest of the couple’s movements. When Emma puts her hand before her eyes, we see her do it, without knowing what prompts the gesture.

Kellman, Steven G. “THE CINEMATIC NOVEL: TRACKING A CONCEPT.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 1987, pp. 467–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26282386. Accessed 13 Nov. 2025.

The illusion of immediacy is also a central concern of the French New Novelists, and of Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular. Much of le nouveau roman must be understood in terms of its champions’ veneration, emulation, and adaptation of cinematic techniques. Robbe-Grillet and Marguérite Duras have even become filmmakers. Robbe-Grillet’s is an art of appearances, of surfaces, and a vision of cinema as the most deictic of media guides his writing. Where literature is an abstraction, images assert a presence; and where words establish a temporal continuum, film creates an eternal present. In his Preface to L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet contends that narrative approaches the condition of film to the extent that it is able to collapse preterite and future into a continuous hic et nunc.

La caractéristique essentielle de l’image est sa présence. Alors que la littérature dispose de toute une gamme de temps grammaticaux, qui permet de situer les événements les uns par rapport aux autres, on peut dire que, sur l’image, les verbes sont toujours au présent (ce qui rend si étranges, si faux, ces films “racontés” des publications spécialisées, où l’on a rétabli le passé simple cher au roman classique!): de toute évidence, ce que l’on voit sur l’écran est en train de se passer, c’est le geste même qu’on nous donne, et non pas un rapport sur lui.