Hope you brought your spiral notebooks and sack lunch today, because we're about to head back to school! Let's take it way back to 5th grade English class and talk about tense and perspective in writing.
Tense refers to the time the story occurs. For the majority of fiction, the past tense is used:
John scanned the horizon and gazed out at the endless sea.
This is the tense that most readers and comfortable with, and so it feels the most natural. However, some fiction is written in present tense, as seen in the following example:
John scans the horizon, gazing out at the endless sea.
Believe it or not, some authors even choose to write in the future tense, describing what characters will do and what events will happen. It's not very common, but it definitely can serve a purpose, especially in a story where time moves non-linearly (as in a time travel story, for instance).
Perspective, or point of view (POV), refers to who is telling the story. Most fiction chooses a third person perspective. In this case, the narrator is not a character in the story, and does not refer to the first person, "I", for the entirety of the writing. It's all about the characters in the story. (The two above examples are in third person).
In a story told in first person POV, the narrator is a character in the story:
I looked carefully through the drawers, searching for any clues she may have left.
First person stories tend to feel a bit more intimate. It's as if the narrator is standing next to you relating to you everything that happened to him or her. This can create a very compelling story, but there's a drawback: typically, first person stories are limited in their access to certain details. As the reader, you can only know what the narrator knows. The advantage of third person POV is that the reader can get insight into many different characters and situations at the same time. This is called "omniscience" in writing, and is a tool that can be used very effectively.
After starting Critical Times, some readers have begun to wonder why I chose to write in the first person POV with the present tense. (And not just a single person POV, but an alternating POV that switches narrators between police officer Luke Harding and his wife, Amy) It's a good question, and I'll try to answer it here as best I can.
First off, if the style of writing is throwing you off, that's understandable. This tense + POV is not very common in fiction, but I feel it was the best choice for this story. Why? Simply put, I feel it's the best way to get to know the characters while maintaining the tension.
The first draft of Critical Times was written in the traditional third person past tense, and it just didn't click with me. I wanted the reader to be able to get into Luke's head a bit more, to hear his thoughts and feelings, and the best way to do that was to have him tell the story. At the same time, if he was the only narrator, the reader wouldn't be able to understand all the struggles Amy, his wife, was facing, and the story would be missing too much on that end.
Additionally, the past tense just didn't work for me. I wanted the readers to feel like they were with Luke and Amy each day as they went about their lives, watching the news reports as society began to crumble, making decisions that would affect their futures. After making the switch to the current style, everything fell into place.
Again, I can sympathize with some who may feel confused by the tense and perspective, but I hope you'll stick with it to the end, since I feel it was the right decision for this novel!
Enjoy!
For more a more detailed analysis of writing tenses and perspective, check out this article here. It has plenty of examples, and even mentions the elusive second person POV narrative style!
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