rhoda_rants: Photo of Kurt Cobain with dyed burgundy hair and fingerless gloves. (kurt cobain)
Ash Nightingale ([personal profile] rhoda_rants) wrote in [personal profile] paulamcg 2019-12-30 12:19 pm (UTC)

Dangit, I had a reply to this all set, but it got eaten. :(

Trying again:

I don't think it really matters what tense you use as long as you use it well. Fandom getting nitpicky over certain things is just part of fandom, and you can either let that dictate how you write, or ignore it and the people who want to read in the tense you're writing will show up. I guess it's different for challenges bc people will have specific requests, but if you're just writing for you, I'd say keep doing that. I do feel like the hostility towards first person is mostly arbitrary, and probably due to a lot of stories being badly written in that voice, but it's not the tense's fault. What did First Person Present ever do to anyone?

You notice a similar weirdness around tenses in Victorian Gothic novels, where people just couldn't accept a character talking directly to the reader for whatever reason, which is why Wuthering Heights has this convoluted flashback-within-a-flashback structure where the guy in the house talks to the housekeeper who used to work for the Lindens and somehow has ridiculously accurate recall for every interaction between Cathy and Heathcliffe from when they were children onward--it's absurd, and I think some literary conventions are still clinging to that a little.

Hm, that's an interesting blog series idea, come to think of it. "How Fanficcers Are Like Readers of Victorian Gothic Novels: Part 1, Being Extra About Tenses."

ANYWAY, if that's your favorite way to write fic, just do it. The readers who want it will show up, and those who dislike that tense will read something else.

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