When Changing Tense Makes You Tense

The right but annoying move.

There’s still time to sign up for my May 9 workshop on WHY WE WRITE. You can register for it here. This workshop will be excellent prep for 1000 Words of Summer, which starts May 30 and runs through June 12. More about that here.

Next week I’ll be in Atlanta where I’ll be talking about 1000 Words with Matt Shaer for a live taping of his Origin Stories podcast. There are a few tickets left.

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Hello friends.

Greetings from jasmine season, where we’re all walking around shoving our faces into bushes like we’re greedy, horny bees.

Round the corner

I’ve been busy here tidying up the last little bits of this proposal, which went from 5000 words to 20,000 words and now has landed somewhere near 15,000 words as I’ve been restructuring it. The 5,000 words I cut are still hanging around, but now they’re in a document called “future part 3” or something like that.

Ultimately the key to this particular revision was changing it from past tense to present tense, a move which sucked in the moment but also was almost immediately clarifying and the obviously right move.

It helped me stay more in the moment of the book and recognize which elements of the story felt more urgent and like they needed to be told upfront and which elements belonged in another timeline which could even potentially be told in past tense.

Does changing the tense fix a problem in all instances? No. Just like changing the perspective from say, close third to first in a novel doesn’t necessarily solve its issues. But it worked here.

And yes, I heartily cursed as I was doing it. I felt like an amateur—how had I not seen that all along? And it took so much time. (If it was easy they wouldn’t call it work, said in Dad Voice.) But eventually it felt good.

I’m going to do one more serious revamp today and tomorrow and then send it back to my agent who has been giving me the best feedback in the world on matters not related to tense. Then I hit the road to Asheville!

After that I will turn my full attention to 1000 Words of Summer which starts on May 30. Are you going to do it this year? Right now I’m feeling like I just want to do a bunch of character sketches, one after the other, and just invent random people to write about, maybe based on people I’ve been seeing from afar out in the world when I’ve been away from home these past few months. But I could also just do some flash fiction or play around with my novel-in-progress. Whatever strikes my fancy. I really just want it to be light and fun after grinding through this proposal.

Do you know what you’re going to write yet?

Sending love,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.