Tuesday, September 14, 2010
I'm With Pullman
I can't stand books in the first person present tense. When I'm browsing in the bookstore, and a book is in the first person present tense, it's immediate cause to put it down and move on. I just find that narrative voice very, very annoying. It's like someone relaying their dreams in real-time.
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Frankly, it's not just annoying, it slows down the pace of the story to a crawl. Essays and screenplays were made for this technique--but then again, they're short and in dialog form, like plays. But a story--and worse, a novel--told in the present tense does no justice to a story and no matter how many plot twists, it's stilted and awkward. I can't stand it.
I think we should only buy books written in the first-person subjunctive. Then we, the readers, can be left wondering whether any of it actually happened at all, or whether it was just wishful thinking by the storyteller.
How much fun would it be, knowing that everything the author has written can be summarily dismissed by the reader as merely speculative?
Just think: "The Lovely Bones" = she was just taking a nap and had a bad dream; "The Lord of the Rings" = Frodo, Gandalf, and Bilbo smoked way too much of that crazy-assed Shire shit; "The Last of the Mohicans" = hahaha, omg jk, there're like tons of them still left! The list goes on and on!
It's never really bugged me, stream of consciousness babble is much more confusing to me. at the end of the day though we don't have to read what we don't want to unless money is involved.
I don't like stream-of-consciousness, either, Tim. Sorry, Virginia Woolf!
This takes me back to school. I remember having an assignment to write about something from our summer in first person present and then read everyone else's work. Frustrating is the word.
I just read "The Hunger Games" and it was written like that.
And it was AWESOME!!
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