Reading Response 2: Week of 3/28/11

Steering the Craft

Chapter 6

Subject Pronoun and Verb

I felt so disconcerted reading this chapter. I agree with Le Guin on the passive voice, including her comment that there is a time and place for it. However, when it came to point of view and tense, it was hard not to look back on the first short story I wrote for class and how I was doing everything that she emphatically said to avoid: present tense and second person. That was the first time I'd ever written a story or anything outside of some brief bad poetry in second person, but present tense is something I find myself falling into for both poetry and prose. I don't think of it as more immediate, or past tense as more removed; I'm not trying to construct some artificial closeness with the reader. I don't even think about why I lean towards it. The best I can think of as a reason is that sometimes, I just like the rhythm and flow of words in present tense more than I do in past tense. Something about the "-ed," I guess. I realize that most of what I've written has been kept to myself, and present tense can be off-putting to many readers, as Le Guin said. I still think it has its own time and place and its own worth as a valid tense, and I can't see myself stepping away from it entirely. But I do need to keep her arguments in mind and use them to critique myself objectively, particularly for short stories. (The novel I'm working on is past tense.) As far as the person of the verb, as I think I mentioned before, I dislike first person and usually lean towards third person limited (sometimes spanning several points of view) rather than third person omniscient. I find both third person omniscient and first person too thin: the latter in scope and the former in depth.