Getting Ready for Solstice

This Wednesday I head out for Boston, Massachusetts.  I have been accepted into the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and will be attending my first of five residencies.  These next ten days include a rigorous schedule of craft and seminar classes as well as nightly readings by professors and early morning workshops.  There are eight people in my workshop groups and I have read all but one of fourteen pieces.  I will finish that up tonight and then, upon my second read through, I am going to mark up and annotate all the places that pique my interest, confuse me, or otherwise deserve some type of comment.  It's been very interesting reading what others, outside my specific circle, are writing.  A trend I am seeing is the need to put everything in present tense or first person and sometimes both.  I don't mind this really and, in fact, I am looking to explore this a bit myself.  Some of the pieces I've read so far leave me wanting more while others leave me fairly content (or not very content) and not really looking for anything further from them.  The workshops should be very eye opening as I've not had a read workshop since I was in college at Mesa State about seven years ago.

On my Prime Cuts Goal List for this blog, I mention five things I want to work on as a writer: time management, perpetuation of creative juices and inspiration, finishing what I start, Grad school, characters, and my letter of intent as part of my admission into an MFA Program.  I am very excited and nervous because once I arrive in Massachusetts and engage in the residency, I will be working on all of these goals simultaneously.  Well, all except for the letter of intent which I can put a huge slash through as I not only accomplished it, but used it successfully to get in to Solstice.  

I hope to get in a blog post from Massachusetts and share the valuable tidbits that my classes and seminars promise to be peppered with, but in case I don't get a chance to do an update in the next two weeks, you now all know why.  My classes for this residency are as follows: Craft Analysis, The Future Now: Dystopia, Magic Realism, Unforgettable Characters, Teaching Composition, Adjusting the Sails, Raw Material, and Changing Lives Through Literature.  Massachusetts here I come!  Also, as a side note, one of the several novels that I was encouraged/required to read prior to attending the residency is The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi.  So far I find it to be a fantastic young adult read.  It's not for the squeamish, that's for sure, but, just like any good Dystopian novel, it is sure to frustrate and invigorate.  I recommend it highly. 

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2012

Playing with Tenses

Photo Credit: OnBloggingWell.com

With NaNoWriMo fast approaching I've been considering my comfort zones as a writer, and particularly the use of tense in my writing. For clarification, while I'm sure all of us here know what that is for our readers, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, which is exactly that, write a novel in a month, sort of. The goal is to push yourself to write 50,000 words in a month. The main website link can be found on the right hand corner of the blog.  That is neither here nor there however, so let me get back on track. In response to Skoora's most recent update, and several other conversations I have been a part of recently where tense is  point of topic, it has truly had me wondering about my own use of tense.

Let me start by saying, that there are a great deal of tenses, far more than I ever anticipated, such as the 9 past tenses Skoora introduced yesterday, there are also many different forms of Present Tense, and then future tense is just a whole different ballpark I don't even want to enter. Mixing the tenses with Point of View (POV) also creates an interesting albeit complicated algorithm for writers.  What I mean by this, is there are just so many, how do you choose? Some tenses come naturally, such as past tense. We as humans are just so at ease with writing in this form. It just comes - as Skoora said - naturally.  However, what about the often neglected Present Tense?

As of recent I've been reading more and more Present Tense stories, these stories are difficult to read a great deal of the time because they take so much thinking to write, and on that same token, they are also extremely difficult to write.  I have started dabbling in Present Tense writing, with a story that I started writing in 2009 that I've neglected for a long time.  This story originally started out in Past Tense, Third Person, Limited Point of View.  A fairly standard approach.  Yet inspired by some of the  Present Tense  stories I've read - yes I am intentionally capitalizing these even though it is not grammatically correct I want to bring focus to them - I decided to tackle the story again from a different angle. I must say I was surprised by how different, and unnatural Present Tense feels.  There are many rules to flow I've discovered - though haven't read up on - that stuck out to me. First, 'is' vs 'was' these words in Present Tense are obviously not interchangeable, because one clearly signifies the past.  'She was dancing' vs. 'She is dancing,' and so on. However, when I'm writing, my fingers long to use the latter.  'Was' feels natural, while 'is' feels like I'm trying too hard.

Is also makes the POV feel that much more close, which in some cases, is a wonderful dynamic between author and character. For example, mystery novels. Many thriller writers make the mistake of letting us see more than the protagonist thus losing some of the mystery, however with Present Tense, a boundary is made, because it is very difficult to create a fluid paragraph in Present Tense that is far away.  This tense seems, at least to me, to push towards limited or close point of view.  I am not sure if there are grammatical rules that follow this assumption, and I will be looking into it and writing a research article on the idea of tenses for Detangled Writers in the near future. Yet I cannot help but wonder.  I have decided for NaNoWriMo that I am going to attempt to write 50,000 words in this tense, and see where it takes me. So now I pose a question to you:

What have you noticed about tenses? How have you dabbled, as well as POV, are there any among us who actively write using Present Tense, if so, how do you work with the limitations this tense form presents.  What about future tense, which is something I rarely see done, if ever now that I think about it. What are your experiments with tense usage, and how have they helped you grow as a writer.

This article is strictly contemplative with no empirical backing, but simple observation, however I am still interested to know if any of you have had the same experiences as myself. What other experiences have you had?

Please look forward to a more indepth and research based article on the topic of Tense and POV in the near future.

~Beth