In Defense of the Tense

Matt Sutherland Defends the Present Tense in Fiction Writing

In January 2025, I wrote a piece attacking the use of the present tense in contemporary fiction, which, in my view, reflects a culture that is incapable of reflection. Pens and Poison reader and author of the Substack Laudanum Matt Sutherland had a lot to say. Today, Matt offers his rebuttal to my piece. You may read my piece on the present tense below and tune in for Matt’s defense of the tense.

~ Liza Libes

The Eternal Now: How Present Tense Fiction Is Eroding Literary Depth

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In Defense of the Tense

I’ll begin with my credentials, or lack thereof: I too am not an MFA-trained writer. I did things the old-fashioned way: beginning my college career in a more practical field (mathematics) and abandoning ship for one of the least practical (creative writing). That is, I carry with me only a BA and I can’t say it’s ever served me outside of checking the box on job applications that, yes, I did indeed go to college. Once upon a time I considered an MFA, but instead opted to dive right into life so that I could fill that necessary well of experiences from which I could draw scarcely concealed characters and scenes for storytelling. (Not that life before college wasn’t life, but you get the point—I wanted to get on with things.)

I say storytelling deliberately instead of writing, because I am of the opinion that writing is only a tool to serve the greater function of storytelling, which humans have been drawn to as long as we’ve been around. The tense in which one writes is a similar tool, with pros and cons like any other.

Bad writing is bad writing. It doesn’t matter whether the writer uses the present tense or the past, writes on pressing issues or trivial ones, has lived a tragic life or a blessed one. If the prose doesn’t provoke and elucidate, it is bad prose (I know, I’ve written it). This is the core of my issue with the denigration of the present tense: we ought instead to critique the poor use of a tool rather than the tool itself.

A story told in the present tense can be just as reflective as one told in the past. It’s only a matter of whether the writer telling it does so effectively to engage the reader in conversation. Consider Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: a rampage of a book told primarily through the present tense, which the reader can easily engage with and reflect on as they turn page after page. While Patrick Bateman tells his story as life unfolds (or doesn’t), we the reader are still able to see his isolation, his desire to fit in, his alienation with consumerist 80’s culture, the depth of depravity that his psyche sinks to in order to cope. All of this happens in real-time, but it instills in the reader the setting and history of the story. Even in a story told through the ceaselessness of the present, the story itself reflects.

Characters in such stories can take time to think back, segments written in the past can be woven in, histories can be conveyed in dialogue. For the latter, one need only look to Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. Around halfway through the novel, Pilar recounts to Robert Jordan the story of her husband Pablo’s brutal massacre of accused fascists in his hometown. The gut-wrenching cruelty of it all, the simmering doubts as to whether what happened was itself just. This all occurs through dialogue, and while the book itself is not in the present tense, it stands to reason that there is no inherent limitation to writing a compelling story in the present tense that could not include in it such a passage To tap into what the present tense may lack. It is only dependent on a skilled writer to pull it off.

I also consider a massive issue in modern, simplistic writing to be a misapplication of iceberg theory, but that’s another story for another day. Decades ago, Hemingway saw it clearly enough in Death in the Afternoon: “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

Rather than critiquing the present tense, I think it instead better to focus on the cookie cutter nature of many modern writers, churned out from the MFA system or otherwise, which I would contend is due to tandem shifts in culture and industry. As progressive mores have pushed further and further left over the past decade, so too have the mores around what’s acceptable to publish (especially as those spaces have become more entrenched in ideology). This may also explain the decline of male readers over time, which only exacerbates the gaps in what gets published as publishing houses and agents select for writers who conform with the markets they prefer. What came first I couldn’t say. I don’t, however, believe this is an inherently sexed issue—though I can attest as a (simple) man that very little of literature in the past decade appeals to me, which is one reason I’ve become passionate about writing the stories I want to read myself. Rather, the decline of male readership is a symptom of a larger problem: a convergence of literature toward politicized aims, currently in favor of modern progressive values and aesthetics. I say this as someone whose sympathies skew left.

In that convergence, audiences shrink along with the topics covered; the way said topics are covered; and, as is always the case where social animals like us are concerned, the tools the remaining writers use to write. Think of it as a forcing function incurred by erroneous optimization. The industry is optimizing for their remaining audience, the dwindling of which they’ve encouraged, and the writers willing to play ball respond to that force in kind—have to use the tools that appear required, have to know the new and ever-changing shibboleths. That is until someone somewhere realizes there’s an opening, an unaddressed and ignored market waiting to be tapped. I think that market could do well with some stories told in the present tense (not only because I just finished my first novel, Long Left East, which is written in the present tense, though that is certainly a factor in my defense of the tense). I only hope that this market isn’t addressed so carelessly as it was abandoned.

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