Yesterday a reader wrote to ask why I wrote The River of Strange People in the present tense, and claimed that “no bestselling authors use the present tense.”

The latter claim is clearly wrong. Off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen of well-regarded, best-selling novels written in the present tense:  The Time Traveler’s Wife, The House of Sand and Fog, High Fidelity, The Hours (I think — but I could be wrong about this one), Fight Club, Bright Lights Big City, A Million Little Pieces (Frey), Cat’s Eye (Atwood), Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (Robbins), Rabbit Run, The Fall (Camus) and Bleak House.  And there are many others.

Yet although the claim that ”no bestsellers use the present tense” is untrue, the reader’s question is still a valid and important one, because it’s certainly true that the vast majority of novels are written in the past tense rather than the present tense. So why did I write The River of Strange People (and A Question of Identity, as it happens) in the present tense?

The present tense has three advantages over the past tense:

• Present tense is better than past tense at creating an immediate “movie” feel to narration, as you live through each scene in actual time, like a movie does. Action scenes, in particular, come alive much better in present tense than in past tense.

• Present tense is better than past tense at creating strong emotional reader identification with the perspective character in a scene, because the reader is right there with the character, experiencing the emotions in the same real time as the character.

• Present tense is better for loquacious first-person narrators prone to generalizations. For example, I’m reading a Kinky Friedman novel right now, written in the first person PAST tense, and the narration is often painfully awkward, because the Kinkster likes to express funny generalizations about New York and New Yorkers, but they just sound incredibly clunky in the past tense (”Rain was a lot like vomiting One of the few great equalizers in life. It soaked society dames and bag ladies. Cops and robbers. People and pigeons.” — A sentiment that would sound much more natural if it was expressed in the present tense, because it surely applies as much in the narrative present as it did in the past time in which the novel is set.) 

But in fairness, the present tense has two disadvantages, too:

•  The past tense is much better for narrating a story over long time periods, because the narrator speaking in the past tense can cover months or years in a couple of sentences if he wants to, which would be impossible in the present tense — the present tense requires the author to write in separate episodes, and then to cover time jumps with chapter breaks or those three asterisks at the end of each scene.

•  The past tense is also better for creating that easy “tale told by the fireside” tone, because when we tell each other stories in real life, we almost always tell them in the past tense (although we do sometimes use the present tense, e.g.: “So I tell this guy, ‘look, take it or leave it’. And he tells me, ‘that’s not a fair way to negotiate’. So I walk out.”)   

So anyone writing a novel has to balance these pros and cons, because neither the present tense nor the past tense is perfect for all occasions. With The River of Strange People, I wanted a “movie feel”, and I wanted the action scenes to feel immediate and vivid, and to engage the emotions of the reader as strongly as possible; and although the novel takes place over a four month period, I conceived the novel as a series of episodes in the first five days, and another series of episodes in the last three days, of that four month period, so it was easy to cover the time between by means of a break between Book One and Book Two. So the present tense was clearly the way to go for TROSP.

For A Question of Identity, the choice was a little harder. On the one hand, I had a loquacious first-person narrator prone to generalizations which sounded much more natural in the present tense;  but I also thought he would probably be happier if he could just tell the whole story the way he would at a bar, i.e., in the past tense. Then again, I wanted more emotional immediacy than past tense provides, and I conceived AQOI, like TROSP, as a series of episodes over a short time period, so in the end I opted for present tense.

But I don’t always go for present tense (I wrote my first novel, The Writing On The Wall, in the past tense). Ultimately, I feel the choice between present or past tense is not nearly as important, nor as difficult, as the choice between first-person or third-person narrator. The proof of this point is: You can take any book that’s written in present tense, and easily transform it into a past tense novel, or vice-versa, just by going through and changing the tense of all the verbs. But you really cannot so easily transform a first-person novel into a third-person novel, or vice-versa, because most of the narration just will not translate, without major reworking of the entire passage.      

So to the reader who asked the question:  thanks for asking.  To the rest of you, keep those cards and letters (and emails) coming!  I love answering questions. It’s so much easier than thinking up blog topics by myself.

World Wide Wes, the murky street savant who plays an unidentified but clearly prominent (and possibly corrupt) role in the lives of most talented American hoopsters these days, was in Las Vegas the other night with a young NBA stud who was urging Wes to stay out past 2 pm in pursuit of yet another bar, which prompted Wes — no Faulkner, yet a surprisingly articulate guy, in a pithy sort of way – to say: “Nothing good can happen at this point. You can’t chase the night. When the night is over, it’s over. You just gotta wake up tomorrow and hope for a better day.”

Amen, brother Wes. You can’t chase the night.

And you can’t chase literary agents, either.

We aspiring writers know this. Either Lady Luck smiles on you, and money rains down on you for no apparent reason — witness, for example, Elizabeth Kostova, who wrote an impossibly tedious 700 plus page first novel, yet somehow not only got an agent (all the agents I know say “don’t even think of sending me more than 400 pages, no present tense, no this, no that, especially for you first-time writers, whom I already regard as something smelly on the side of my shoe”) but also got a six-figure advance for a book I DARE you to try to finish without contemplating suicide at least ten times, just so you can get out of finishing it – or, as happens more often, Lady Luck does NOT smile on you. And you find yourself chasing the agents. With the same sense of futility as an NBA star chasing the night.

But lest you think I’m feeling sorry for myself, guess again! The life of a novelist is really a piece of cake in the 21st century. Sure, it’s an endless cycle of uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment. Sure you get up every day and try to drown out that little whispering voice in your head that says “you can’t do it” and “you’re gonna fall flat” and “why would you even bother trying to write a novel, who the hell cares about novels anymore?”  Sure your friends all start to give you patronizing, pitying looks normally reserved for street people rumored once to have been promising students, before a very ugly fall from grace. Sure, every page of your novel shows the bloodstains of the wrestling match in your head between hopelessness and whatever it is that makes you write in the first place, be it masochism or psychosis or just plain stubborness, like a Welsh Corgi gnawing, biting, chewing on a bone, for reasons he can’t even begin to guess.  

So you think you’ve got it tough? Think again. Remember the great Russian writers? Now THOSE guys had it tough.

Pushkin died in a duel. Lermontov died in a duel. Tolstoy fought in the Caucassus. Dostoyevski was sentenced to death, then driven to epilepsy when they fired blanks at him, before exiling him to a Siberian labor camp. Solzhenitsyn fought in WWII, got sent to the Gulag, survived cancer and still defied the Soviet government.  Pasternak barely dodged a Stalin death sentence in the 30’s, then was forced by death threats to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958 (leading to the great cartoon showing Pasternak in a Soviet work camp, splitting wood and saying to another prisoner: “I won the Nobel Prize — what was your crime?). Shalamov got 17 years in the Gulag, and Girboyedov was torn to pieces by angry Persians after trying to save an American eunuch.

Now THAT’s suffering for your art!  We who merely chase the agents — even though it’s as futile as chasing the night — have a long ways to go.

My younger daughter, Kyla, plays tennis for the University of California Santa Cruz tennis team, whose nickname is the “Banana Slugs” (voted by ESPN the single best college sports nickname in the USA).  In past years the t-shirts we Banana Slugs fans wore said things like “no known predators” (an excellent point — not even a crocodile’s going to stoop so low as to eat a banana slug), but this year, riffing off the old groupie slogan “I’m with the band”, the UCSC tennis t-shirts say, “I’m with the Slugs.” A droll t-shirt anyone with any sense would love to wear. (If you want to buy one, let me know, and I’ll be happy to put you in touch with Kyla. They’re a bargain, at any price. Soon to be collector’s items.)

But apart from the solidarity I feel with UCSC tennis, the slogan “I’m with the Slugs” is resonating for me in a broader sense these days. Because it now symbolizes the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve finally kicked my lifelong addiction to University of Michigan sports. 

I do not use the term “addicted” loosely here.  Growing up in Ann Arbor with two faculty members for parents, the fanatical devotion to UM sports got inculcated into me at a very tender age – about the same time I was innoculated against smallpox — and it grew into a lifelong obsession that has caused me, like any addict, to suffer from uncontrollable compulsive behavior (watching every UM football or basketball game, even when there were so many better things I could have been doing with my life the past 45 years) and then suffering from predictable but utterly uncontrollable mood swings (ranging from euphoric highs like I felt Kolesar’s catch and Rumeal’s FT’s, down to abysmal lows like the suicidal feeling I had after the Webber timeout and the Colorado Hail Mary) all depending on the random scores that resulted from the performances of the immature semi-professional gladiators that UM hired to represent it — gladiators who bear as little relation to UM students as the New Orleans Saints players bear to the suffering community they supposedly “represented” in the Super Bowl.

I tried reasoning my way out of my addiction. Why should I get totally morbidly depressed for three days, just because a group of young guys who won the genetic lottery — pituitary freaks, really — had a bad day and failed to win a ballgame against another group of genetically-lucky young guys who “represented” another university to which they were as loosely connected as “our” guys to UM?  It made absolutely no sense.

But addictions never make sense. And yet, believe me, my Wolverine addiction was real. I cannot describe the depths of depression into which I would routinely sink, whenever the Wolverines would lose a game they should have won — which happened a lot during the last 45 years. My long-suffering wife learned to avoid me for at least 72 hours after such events; but the rest of the world — clients, colleagues, friends and neighbors — were left shaking their heads at my admittedly erratic post-loss behavior.

So for years I struggled with my addiction, trying not to scream at the television in front of colleagues and clients when Bo would inevitably start sitting on a third-quarter lead against a good team, playing too conservatively because he refused to understand that in the modern game, teams can pass their way back into contention much more quickly than they could back when Woody was teaching Bo the X’s and O’s.  I even agreed to seek counseling in 1989, after I repeatedly woke our sleeping infants with euphoric whoops during our improbable NCAA tourney title run, prompting Child Protective Services to threaten to take the children away from us if I didn’t get my addiction under control.  But like Tiger Woods in his rehab clinic, I could never really kick the habit, or even tame the tiger, because, as we say in rehab, I am an addict.

Or at least, I was. But somehow four years of living in London, combined with four years of record-setting futility in UM football and basketball, have combined to give me, finally, a glimpse of a Wolverine-free life. The UM teams are so bad now, even I can see it makes no sense to yell at the television. These poor slugs can’t help themselves, I tell myself. They’re doing the best they can. So instead of sinking into an irrational low every time UM loses another game, I simply congratulate myself on another Wolverine-free day.

But like any addict, I’m in constant danger of a relapse. You can’t count on UM’s football and basketball teams to continue their improbably poor play forever. (Or can we? Lord.) So, as a prophylactic measure, I’ve adopted the UCSC Banana Slugs.  (Last year I tried rooting for my daughter Rachel’s college team, the Oregon Ducks, but the problem is, Oregon is just good enough that you can get sucked back into the whole maelstrom of highs and lows, just like rooting for UM — and then when the Ducks mailed in that stinker against OSU in the Rose Bowl, I was right back to Square One, mired in a three-day depression when everyone else was celebrating the New Year.) 

By contrast, when you root for the Banana Slugs, you are NEVER in danger of getting TOO sucked in — after all, a team that calls itself the Banana Slugs cannot be taking sports TOO seriously, right? Don’t get me wrong here. The Slugs compete hard. They are feared by their opponents. But at the end of the day, unlike the Wolverines, the Slugs are actually real students, who would’ve gotten into the University they purport to represent even if they were NOT so deft at swinging a racquet (or whatever other sport they may play). And as a result, the Slugs have sports, and life, in the proper perspective (something sadly lacking in my own NCAA-distorted life).

Wouldn’t it be great if all of college sports were required to go forward WITHOUT scholarships, WITHOUT TV money, WITHOUT donors and sky boxes and coaches who make more than the professors? Just roll out the balls, and whoever wants to play can compete for the right to play; but when they’re done with the games, they still have to pass their classes, and no one pays them a dime?

As John Lennon would say, imagine.  

So call me a dreamer. But this is why I’m with the Slugs!

First, thank you to my loyal blog readers (all 16 of you) for complaining about my recent deplorable lack of output!  It’s so nice to know that my silence has been noticed.  I assume each of you has your reasons (strange though they may be) for reading my blog and, of course, like Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, I will not ask what those reasons are.  Your secrets are safe with me.

But what the hell have I been doing the past 8 days? you may be wondering.  Basically, I’ve been acting like a modern version of P.T. Barnum, tirelessly huckstering my new novel (instead of, say, moving on and writing another one, like Serious Writers used to do, back in the bad old days, before we had the internet and digital publishing and authonomy and so many other ways to promote ourselves).  But lest you think I’m just a shameless mountebank, let me explain.

Growing up in the 1960’s, my vision of the Serious Writer was William Faulkner.  Born in 1897 in backwater Oxford, Mississippi, Billy tried to be a dashing pilot in WWI, failed somewhat ignominiously, and then became the worst postman Oxford ever saw (he liked to open the letters and read the local gossip, as grist for his future novels — a habit that one him precious few admirers amongst the Oxford stamp-purchasers).  So Bill lit out for New Orleans in the 20s, haunted the French Quarter bars, drank too much absinthe and chased too many hookers, but wrote some damn fine books, like The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom, which unfortunately no one much cared to read, because the plots are awful complicated, and the sentences are awful long. Driven by the need for SOME income, Bill decamped for Hollywood in the late 30s, and wrote some of the best screenplays ever written, for movies like The Big Sleep, while quietly drinking himself towards an early grave — only, unbeknownst to Bill, some well-regarded French intellectuals (Sartre and Camus) had decided that this backwater Mississippi writer was the best thing going in America, and their ceaseless championing of Faulkner’s novels inspired a renaissance of interest in his old 1930s novels, and in 1954 the by-then-totally-burnt-out Faulkner won the Novel Prize (for which he barely sobered up in time, but then gave a truly great speech). For the last nine years of his life, Faulkner hung out at universities, giving error-ridden answers to questions about his novels in the morning, which were cleaned up in the afternoon by friendly professors while Bill was drinking himself silly, before finally succumbing to the early grave that awaits most alcoholics, at age 65.  Now THAT’s the life of a SERIOUS WRITER, I thought, whilst growing up.

By contrast, let’s look at my shabby life.  Born in 1954 (the year of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize), I won some writing awards in my early 20s, but lacked the guts to just commit to writing (like, say, Stephen King, who was so sure he had the requisite talent, that he was willing to live in a trailer with his young family, just to give himself the time to write), so I made the Obvious Compromise:  I became a lawyer.  For 25 years, I barely breathed an opportunity to write (though I did help, in my spare time, to raise two lovely young women), and then at last, thanks to the wonders of hard work and a few good contingent fee awards, I saw the chance to retire.  So now I write full-time, and though I’m no spring chicken, still, in the Scheme of Things, I’m still a few decades away from the reach of the Reaper, and I’ve still got most of my faculties, and I have a lovely wife who supports me, and I have unlimited time to Write.

In short, I consider myself very lucky.  So somewhat belatedly, but with full earnestness, I’ve set out to be a Serious Writer.  I’m too old to chase hookers (alas), but I drink my share of absinthe (and Susan would say, a few other people’s shares of absinthe, too), and I work even harder as a writer than I did as a lawyer (and I was no piker as a lawyer), and so I put out The River of Strange People.  

Now if I were Billy Faulkner, I’d send that fine novel off to Max Perkins, and then immediately dive into one of the three other excellent projects I’ve got rattling around half-written in my notebooks, and let Max take care of pitching the novel to the publisher, editing it, and marketing it.

But alas, I live in the 21st century.  The Age of Information. The Internet Age. All around me are examples of novelists who’ve “hit it big” just by being “entrepreneurial.”  For example, there’s the lady who wrote The Lace Reader — Brunonia Barry? — who, weary of dumb agents rejecting her fine book, formed her own publishing company, published herself, marketed herself, and became a best-seller!  Surely, my friends tell me, you’re as smart as Brunonia, or any of dozens of other self-publishing/self-blogging success stories like hers that you can hear these days – so why don’t you just do it?

Okay, I said.  You’re right.  I’m a smart guy, and The River of Strange People is a damn fine book.  So in the past 60 days, in the pursuit of becoming the Next Great Fireside Story of a Writer Who Marketed Himself, I’ve:

• Hired and worked with a website designer, to get this website, and this blog, up and running;
• Hired and worked with a graphics designer, to get that cool cover for The River of Strange People that I bet you like; 
• Hired and worked with a text specialist, to get the novel into printable format;
• Hired and worked with a printer, to get The River of Strange People into print;
• Attended a writer’s conferences, to meet literary agents and pitch the novel;
• Scoured dozens of compilations of literary agent listings, to look for the right agent for this novel;
• Crafted synopses and query letters, and sent them to dozens of literary agents;
• Started uploading the novel onto “Authonomy”, the website for aspiring authors to gain wider recognition; 
• Hired and worked with a PR firm to get a Press Release out about this novel to 2400 media “outlets”;
• Hired the PR firm to send information about the novel to hundreds of potential reviewers; 
• Communicated with amazon and barnes & noble to get the novel available on-line;
• Set up book readings at high-profile bookstores;  AND

In short, spent no time writing any new fiction.

So now I find myself wondering:  why was I in such a hurry to retire from being a lawyer — a thankless job that requires endless hours of self-promotion, just to keep the new cases coming in the door — if all I was going to do was become a writer and spend my time endlessly self-promoting?

WWWFD? (What would William Faulkner do?)

I’m guessing he’d go have an absinthe.  Or six.  And then just dive into his next novel.

My wife Susan had a cousin, Richard Morof — a truly lovely man, who died far too young — who was a very talented actor but who, like many talented actors, hustled his buns off just to get a few scraps from Hollywood’s table, because there are so many talented actors in L.A. who never get a chance to strut their stuff.  Every so often Richard would call to tell us he had a walk-on in a TV show, or a speaking part in a commercial, or whatever — and we’d do our best to get excited, even though we knew, as Richard also knew, that the part was not worthy of his talents. But one time Richard was at our house for some family function, and I got him more than a little lubed up (as I, like the devil pouring drinks, have been known to do, to many of our guests), and Richard went off and told the funniest, yet most achingly painful, joke I’ve ever heard. It goes like this.

An actor is driving home one night, and in the distance sees a huge fire. As the actor draws near, he realizes it’s his own house on fire. He pulls up to the barricade, and when the cops stop him, the actor identifies himself as the homeowner. “Oh sir,” the cop says, “we have terrible news for you — a man came to your house, raped and murdered your wife and your daughter, and set your house on fire. And we know who he was. He was  …  (pause) YOUR AGENT.” The actor gazes at the cop a moment in disbelief, then says: “My agent was here? AT MY HOUSE?”

Tears still come to my eyes when I think of Richard telling that joke. He had such a special zeal — such a deeply-felt, fully-deserved rage — about how the agent/actor relationship makes the actor crawl for every few dribs and drabs of the agent’s attention, in a demeaning way normally reserved for lovesick teenagers stuck in hopelessly lopsided romantic relationships. 

But recently I’ve been thinking: Et tu, Jonathan?

For so, too, we writers scramble hard, like actors and pathetic teen lovers, for even a few seconds with a prospective literary agent. These days I’m sending out query letters for The River of Strange People – to try to attract a big-time agent, who could garner, for what everyone tells me is a really fun and exciting novel, the exposure and promotion that I will never be able to bring it, working as my own “marketing department” – and therefore, as I write each successive query letter to literary agents, I can’t help thinking of Richard Morof and his agent joke.

In fact, writers these days may be even more pathetic than actors. It’s gotten so hard to get a literary agent to take you on, agents now charge serious money for ten-minute “one-to-one” meetings, in which the author pays for the privilege of pitching his or her book, while the egg-timer or chess-clock measures the madness to the minute.  But actually, I’m not complaining, because this new format probably favors me above other writers – after all, I have 25 years of on-the-job training in strictly-limited ten-minute oral arguments (i.e., pitches) to an even more difficultly-ADD audience than literary agents (i.e., judges). Still, as I pay my shekels for my ten minutes of infamy with each successive agent, I can’t help thinking that Richard Morof, looking down on me from whatever cloud he’s riding on, is shaking his head and saying “Jonathan, Jonathan — don’t stoop so low. Just because they came to your house …”

But what’s the alternative?  For most of my life I’ve modeled my artistic career on that of Vincent Van Gogh:  only one sale in his lifetime, but man! his after-life residuals were off the charts!  People in Amsterdam now queue up for blocks to visit the museum in Vince’s honor. And if you think about it, I’m directly on track with the one-eared wonder: like Vince, I’ve got one sale so far (A Question of Identity), so if only I have the good judgment to cut off my ear soon and commit suicide, my career could really take off!  (Look at what Death did for Michael Jackson.)

Alas, I love life too much to follow Vince into what Dylan Thomas called “the grains beyond age, the dark veins of [your] mother”, so I guess I’ll just have to keep going to these “one-to-one meetings” with literary agents.  But whose house is really on fire, I wonder? 

I was going to end this post on that gloomy question, but instead, I think I’ll give you Richard Morof’s other great agent joke (and I have to say, as a lawyer, I was amazed to learn there was a species of humans targeted by more vicious jokes even than lawyer jokes). It goes like this.

An actor checks into the ER. He needs a heart transplant, ASAP. The doctor says: “We’ve only got two hearts available, but one belonged to a 26 year old marathoner who was struck by a car and died without damage to his heart. We can put his heart into you and you’ll probably live a long life.” The actor nods, but out of caution, asks: ”what about the other heart?” The doctor says: “oh, you wouldn’t want that one — it belonged to a 52 year old agent, who smoked like a chimney.” The actor doesn’t hesitate:  “I’ll take the agent’s heart.” The doctor is stunned. “Why would you want the old agent’s heart, instead of the young marathoner?” he asks. The actor smiles. ”Because I’m sure the agent’s heart’s never been used.”

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Several people emailed to ask why they can’t post comments on this blog.  The answer is: I would rather just field email responses, rather than spend the extra time necessary to watch the blog like a hawk to review all comments as they arrive, in order to delete inappropriate comments from “trolls”, and edit prolix comments that make it harder for readers to access the original blog posts.  While I’m sure most people would post comments responsibly, my understanding from other author-bloggers is that allowing comments requires eternal vigilance and/or hiring a blog monitor.  Right now my commitment to blogging, though serious, is not that fanatical.  But perhaps in time I’ll grow so addicted to blogging I’ll be willing to give up the time necessary to monitor comments.  In the meantime, though, since I’ve disabled the “comments” feature, please send email responses to anything you read — I generally respond to all emails within a day or two.  Thanks.