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Last week, our hero and his partner in P.I. put silver-studded arm restraints on a werewolf. ‘Cause that’s how we roll around here.
I’m skipping over a some interrogation and Tom’s building worry over his brother and frustration with the wolf’s fairly smug non-answers, so while Tom’s action is brutal, it isn’t as cold-blooded as it seems when read in context.
Promise.
The thug eyed me. “What the hell are you?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Out of patience,” I said, firing a bullet through his kneecap.
He gritted his teeth and huffed out a few breaths. Wolves could take a lot of punishment, but mostly because the pain didn’t last long—unless something stopped the healing process, like, say, a small fortune in silver studs pressed into bare skin. They must have stung like hell, all by themselves.
“You’re. The message,” he said, panting.
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I have a question about tenses (Chip, this is your fault for making me think about why I’m doing what I’m doing):
I’m not used to writing in first person in fiction, and while the story is set in the past, my inclination is to put certain sentences in present tense, because that’s how we all tell our own stories when we’re speaking directly to our audience and make statements that are still in effect.
Like this:
Grandma shouted at the cabdriver to follow that car and floor it, sonny. When he stared at her, she started waving around the hundred dollar bill she keeps in her bra for luck, the one she swears she won from Dean Martin in a pinochle game at the Sands—the bill, not the bra, which please god has no interesting story attached to it and never will—even though she won’t let anyone look at the series date or the treasurer’s name.
The taxi driver took off like a bat out of Hoboken, even though my sister kept screaming at him to pull over . . .
Grandma (not actually one of mine, by the way, I made her up just now) still has that bill in her bra (yerk), so even though the rest of the story would be told in the past tense, that’s in present.
So since Tom is telling his story to you people, my first draft of the above snippet reads like this:
“Out of patience,” I said, firing a bullet through his kneecap.
Wolves can take a lot of punishment, mostly because the pain doesn’t last long—unless something stops the healing process, like, say, a small fortune in silver studs pressed into bare skin.
They must have stung like hell, all by themselves.
Does this tense shift from past to present and back again seem natural to you, or does it bug you as a reader? Do you prefer this one, or the revised all-past-tense one at the top of what has become a ridiculously long post?
Just wondering . . .
Earful of Cider 