Completely lambasted by academics for using 1st person present with flashbacks...

I think your tense choice is fine, but your prof is probably right about some of the items you've listed - for example...

Not: Wow, she's hot, I think.
But: Wow, she's hot.

But as far as the flashbacks go, do you mean you cut away from the present-tense scene and go to some prior time, ALSO in present tense? If so, that would seriously bug me. I'd suggest putting the flashbacks in as memories - that is, IN the present tense of the story, your first-person character remembers something. Such as,

Sue's skirt is bright blue, the color that always makes me think of the time I was at the seashore with my mother. I was five, and she took me by the hand and led me down to the water. "Johnny," she said, "Don't you want to take a swim?" I hadn't wanted to swim, but she threw me in anyway and I almost drowned.
Sue taps my shoulder. "Johnny, aren't you listening?"
I blink and look up, etc. etc.

If you want to publish commercial fiction, the only critics worth having lambast you are those who have published a lot of commercial fiction. Everyone else should be offering respectful suggestions in my opinion - especially academics who often know critical theory but not how to write.

First person goes into and out of fashion. There are stories for which it works better or worse (for instance, very few first person stories end with the narrating character dead). There are better and worse ways of writing them -- where 'better' means that readers are chewing their nails, and 'worse' means that they're stifling yawns. The biggest restriction of first person is that you're limited to one character's perspective. That works well for some stories (e.g. character against environment), but not so well for others (e.g. complex intrigues).

1P present-tense is extremely restrictive. Not only are you limited to one character's knowledge and perceptions, but you must introduce them as the character experiences them. With 1P past-tense at least the character can interject knowledge learned later -- but you lose that with present-tense. So it's not hard to write (say) a short, suspenseful confrontation in 1P present-tense, but much harder to write (say) a murder mystery.

The main problems I'd look for in your 1P present-tense story are plot logic and motivations of supporting characters. If the 1P present-tense is falling down, that's where I'd expect to lose the reader. But if they're biting their nails throughout, and the logic and motivations are all apparent, then why change?

As for flashbacks, sometimes they're necessary but more often they're abused. They cost your story pacing because they interrupt the logical flow, and very often they don't actually contribute to tension. Also, if you're telling your story in 1P present-tense, I think that a flashback would look a little odd. They're more a past-tense story-telling device.

The most compelling reason to insert a flashback is if the main character is doing something that appears out of character. Another reason is if you have a 'howdunnit', or maybe a 'whodunnit' with a clue. But for much of the time you can narrate backstory and it works much better. I used a flashback for my short Tofan's Badal because I wanted to show why a 15 year-old plans murder, but if Tofan had just planned to break a window instead, a narrative about his reason would've sufficed.

Hope that helps.

Fad?

Check out the mystery novels of Carl Hiaasen. (His books make the New York Times bestseller list). He writes in the first-person, present tense. For past events, he uses the past tense. Once you're reading, you tend to forget what tense he's using.

Maybe this is the kind of "fad" your professor is talking about. I know nothing about your creative writing program, but some of the "rules" that writing instructors come up with have always baffled me.

Of course, if you're looking for a grade, maybe you'd better do what Teacher says.

If there's one thing most of us have learned around this joint is that there are NO rules about writing fads. If it sells, HEY! It sells!

If your character is thinking of someone they haven't seen in a long time and they are a business acquaintance they just might think to themselves both first and last names. But they wouldn't say I THINK to themselves.

However, let me caution you, if this is a graduate class and you will be receiving a grade, give the professor what she wants. Keep the copy of how you like it for your files and submissions but give her what she wants.

Gah, the last person in the world I would want to take writing advice from is a creative writing professor! I've had my work critiqued by a number of different people, and have learned that the more experience and training a person has in writing/editing, the less useful their input is. See, people who know a lot about writing have thousands of their own ideas and opinions, most of which will probably differ from your ideas and opinions on how things should be done. For the most part, I've found experienced people to be so caught up on little technical details that they have no appreciation for real story telling (particularly when it comes to a story that breaks their sacred Rules of Writing!)

All my beta readers now are readers — you know, the people who will actually be buying my books someday. None of them even write as a hobby. Their advice has been invaluable. I suggest you go find some more open-minded people to read your book and give you input that's actually useful.

You said you've got an agent looking at a full already too. How can your work possibly be that bad if you've already got an agent looking at it?

I think the huge error on your professors part is assuming that anything in first person is interior monologue, and then taking that a step further and assuming that interior monologue cannot involve a person addressing himself. The only reason this would seem weird now is because of the creation of the stream of consciousness narrative during the modernist period, when writers attempted to write the way people actually think. Of course, you can only write the way you think, you'd never be able to capture the way everyone streams a narrative in their head because you have no way of knowing what goes on in another person's mind. It's entirely possible that many people speak to themselves as an outsider in their interior monologue and include information about what they see and hear.

The intended audience is not an academic one

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I think you've answered your own question there
My own mother once read something I had written and told me rather complacently that she was itching to put a red pen through most of it. Her credentials were that she had attended night school in creative writing. She never had any of her work published, not even in a club newsletter whereas I managed to do that and much more.
Good advice though, to toe the line for the purposes of your course. Grit your teeth!

Methinks your writing prof is simply directing you down an easier road.

If you think 1st person/present tense best fits your story then that's what to use.

If on the other hand you're using it just because you want to, dammit, then that's not a fad, that's a conceit, a whimsical notion. Why not try writing it in 3rd person limited instead, just for kicks, and compare?

-Derek

I just started reading a novel that has been selling in my stores.

I was appalled. The writing was horrendous. Double adjectives, adjectives that made no sense ("dripping talons" , duh, talons don't drip), switching from past to present tense at random. Then to top it all, the opening scene was a dream sequence. All in the first three pages.

Not only did it get published, but it is selling well.

Makes me shake my head, should I re-write my WIP to be that bad? LOL.

Smiles
Bob

I agree, in school, do everything exactly as the prof teaches, even if they are wrong. I once corrected a math prof in class, next paper I lost over 20% on punctuation. Never again.

Academia is full of head cases.

I mean, seriously. I have rarely found critical essays and "reading guides" written by academia any help at all. They spend so much time on little nitpicky stuff that they lose the big picture of how storytelling works. Stuff like "why is the color of the cup blue? What does it symbolize" and rubbish like that.

I think your professor is just suffering from chronic OMGhebrokeanarbitraryrulethatmagicallytransformsbadwritingintogood-titis.

First off, creative writing classes on the graduate level are often frought with cutthroat competition, and many are unfriendly toward genre or commercial fiction. Believe me, I have some scars to prove it. You can get something out of them, but you have to figure out the prejudices of the instructor and students, then remember to carry a big salt shaker with you whenever your work is up for critique. And know, if you're bucking the trend of a class that doesn't respect all fiction, you're going to get savaged. Depending on the extent of the savaging, this particular class might be more destructive than constructive for you. Something to think about.

I'd say your instructor is right about intimate POVs, like first person or third person limited with deep penetration into the character's mind. The POV character will usually not infodump, that is, call someone he thinks of as Bill, William Stovington, III. However, not all first person (present or past) is interior monologue. Far from it.

For example:

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger - the conceit of the book is that Holden is writing down the story of his flight from school to New York from the rest home to which he's been consigned. He's not "interior monologizing." He's writing to an audience and often attempting to justify himself to it.

The Shopaholic series, Sophie Kinsella - These books are in first person, present tense, and are some of the most popular in the popular chick lit genre. The POV character, Becky, seems sometimes to be speaking directly to herself, but more frequently to be telling her story to a good friend in a cafe -- again, she has an audience and hence can explain things she wouldn't have to explain to herself.

The question you could pose to your novel is: Who is the first person narrator speaking to? Is he writing his story down for posterity? Is he talking to a friend, or to an interrogator? Is he really talking just to himself (true interior monologue)? And what is his reason for telling the story? Self-justification? Simple narration? Bragging? Something else? Some complex combination of motives?

Considering these questions will help clarify for YOU whether the POV is working for the novel. Also, seek out beta readers who like the genre of the novel, especially if it's not a genre your instructor and classmates respect. That an agent has requested a full for it is a good sign that you're moving in the right direction.

Academia is also full of truly insightful professors, one of whom once highly praised a novella I wrote in first person present tense. A novella, I'd like to note, which won the graduate fiction prize that year, and was also highly praised by that year's judge: Robert Olen Butler. So, take your professor's remarks as his opinion only, not a rule to guide your writing.

If you have already sent queries out to a few agents and have a request for a full, I think I'd just let that ride for a bit before changing anything. Maybe you will get some valuable feedback from someone who is actually trying to sell novels in today's market.

In this kind of instance, I'd give 'em what they want to get the grade all the while reminding myself something my wise grandfather taught me many moons ago: "Them who can't do, teach."

Your prof is assuming a lot. But, it's really easy to screw up using 1st person present tense, though some authors do it beautifully. Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants is in 1st person present and has been on the NYT Bestseller list for more than a year...

Do you have to decide whether to use the critiques right now? In my experience, if a crit seems too harsh to me, I often need to set it aside until I'm calm enough to see what it has to offer me and what I need to reject. If you do have to make changes for the class, I'd treat them as experiments that you're learning from rather than as "corrections" to this specific work.

Sorry for the bruises. Eat chocolate.

If you have a request for a full, you must be doing something right. Wait for feedback on the full before changing anything. It's fiction, rules are bent. Some academics lose sight of that.

Academia is also full of truly insightful professors, one of whom once highly praised a novella I wrote in first person present tense.

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Of course. Although I still think that is the exception, not the rule, at least based on my observations.

If I pick up a book, glance at the first page and find it's in present tense, I put it back on the shelf. I know I would never be able to read beyond the first page before said book put a dent in one of my walls. Just personal choice.

Beware academic writing instructors. Some will insist you write in their style, and they'll fail you if you don't. It's rare to find one with an open mind toward other writing styles and tenses. You'd be better off giving the novel to a Beta.

Think about your target audience.

For grades, give them what they want, be they professors, instructors or the volunteers at the senior center.

For agents/editors/your reading public, give them what *they* want.

For yourself, give yourself the pleasure, heartache, satisfaction and trouble of writing the story inside you before fixing it to give everyone else what they want.

I'm a writer - I write genre and I am proud to be able to do so. It doesn't dress itself up as anything other than the honest, entertaining stuff it is supposed to be. It makes me happy - if not yet rich - and it makes my readers fall into another world/time/place for a while.

Make sure your stuff is readable. That's what the rules are all about. If you make it too hard to read, it had better be James Joyce with the reward of the beauty of the language as the prize for reading it.

Oh, and when you're watching the trees fly by you out of a window of a moving vehicle, it is obvious that you are moving by them quickly. If you just say "trees are flying by" - well, then we're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy and the orchard has sprouted wings.

I would always opt for clarity - as you did in your example - over difficult a over-analysis of what constitutes "fad" writing.

wakeupwriting said:

Yes, that's how I've done it. The flashbacks are in past. Such as, "I'm watching the trees fly by on the side of the road. John Davis, thirty-year-old neighbor has the same trees in his yard. I remember when I first met him; he had been planting seeds in his garden..."

My prof sees three things wrong with this: In an interior monologue, you don't write "I'm watching," you'd just say "Trees are flying by." You wouldn't say "John Davis" and explain who he is, because the narrator knows who he is. (Who is she introducing him to?) And a character wouldn't go into a flashback because you wouldn't think out a flashback in your head like that. The problem is that the prof believes there is not any such things as a first person present that isn't an interior monologue. At least, "real" writing (not a fad).

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Then your prof is stupid*. What your narrator is doing is assuming an audience, which is perfectly fine. As someone else mentioned - Catcher in the Rye? Hello?

*Or perhaps just ignorant.

Well, if this is actually a passage:

"I'm watching the trees fly by on the side of the road. John Davis, thirty-year-old neighbor has the same trees in his yard. I remember when I first met him; he had been planting seeds in his garden..."

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there are some problematic issues with the mechanics. But since you didn't post this for critique, and some of the issues could well be simple typos, I'm not going to get into any of that.


If this class doesn't work for you, can you withdraw and get a refund, or transfer to a class you might get more out of? Not every teacher and student are a good match to each other.


Also, very few of the students in a graduate creative writing program intend to be "academics", at least in my experience.