– Why Did You Write Dark Matters in Third Person, Present Tense
I wrote this story in the third person, limited perspective, present tense because I want to eliminate as many layers as possible between the senses of the reader and the experiences of the characters. The choice of the third person perspective is important because I wanted the reader to be able to switch between characters, from moment to moment, without feeling schizophrenic. At the same time, I knew I had to counteract a weakness inherent to the third person. While third person has the weakness of observational separation, first person has the conceit of ego, of the character’s inability to describe a situation without a personal bias that might limit what he or she would normally say. In other words, drawing on the first person might actually force the character to speak on a matter or experience that the character might not otherwise be willing to explore.
In order to strengthen the intimate experience, and counteract the separating nature of the third person perspective, I chose not only to try to keep the focus of the experience on one specific person in any given space of writing, but also to push the piece into the present tense. The past tense, combined with written variably omniscient, traditional first and third person perspectives become shields against direct experience of ‘nowness’ I am trying to capture. The ‘I’ experience, I think, is much deeper and integrated within all of us than a mere sense of individual self, happening, and reactivism.
The past tense that is usually employed to further coddle the reader by creating a sense of both separation and control proved too limiting. Control of tense, pace of story, absolute knowledge of detail (omniscience), and focus of time that traditional methods of writing and story telling demand simply cannot convey the experience I am trying to describe, or draw out the sense of nowness I am working to explore. In this work, what I am trying to say cannot be heard unless there is a minimum of separation between the moment of the character and the moment of the reader. Even though we switch characters from moment to moment, our experiences and understanding are limited to the senses and values of the characters in that moment. This proves critical to encouraging a sort of empathy with the reader not only to the character, but to other characters who we may only experience briefly within the context of the advancing story.
