Re: Narrating in a Visual Novel?
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 8:19 pm
I don't know, I'd say a book that sells well is a book that is written well─if people are attracted to your book and the story in it, then I'd say it's written well. You suspended their disbelief, you made them look past the plot holes, you wrote a story that enraptured your readerbase and that spawned a fandom. You can go all about how it's badly written garbage and should not be taken as an example, but what they have is success, and that's more than you can say of other writers who stick nicely to your rule of "past tense only".
Are you cherry-picking your arguments here? You literally said:Does this mean you missed where I mentioned poor plotting, poor research, and poor grammar? I assure you, such things are indeed indicators of a book's quality.
You did not say, "Open a fiction book─any good fiction book." You said, "any fiction book", and you are demonstrably wrong. Please do not state things as absolute facts if you cannot handle being refuted. Tempus was obviously referring to your initial statement─ironically, he wrote in past tense, so it should have been easy to understand.Open a fiction book -- any fiction book. Present Tense is only used in Non-Fiction and Dialogue.
I do not believe everyone has significant difficulty reading sentences written in present tense. I know I do not.One must stop to restructure the sentences in one's head to comprehend what they meant before one can read the next. This slows reading down considerably and makes it more Work than Pleasure to read.
This is a bullocks argument to tell someone to write in past tense instead; just because there's a chance of mindflurbing and mixing up your tenses does not mean that you should not write in that, and there's no real argument to say people don't mix up past and present tenses either.This is in addition to the fact that writing in Present tense is insanely easy to mess up by accidentally switching to Past and Future tenses in the following lines.
But there are editors who disagree. Just because it isn't popular doesn't mean it should never be done. There's plenty of resources on present tense as well, and your opinion should not be stated as fact when it isn't carried by everyone.Essentially, what my argument boiled down to was that editors didn't like it.