Writing: Viewpoint and Tense

I subscribe to a blog/podcast called Writing Excuses. This week's episode is "Viewpoint and Tense, part 2" though it certainly stands on its own.

Most genre fiction (in my case, science fiction) is written in third person "limited" viewpoint. That is, an invisible narrator is telling the story, but the narrator doesn't know everything that's going on. Usually this means the narrator gets inside the head of a character and tells the story from that character's viewpoint. Until he/she switches the viewpoint to another character. Some writers can juggle several different viewpoints and keep them all straight. Brandon, Howard, and Dan (the Writing Excuses guys) recommend keeping to two or three characters.

The story I'm writing is told in the third person limited viewpoint, and mostly from one viewpoint as well, that being of my male hero character. Most of the rest of the story is told from my female hero's viewpoint. Sure, there's gender bias in my choices, but since I'm male it makes (some) sense. It's easier for me. A small, but significant percentage of the story is told from my secondary female hero's viewpoint. The rest is told of necessity from the viewpoints of various other characters, mostly in scenes where my heroes are not present.

I've written extensively in first person, but not in the sci-fi genre, yet. First person can be interesting, but of course you're limited by what your story teller knows and sees. Third person lets you know and tell more, but in the limited viewpoint you still can't jump outside the knowledge of the characters, since you are always working from some given character's perspective.

Now, on to tense. My first draft is written in present tense, mostly because when I began I was working on the draft for a script. Well, I'm still working on a script so almost everything is happening "now." This does make things like flashbacks somewhat tricky to baseline, but as long as I can establish that we've jumped out of strict timeline order, then it works reasonably well.

On the subject of tense, I've noticed I have a tendency to slip into past tense. It happens all the time, and I am continually fixing these lapses. Kind of makes one wonder if it would be easier simply to write in past tense and be done with it, eh? All writing is practice, so I suppose it just means I need more practice.

On a slightly different topic, but still apropos of writing and my story, in particular, I believe I have come up with a way of showing the progression of time. If we were still in our world, then showing the date at each such juncture would be appropriate. That would help set the timeline pretty accurately. That is, if we had a calendar in the world of my story. But we don't. So, how then can I show the passage of time, unless I am continually saying things like "fifteen days from then" or "five days in the past"?

I've decided to show the phases of the moon. There's enough of a correspondence between chapters that the changes should be fairly representative. What I mean is, between scenes or chapters, there shouldn't be too much change in the moon such that it would be confusing. I might also show a text label, such as "waning half" or "nearly full" or "new." I haven't tried out this idea yet, so I have yet to see how well it will work.

I have dates assigned to the entire storyline. Most of them are 117 years in the future, though. With the exception of the few scenes that take place in the "facility" where they have a computer that knows the exact date, the rest of the story takes place in a primitive world where the most reliable way of reckoning time is the moon. And the seasons. Besides, in many ways, does it really matter if some event takes place on June 6th or June 8th? For the most part, it's quite good enough to say "several days later" and be done with it.