Read on Twitter
all right it's december 2020 and month ten million of pandemic so i don't know if i have the energy to #claykop fight about this sh*t anymore but i don't want to disappoint anyone so ::tapes hands:: https://twitter.com/FatedMates/status/1334132822848786433
what i appreciate about how @JenReadsRomance talked about 1st present here is her acknowledgment that this is, perhaps, a personal preference related to narrative style, rather than a wholesale dismissal of it as craft or as a strategic choice.
i've said it before and i'll say it again: every type of narration is artificial (and also, often coded). jen notes that 1st present often feels ridiculous to her because making meaning of things (or narrating things) as they happen isn't how she experiences her day
but 1st past is no less ludicrous; there's no reason to trust a 100K word account of someone's memory of specific events related to their love story. memory is unreliable, and with 1st past you don't even get the fiction of the "omniscient" narrator to help you get over that hump
the things our brains do for storytelling purposes are fascinating for all these reasons, and an exciting thing about the romance genre right now is the way it's accommodating a lot of different narrative styles
that feels right for a genre that's very invested in the emotional experiences of its characters. that's something to celebrate about the kind of work that's going on in the genre. okay that concludes #claykop for today until jen and i start talking sh*t at each other on text
