This has led to some interesting replies about the use of the present tense. However I would note that just the other day everyone was sharing an article that complained there was too much use of the first person too. https://twitter.com/john_self/status/1341811994131894273

I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to say that in an age of heightened immediacy writing will naturally adapt to try and inhabit and interrogate that immediacy.

In just the same way that, in a cultural moment where objectivity is routinely problematised, writers will see in the first person a means of acknowledging and more deeply exploring the complexities of individual experience, perception, viewpoint etc.

We simply don’t experience the world in a very omniscient, past tense way at the moment. It’s natural that writers consciously or unconsciously internalise that.

And of course - all of this is also informed by shifting ideas about authority. There’s no reassurance in the assumption of authority now. Our relationship with it is too uneasy.

For me, what needs to change is actually not an approach to writing but an approach to reading. There’s still a long way to go in getting away from the idea that any one book, on anything, by anyone, is complete, or authoritative.

Writers are shifting away from that idea, towards a more problematic, in some ways narrow, in some ways infinite, subjectivity. But the discourse around books still too often seeks the definitive.

What’s more interesting is how multiple books form a constellation, how they add up, between them, to exactly the kind of broad canvas approach we still so often, as readers, seem to crave.

It’s understandable that sometimes we look to books for the reassuring authority and distanced perspectives our lives lack. It’s one of the things the medium does well.

But sometimes we forget that writers are living in exactly the same world the rest of us are, and are swayed by its currents just the same as anyone else. And if we really think about it, that’s where we want them to be.

Lol.

Perhaps what I’m saying is that I don’t believe a writer’s responsibility is to “narrative” at all. Nor do I think the aesthetics of narrative constitute an expression or assumption of responsibility.