{1,000 words — 4-minute read}

The core story of my memoir, A MEMORY MOSAIC, is a 10-day trek in Nepal during the first 10 days of April 1980 and 6 days that followed. In writing this story, which took place more than 4 decades ago, I told it in the past tense. It just made natural sense. In ways, it wasn’t even something I decided.

And so I arrived at final edits, final design, and preparations to send it to the printing company for my starting inventory of books. Then, a couple of days before I’d be sending the book to print, something small gave me a nudge. Duncan Koerber, a professor, memoir-writing coach and leader of a Facebook memoir-writing group I’m in, said, “Be immediate in your storytelling. This tip helps avoid hindsight bias to keep readers in the moment with you.” Then he launched into talking about writing in the present tense.

The core story of my memoir, A MEMORY MOSAIC, is a 10-day trek in Nepal during the first 10 days of April 1980 and 6 days that followed. In writing this story, which took place more than 4 decades ago, I told it in the past tense. It just made natural sense. In ways, it wasn’t even something I decided.

It got me thinking, though at first I imagined it would be a brief daydream that wouldn’t come to much. But an itch started . . . and grew. So, as a small experiment, I spent less than a hour creating a present-tense version of a 4-page excerpt at the beginning of the memoir. Then I moved on to the chapter relating Day 1 of the trek. And within a few hours of editing over the course of a few days, I had gone through Day 10 of the trek and all 6 days after.

Twenty years ago, the experiment would have ended there. In the past, I, like almost all authors, would have to choose one path and foresake other choices for publication. With just one exception, I can’t think of a book that presented readers in print with two slightly different versions of one story (though I suspect readers can come up with other examples). That exception I know is Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. Indeed, that is a central process of writing, whether non-fiction or fiction. But, what if, instead of having to lament “the path not taken,” I could engage in the “Sliding Doors” possibilities, and I and my readers could take pleasure in “the path also taken”?

It being 2024, not 2004 or 1984 (when Pavic’s novel was published). I chose to take advantage of a freedom offered by self-publication. I printed half my inventory as a Past-Tense Edition and half as a Present-Tense Edition! Because I wouldn’t expect a reader to buy both, at the front of the book I offered a URL to access a PDF presenting excerpts from the edition the reader didn’t have in hand.

What did I learn from doing this? And what did I accomplish by not choosing one version over the other?

As Duncan Koebler suggests, writing in the present tense injects an immediacy into the narrative. The reader is walking with me on my trek. The past-tense reader is an armchair observer, looking back over a span of years. It can be the difference between you the reader seeing through the author’s eyes and feeling the author’s other senses versus hovering like a drone overhead, observing closely but not quite in the scene.

Not every story reads well in the present tense. And many readers have an almost innate dislike for present-tense stories. Or they think they do. Look through the many books you’ve read in your life, and you’ll discover many are told in the present. And you never noticed. You were pulled in. Still, a story in the present tense can feel like it’s stumbling along, a forced and contrived device. So each writer must decide for themselves, perhaps experimenting with present- and past-tense versions. Which reads better and more naturally?

I did also learn that the present tense makes it difficult to impossible to work in reflection in the moment. And all memoir needs that sense of reflection, observation and lessons learned. However, in many memoirs, the story itself is so powerful or clear that the author doesn’t write the lesson; readers “write” it in their minds as they read, and commentators present them in reviews, essays and discussions. So the present tense remains open to being used. Still, there are advantages to the past tense. One can write, “Years later, I understood the significance of what I saw when…” — something one can’t do in the present tense without extremely deft verbal gymnastics. In most such situations, a writer is faced with 3 options.

1) You can find a way to get across to the reader in the present tense, within the moment, how significant that moment is. This works well if the moment is especially powerful, so that the lesson or observation in hindsight, though unwritten, screams out. Or . . .
2) You realize the hindsight lesson/observation you’ve included disrupts the present tense of the narrative, and so you remove it. Or . . .
3) You find a workaround, where you manage to state the hindsight lesson/observation without disrupting the present-tense narrative flow.

I was able to take Option 3 for my Present-Tense Edition of A Memory Mosaic. Each chapter, after the opening section telling about that day of my adventure in the present tense, had brief reflections and vignettes from earlier and later in my life. In most cases I could extract a lesson/observation I gained years later and present it as one of my brief reflections. In just a couple cases, I decided doing this would not work well. In those cases, I took Option 2.

Admittedly, I made the decision to have 2 editions — Present- and Past-Tense — because there would be a novelty factor. But far more important was because my book is not just a memoir about the trek but a memoir about writing a memoir, a meditation on memoir & memory, and a rallying call to memoirists and prospective memoirists. In discussing numerous aspects of the memoir-writing process to readers, I include discussions of the many decisions and choices a writer must make. What better way to do so than to actually show alternate choices in action.