Writing in the present tense

Struggling right now with this. A while back I started righting short fiction in the present tense. It was fun to reveal story as it happened. I liked the immediacy of it. And in first-person, I felt it was almost easier to hoist the reader on my back, so to speak, and show him or her around.

This seems to work particularly well in short, single-scene pieces. In longer form, however, I'm finding that staying in the present tense is pretty tough. It's tricky to describe the past in the present without it feeling cumbersome or awkward.

Just something bugging me right now, because I like the present tense and want it to work. With a couple days off, I may try finding novels that manage to do this. We'll see...

Tom Wolfe on writing

My latest hobby is scrolling through the NPR archives for interesting pieces on books and other stuff. I know I'm late to this particular party ... I used to only listen to public radio -- or any radio -- while driving. I don't drive that much.

What I just realized--duh--is that I don't have to wait for the clock to roll around to catch a good program on the radio. I can just go to the NPR site and click what programs I want to listen to. Somehow I always knew I could do this, but hadn't really wanted to until I missed a Normal Mailer interview that took place earlier this year.

After that, I hit up a Tom Petty retrospective interview, caught up on This American Life, and some odd book readings that I'll never have the time to make in person.

The best one so far was a Tom Wolfe interview aired 20 years ago and re-aired to celebrate Fresh Air's 20th anniversary. Wolfe talked a lot about writing and the genesis of his writing style... like writing a novel like you're pretending to be writing a letter to a friend, and how he purposely choose clothing that stood out, which seems antithema to the traditional fly-on-the-wallishness of being a writer.

"It is much more effective," he said, "to arrive at any situation as the Man from Mars, than to try to fit in."

I'm probably guilty of idolizing mainstream or popular authors like Wolfe too much. It's not like I don't read lesser known scribes. But I'm fascinated with why certain authors are considered greats, and I often find I waste little time when reading them.

Anyway Wolfe's interview is good stuff.

Norman Mailer, RIP

Seems all the giants of letters that I got to know as a young man are going, one by one. This week it was Norman Mailer, arguably the biggest one left. (Not too long ago it was Vonnegut.)

NPR had a really good interview with them recently, by Michael Krasny, that they aired tonight. In it, Mailer toys with the idea of death and reincarnation, and how God judges our worthiness by what he assigns us to be in a second life. Mailer wants to be a black athelete, but figures he'll just be a cockroach -- but the fastest cockroach on the block.

I, like Krasny, hopes he becomes a black athelete. Toodles, Norman.