So last week, in this post, I wrote about the seeming lack of new or emerging writers on the indie scene tackling history in any meaningful way. Not as an indictment, but more an observation and perhaps a warning, since I worry about our society’s ability to learn from history if we lose our collective memory.
Then I read an excellent essay by Jeff Porter in the latest issue of Redivider and it made me think. I wonder if some readers avoid the past because they don’t know how to write about it without sounding like a history textbook. In light of that thought, I highly recommend Jeff Porter’s essay “Style and the Subjunctive.” Porter is writing about literary nonfiction and particularly memoir, but I found myself agreeing with his advice as someone who typically writes fiction around historical events:
The problem…is that the indicative, especially as it is deployed by historians, produces a premature sense of finality, as if the knowing of something were finished before you even got out of bed.
It’s true. It’s boring. It’s why kids hate reading history books. And it’s why, when I write around history, I write the piece in the present tense. Present tense means the reader can be part of the story, whether it took place forty-five minutes or forty-five decades ago. It means the reader can feel the excitement, the danger, the fear, the uncertainty–most of all the uncertainty. It turns history into an alternate universe, where maybe anything could, and might, happen. It makes the story compelling and breathes life into historical facts on a page.
Porter has a sort of similar idea for creating fascinating history, and he adds the writer to the list of those who benefit from this approach:
One way to open up the past to the writerly imagination is to switch the indicative mood to the subjunctive. Framing things in a conditional or hypothetical way has the useful result of exposing the text to contingency and possibility. A mood swing would seem like a small thing, but it is surprising to what extent meaning is modified when writing shifts modalities. It’s as if the entire discourse was transcoded.
Of course, we all know we’re not supposed to use the subjunctive in our writing–it’s nearly as bad as the use of passive voice, yes? Porter notes that Strunk and White omitted it from the Elements of Style alt0gether. There may be reason, as Porter writes:
…the spirit of the subjunctive releases writers from the laws of history, setting us free to move without restraint across the modalities of time. That freedom is dangerous, of course, to the extent that it exposes us to what postmodern science calls the inherent disorder of time.
But, as Porter points out, the risk is worth the reward for many writers looking to expand the possibilities in history. It’s the kind of risk in craft that gets me up every morning excited beyond belief just to write.
