Happening Now: the power of the present tense

by Ellen Santasiero

July 2026

Photo by Vanja Lazic

I’ve been thinking about the present tense lately because I just finished reading Amy Lin’s Here, After, a grief memoir written in a series of present-tense vignettes. The book offers a way for certain memoirists to make a manuscript more of a page turner. “Certain memoirists?” you ask. “Which ones?”

The ones who do not live a celebrity life, and the ones who do not have a cataclysmic external event to recount—a skirmish with a polar bear, say—that will help propel the tale along. (Wait! I have to see how the hell she's going to get her head out of the bear’s mouth.)

Ordinary people writing stories of inner (and therefore abstract) journeys worry about how to keep readers interested. Poets who write such stories have a leg up, for as practitioners of the supreme art (in my opinion), they can use language to beguile readers from chapter to chapter.

Thankfully, for the rest of us, there are a few craft tools at our disposal, that, when used judiciously, can make our stories crackle. One of those is the present tense, a choice that Lin makes, which in turn makes her book hard to put down.

If I write, “I eat a peach,” I signal to the reader’s brain that said peach-eating is happening right now (as opposed to “I ate a peach.”) And the brain thinks that whatever is happening right now is important. The reader watches more keenly for what happens next.

In Lin’s memoir, the use of present tense helps the reader register the shock and suddenness that Lin feels when her husband dies (it’s happening now!) and, Lin says, it also reflects another, more nuanced aspect of her experience.

“The thing about grief,” said Lin, “for me, certainly, was that when I entered into it, I fell out of time. Which is to say, the ways in which we tend to quantify established time—past, present, future—completely eroded for me. … That’s what grief does, it completely deflates these realms.”

Of the present tense, Peter Selgin, the author of Your First Page, writes, “For a sense of immediacy, nothing beats it. Screenplays traditionally avail themselves of it. It is the most cinematic of tenses.”

The present tense is much maligned in some quarters for being banal at worst, and limiting at best. Selgin claims it restricts the writer’s movement between the past and present, and allows little, if any, space for reflection. OK, I say, but a writer may want the limitations inherent in this tense. The thing to know is what you want in a piece of writing and to use any or all tools to achieve it.

It turns out that Lin’s use of the present tense did not limit her in the ways Selgin laid out. She moves seamlessly from her present-day grieving to present-tense flashbacks of courtship and married life. It only takes a signal phrase at the beginning of each flashback to orient us in time:

“On our second date, he spends an hour making elaborate grilled cheese sandwiches …” and, “During our honeymoon in Japan, I climb the stairs of our ryokan …”

As for reflections, the use of present tense did not preclude them:

“I am not going to do any of those things. It is not just because he is dead. I have never been the kind of person that can jump for joy—I want to but I am always too afraid. I need him to feel it for me. Jump for me.”

And, “Understand: I have never known how to love something in moderation.”

Of course, it is not the choice of present tense alone that makes Here, After so effective and affecting. All literary techniques swirl in concert with and in the context of other craft choices, in an alchemical medium where each multiplies the others’ effects. Lin’s sense of urgency, disorientation, and dislocation also come from her precise language and images, detailed scenes, and well-considered line, section, and chapter breaks.

If energy is low in one of your passages, try rewriting a past-tense scene in present tense. What does that do to your reading experience? Better yet, join us this fall at The Forge, where we help students experiment with all craft techniques till they find the best ways to tell their own stories.

We’re accepting applications now for our 2026 class. Email us at theforgewriting@gmail.com