The Pen and the Telescope: Words as a Source of Power in So You Want to Be a Wizard

Warning: The following post contains significant spoilers for the plot of So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. If you haven't read the novel, and you have any intention of doing so, save this post for later! I've tried to write this post in a way so as to make it accessible to people who haven't even heard of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series before, so if you haven't read it you shouldn't be confused -- and if you are, please let me know in a comment so that I can make myself clearer!

“Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth shut.” (11)

So begins Diane Duane’s first young adult fantasy novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard. From the genre and the title, the first-time reader might expect thirteen-year-old Nita to be fleeing some fierce mythological creature or an evil sorcerer, but the truth is at once more mundane and more threatening: she lives firmly in our world, and she’s running from a group of schoolyard bullies.

Bookish and intelligent at an age when such qualities will get Nita shunned at best and beaten up at worst, her brain is all she has going for, but when taunted by Joanne and her gang, even her quick tongue won’t save her, and her cunning retorts are more likely to get her in trouble than save her skin. Like everyone else who was ever labeled a geek, nerd, or bookworm as a kid (myself included), Nita seems vitally aware of the supreme unfairness of her situation. She’s smart, so she talks; she talks, so she gets in trouble. There’s always the possibility that she could be just like the other kids if only she could just stay quiet—but she can’t, not while maintaining her own integrity and sense of self.

Luckily, Nita manages to hide from the bullies in “a little brown-brick building with windows warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library” (12). The knowing librarian suggests that Nita hide in the children’s section and promises to misdirect the bullies who come in after her. So it’s in the basement of her local library that Nita first discovers the book that’s about to change her life: an innocuous-looking book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she’s sure it’s someone’s idea of a joke—there can’t really be wizards, and even if there were, they certainly wouldn’t have instruction manuals—but she begins to read it all the same, until “it abruptly stopped being a game, with one paragraph”:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree, say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of the Universe. (15-16)

So You Want to Be a Wizard announces itself to a child who is both at risk and at promise because of her strong relationship to books and her appreciation for words. It appears in the moment when Nita is both at her most vulnerable and her most protected, on the run from disaster and yet surrounded by the books that have been her friends and companions when people can’t be counted on. Tellingly, the fantasy it presents her with is linguistic: become a wizard, the book says, and your words will have power. Forget those bullies—when you talk, the whole universe will listen.

Unfortunately, the bullies don’t make themselves easy to forget. The library provides only temporary solace, and as soon as Nita leaves (with her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard in tow), she’s ambushed by Joanne and her gang. They beat her up and steal one of her most prized possessions, her space pen “that could write on butter or glass or upside down” (19). The space pen, with its pressurized ink cartridge that allows it to write on almost anything, seems the perfect representation of Nita’s desire to express herself without restrictions, and it is exactly this kind of freedom that Joanne denies her. Words are the only tools Nita has for fighting back, and Joanne both literally and metaphorically robs her of them.

The bullies might have stolen her pen, but her library book is still intact, and Nita reads on, learning of “the Speech, the magical tongue in which objects and living creatures can be described in more accuracy than any human language” (16), in which names are “‘a way of saying what you are’” (34) with the same devastating precision. Wizardry, for Nita, becomes a way of reclaiming linguistic agency and using it to fight back, not just against Joanne’s physical bullying, but against Joanne’s attempt to redefine Nita’s geekiness from a hostile perspective. Despite children’s rhymes to the contrary, Nita knows that words can hurt just as well as sticks and stones:

(Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.) “No,” she remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach. (13)

Her experience suggests that there is no separating harsh words from harsh actions, and that it’s not only in the Speech that names have a frightening ability to define who you are. When Nita resists the bullies, she is resisting a kind of malevolent renaming. It’s no surprise that when Nita first meets Kit, a fellow young wizard with whom she shares a history of being bullied, the first thing they have in common is a dislike of what other people call them:

“I’m Kit,” he said then. “Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher.”

“Nita,” she said. “It’s short for Juanita. I hate that too.” (30)

Like Nita, Kit’s linguistic expression is threatened—he’s teased and bullied partly because he’s skipped a grade, but partly because of his Hispanic accent—and when she tells him about Joanne stealing her pen, it doesn’t take long for him to agree to help Nita get it back. The first spell they work together is one that makes use of their growing fluency in the Speech to stop the bullying and the redefinition that comes along with it. Kit hopes to attract an aura to himself that will keep the other boys from trying to beat him up; Nita just wants to regain her pen.

It turns out that wizardry is not quite so simple. Their initial spell backfires, and Nita and Kit find themselves unintentionally babysitting a white hole dubbed “Fred,” who has come to Earth to warn the local wizarding advisories that what he calls The Naming of Lights—and what Earth wizards know as The Book of Night With Moon—has gone missing. Suddenly, the story is not just about allowing Nita and Kit to reclaim their own names, but about making sure that the definition of everything in existence is preserved. One advisory wizard explains:

“When you use [the Speech], you define what you’re speaking about. That’s why it’s dangerous to use the Speech carelessly. You can accidentally redefine something, change its nature. […] The Book of Night with Moon is written in the Speech. In it, everything’s described. Everything. […] It’s one of the reasons we’re all here—the power of those descriptions helps keep everything that is, in existence.” (51)

The quest to find The Book of Night With Moon takes Nita and Kit straight out of their universe and into one “next door,” where carnivorous taxi cabs prowl the streets of Manhattan and living things cower in the shadow of Life’s great antagonist, the Lone Power, who invented death and set it loose among the worlds, and who spends his days tricking species after species into accepting his “gift.” There’s some sneaking, some fighting, some injuries, and a whole lot of running—but when it comes down to it, the final battle to keep The Book of Night With Moon and to preserve the universe in working order is fought with words. In the book that describes everything, exactly as it is, Nita and Kit find the section that describes the Lone Power. To gain influence over him, and to come out the winners, all they need to do is finish reading his name—because encapsulated in the Lone One’s name is his first banishment, and to read that name again is to re-enact the expulsion from grace, the fall from heaven, the removal (even if only temporarily) from a space of influence over this universe.

As far as magic goes, it’s rather straightforward: read the name, and banish Life’s eternal enemy into darkness (at least for a time). But Nita and Kit understand something important about the value of names, something that comes not only from their training as wizards, but from years of enduring taunts and name-calling. They understand what it means to allow what others call you—perhaps even what you come to call yourself—to overcome and ultimately become who you are, limiting the possibility for change and growth. And that’s not something they would wish upon anyone, the Lone Power included.

If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to. For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way—and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound the same way.

[…]

…she knew what she had to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly—the same glitter as the ink in which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen—if, only if—and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real. (145)

What started out as a simple desire to regain a lost pen directly precipitates the greatest and most significant change in the novel, and the pen itself is the tool Nita uses, not just to defeat the Lone Power, but to give him the room to change his nature—to remove the trappings of eons and become something beyond what he has formerly been. This might seem strange for a number of reasons, but in a universe that values the power of linguistic agency so highly, it is anything but. The pen is an object of power, a tool for writing one’s own history instead of succumbing to the definitions of others. Nita rewrites the Lone One’s name from a perspective inconceivable to those who have bullied her throughout the years, and probably quite inconceivable to the Lone One himself: rather than attempting to restrict or to bind him, she turns his name and all of the connotative baggage it entails into something that can set him free.

If the novel ended there, it would still constitute a powerful argument for the magic inherent in language. But it goes a step further. Rather than concluding with Nita and Kit’s heroic victory over the Lone Power and their triumphant return of The Book of Night With Moon to the appropriate authorities, the novel ends where it began, with Nita and Joanne face to face once more. This time, they exchange words rather than punches:

I don’t know what to say to her, we have absolutely nothing in common, Nita thought frantically. But it has to start somewhere. She swallowed and did her best to look Joanne in the eye, calmly and not in threat. “Come over to my place after supper sometime and look through my telescope,” she said. “I’ll show you Jupiter’s moons. Or Mars—” (150)

Nita still can’t keep her mouth shut. But what makes her a target for bullying at the beginning of the novel has turned into a tool for disarming bullies by the novel’s end. Wizardry offers Nita the opportunity to see the positive uses to which all language, not just the Speech, can be put. Rather than keeping this knowledge to herself, she shares it—even with a bully who can’t quite be trusted to listen.

Ultimately, Duane shares the same message with her readers. After all, we are reading a book with the same title as Nita’s wizard’s manual. Just as Nita learns a new language from her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard, we can learn one from ours. Even if we can’t become wizards and fight evil throughout the worlds, we can become kinder and more considerate people who use plain English to break the cycle of violence within our home lives—and to Duane, this work is just as important as that carried out by wizards with all their powers:

A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it from being wasted. On the simplest level this includes such unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting the people around you in getting their lives to work. (16)

Throughout the novel, Duane transforms not just “unmagical-looking actions” but the commonplace and often unmagical-looking given of language itself. All words, it seems, can be “magic” when used properly. And if “a spell always works” (150)—if language always, no matter how gradually, effects the changes it seeks—then it’s not just wizards who have a duty to make sure that the power of language is used for good.

All citations are from Support Your Local Wizard, an omnibus edition of the first three novels in the Young Wizard series.

Tailor Made

One of my favorite feelings upon reading a book is the sensation that, somehow mysteriously, the author has written this specifically for me. It doesn't crop up too often, so I know it when I feel it -- that headlong rush into stunningly familiar territory, the thrill of discovery underwritten by a sense of comfort at the fact that you and the book exist within the same universe, have the same notions of right and wrong and have come to a basic agreement as to how stories should work.

But there's a flip side to this coin. Sometimes, my reactions to these kinds of books seem so intricately (and intimately) tied up in specific strands of my personality that I'm wary of recommending them to others who don't share my values and obsessions. More often than not, I'm afraid to admit the depth of my affection for these books, despite feeling like my bookshelves are empty when I don't have them near. Maybe it's because I move in academic circles and the books that have hit me in this way are mostly not academic. Maybe it's because I'm afraid what portrait of me might be constructed from the books that I feel drawn to in this way. And maybe I'm just afraid to think about what this list of books might tell me about myself -- about what I see as fundamentally me, what I care about, what makes my heart beat.

Whatever the reason, I'm about to (begin to) find out, because here -- for the moment -- is my list.

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

On the run from bullies, Nita Callahan takes refuge in the children's room of her local public library and finds a book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she's sure that it must be a joke, but she picks it up and begins to read it -- and the moment when it stopped being a joke for her is the moment I would have known (or at least so furiously desired) the same:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world — a tree, say, or a stone — that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skilfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing, or into it — freeze fire, burn rain — even slow down the heat death of the Universe.

That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.

Nita's copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard goes on to change her life. My copy continues to change mine.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I have a complicated relationship to this novel, but it all started when I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, just starting to take life and literature (and love) seriously, and searching for a paradigm that would speak to the struggle that I felt, but would do so without rejecting the goals I'd set for myself. I don't exactly understand how this came to pass, but Jane Eyre helped me find those answers I hadn't even known I was looking for Four years later, I've read it for at least three other (college) English courses. Thumbing through my well-worn Oxford Classics copy (thoroughly underlined, festooned with Post-its and dripping with marginalia) in search of a single quote that would sum up this book's impact on me, I find it impossible to choose just one, because so many of the words of this book are like old friends, pleased to meet me in my re-perusal.

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier

When I first read this book, I was overcome with a sense that this was the novel I had always wanted to write. In fact, its plot is in some ways quite similar to the one I've been trying to write for five years: a retelling/homage to the story of Beauty and the Beast, which pits an educated heroine against a culture that cannot value her education and carefully questions what it means to be a "beast" and what it means to be a man from within a richly-defined world. Marillier's tale departs from mine in many ways (not the least of which being that her version is finished and published), but I nonetheless feel a connection to it that ignores its occasional flaws in favor of lovingly attending to the moments where everything happens just as it ought. And from my perspective, at least, there are many moments like these.

Possession by A. S. Byatt

"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects — all the time — and I suppose one studies — I study — literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful — as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?"

I knew long before this passage of dialogue that Possession had been written with me in mind, but this is perhaps one of the most coherent examples of why this book speaks to me in a voice at once wise and familiar. Roland's hesitant shift from "one studies" to "I study" speaks to the dilemma of every modern academic, but particularly those in the humanities: how much of me is meant to be in what I do? The questions he asks here are in some senses rhetorical -- he wants, like I want, to believe that there is some "clue to the true nature of things" secreted away within literature -- but also intensely doubting. Who is he -- who am I -- to say that things even have a true nature at all? And yet. By the end of that second sentence, the question that he started all those interjections ago isn't really a question at all.

Moving Eastward

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life has been influenced by where I grew up.

I'm the daughter of a nurse and a high school English teacher-turned-administrator. They moved into the house I grew up in when I was a little under a year old. They picked it because it was close to the best healthcare and in the same district as the best public schools, and because it was safe and suburban and the kind of place where you want your kids to grow up.

For eighteen years, I lived in a city that only became a city the year before I was born, in a house that was "old" for the area because it had been built in the 1970s. I lived in a community that depended on cars and scoffed at public transportation, where the hum and rush of traffic along the 5 freeway was ubiquitous the way the sound of waves is to people who live along the shore. I lived in the kind of suburban city that is no longer even a suburb of anywhere, except for the suburbs themselves. The closest major city was Los Angeles, all spread out and gleaming and so emphatically and insistently new, but even LA was an hour away, and for eighteen years, I probably spent 90% of my time within a fifteen-mile radius of home.

My parents grew up within that radius. When my mother was in high school, her family hosted an Italian exchange student. Mom remembers showing Beatrice all the sights around where she lived, but specifically, she remembers showing her to Mission San Juan Capistrano. Founded by the Spanish in 1776, when much of California was under their control, it's one of the oldest things there is around here. Mom had always found it pretty impressive, but seeing it with Beatrice, she realized how strange it must seem to a girl who grew up just outside of Rome that the oldest thing around was just over two hundred years old.

The American dream, for better or for worse, is about conquering new places and building new lives. As a culture, we're still dealing with the myth of the west as a grand frontier, the newest part of the New World, the place where you go to remake yourself. But it doesn't seem that way to someone who's grown up there. Aside from intermittent travels and nine months spent studying in London, I've lived my whole life on the west coast of the United States, and somewhere along the line, being surrounded by so much that was "new" just got old.

For a while, I've wanted something very different. I want to live at a center of things, a place to which everyone feels connected by a depth of history almost unimaginable from the perspective of a southern California suburb. I want, not the movement to the unexplored and uncharted, but to trace my steps back across the American plains and to the cities where my ancestors first landed on this continent -- back even further, across the Atlantic Ocean to the ports of Europe, where once those same ancestors mingled and shared a cigarette or two before boarding the ships that would take them across this bridge of water to a new world. I don't want the new world, having grown up with it. I want to reclaim some of what is old, some of what lasts.

Moving to New York seems like a twentysomething's rite of passage. (After all, hasn't American television taught us that everything that's anything happens in New York City?) But for me, it's more than that. It's about reversing the movement west, the movement to the new. It's not about leaving something behind me, but getting something back. And I wonder: if you grow up on the edge of things, in the place that used to be a frontier, the place where the American Dream ends, how is your cultural narrative different because of it? I grew up in the west. Maybe that's why I feel so much destiny in moving east.

A Bigger Doorstep: The Importance of Living Abroad

I participated in Model United Nations all through high school. I was one of the more active delegates in our program, never missing a conference if I could help it. Over those four years, I accumulated binders and binders of research on the topics I found myself debating most frequently. I could tell you the details of conflicts going on all over the world. But I never felt like I was connected to them. I was far enough away to be objective, and as tragic as all of it was, it wasn't happening on my doorstep.

The past few months, I've been realizing that my doorstep is a whole lot bigger than it used to be, and for a pretty simple reason: I spent a year studying in another country, and I made friends with people who had done the same.

When the earthquake hit Japan, one of my friends had just returned from a month spent traveling there. Another friend had previously lived there for six months through a study abroad program.

When terrorism hit Oslo, my Norwegian friend -- whom I met while she was studying abroad for a semester in Berkeley -- had just left Norway to spend another semester abroad, this time in Australia.

And when north London broke out in riots, I heard about it on Twitter and Facebook before it was on the news, because I studied there for a year and most of my friends live in the areas most heavily affected.

When I searched Twitter looking for news of any disturbances in Mile End, the London neighborhood where I used to live, I found this picture of the Budgens grocery store where I shopped when I was too lazy to make the walk down to the Sainsbury's in Whitechapel. I found that the houseboats that usually moor along one side of Regent's Canal switched over to the other side as a way of avoiding riot damage because, to access that side from the street, you need to get past the security guards sitting behind the gate into the campus of Queen Mary University of London. That campus is where I lived and studied. This is my doorstep.

A lot of adults (and a lot of college students, too) seem to think that the point of taking a semester or a year abroad is to goof off in a foreign country where the academic expectations are low and the drinking age is lower, where any misbehavior can be excused by saying, "I'm an American!" This isn't why I decided to live in London for a year. But even those who sign up for study abroad programs with the expectation that it will be one big party have the chance to stumble across the lessons I've learned from it. No matter your intention, if you spend enough time somewhere else, you'll find yourself connecting with people in a way that animates the places they live, the struggles they witness, and the hardships they suffer.

It's one thing to talk about globalization and large-scale human interdependence -- it's another thing entirely to feel it within the network of your friends, spread out across the globe. The earthquake in Japan becomes something that could have happened to Kat or Natasha; the bombing in Oslo is something Sidsel just missed; and the London riots are going on walking distance from where Cara and Kaite and Alastair and Abbi and so many other friends live. It hurts, sometimes -- but that's because I'm connected, and because I care. And I'll take that over the world-weary "more bad news as usual" any day.

Perspective

Recently, Time Magazine released color photos of London in the aftermath of the Blitz. It's amazing to see the kind of devastation that London and its people managed to withstand, but the picture that strikes me the hardest is of a small church standing undisturbed on a block where most of the other buildings have been bombed to rubble. Because I know that church. I visited it last year, when I was living in London. It's not very large, and not very famous, but it's where John Milton -- author of Paradise Lost -- is buried, and where his father was buried before him, and so I went to pay my respects. Three hundred and thirty-six years after his death, I'm sure a lot has changed, but the place still stands. On the outside, at least, it looks just like it did fifty years ago, enough so that I could recognize it in an old photo having only been there once. Some form of church has stood at the site of the present St. Giles' Cripplegate since 1090.

To a girl who grew up in a city that was only incorporated a year before she was born, the sense of depth to human history embodied in this single space is awe-inspiring. When Michel de Certeau says that haunted places are the only ones people can live in, I think this is what he means. I'm sure not everyone would agree with him -- I know plenty of people who live just fine without the past ghosting about their everyday routines -- but I do believe there's something about these "haunted places" that makes them paradoxically more alive, and more worthy of being enriched with a portion of my life, than any corner of Outer Suburbia ever could be.

Shitty First Drafts

I participated in my first writers' workshop when I was seventeen. My instructor shared a lot of quotes with us about writing, and whether we all agreed or disagreed with them, I've always remembered them -- but none as well as Hemingway's statement that "The first draft of anything is shit." It might not be the best philosophy for turning out work in a timely fashion, but for better or worse, my writing strategy pretty much depends on it.

I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the first long-form writing I ever did was for National Novel Writing Month. It's a challenge that actually encourages quantity over quality -- participants strive to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with good words counting no more than bad ones and everyone who hits 50k being considered a winner -- but does so with the underlying assumption that if you write enough, you're bound to write something good. I don't know if it works that way for everyone, having a steady daily wordcount and a group of supportive fellow writers always helps me tune out my "inner editor" and ultimately go places with my writing that I otherwise might not have.

In the past six years, I've written anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 words of fiction each November -- even continuing to work on one project sporadically until I finally typed "the end" at around 220,000 words. (For people not used to thinking in wordcounts, that's over twice the length of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and about four times as long as Fahrenheit 451.) None of these projects were particularly good. But as Ernest Hemingway and NaNoWriMo have taught me, "good" is not what first drafts are about. It doesn't matter that these first drafts were shit: three of these November novels have nonetheless shown enough promise for me to continue work on them after the month was up.

Writing with the belief that first drafts don't have to be fabulous makes the second draft a whole lot harder. But without this mentality the first draft would probably never be written. If I agonize over every word of something, I'll never make it to the end of the chapter, much less the novel -- but if I turn out a first draft in a month or two, falling for the characters and the concepts along the way, it doesn't matter how hard the second draft will be, because I'll have dedicated myself to doing it. It's easy to quit a story you haven't finished writing. It's a lot harder to walk away from a finished first draft.

I've been thinking about all of this lately because I'm in the process of working on a real, hard, not-so-shit second draft of the former NaNo-novel that ended up clocking in at around 220k. It's agonizingly slow going, and I've already started a Word document just to keep track of all of the research I need to do and decisions I need to make before I start to write the third draft (having decided they are not major enough to require my concern in the second). But sometimes I sit and look at my computer screen and marvel at the fact that there even is a second draft-in-progress. Today is one of those days.

You can laugh all you want at the fact that I spend my Novembers frantically churning out shitty first drafts of novels that there is a 50% chance I will never want to look at once the month is over. God knows I laugh at myself sometimes. But when I'm done laughing, I knuckle down and start writing -- and in the end, that's the only thing that matters.

Narrative Nit-Picking

I will read almost anything. Yes, it's true that when left to my own devices I gravitate toward 19th-century English novels and/or young adult fiction and/or stuff with magic/wizards/aliens/spaceships, but I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to fiction. I spent a lot of my youth being frustrated by people around me who judged my favorite books by their genre, so I try my best not to repeat the behavior, and if someone I trust recommends a book to read, I will read it. I may not like it, but I'll certainly give it a try.

And yet there are some stylistic tics that bother me, across all genres. I realized this about two and a half years ago, when on the recommendation of several friends, I picked up The Time Traveler's Wife. It should have been right up my alley: urban fantasy (not that it packaged itself as such, but it was) mixed with a love story. I should have connected with it. Instead, I found myself turned off by three stylistic choices:

1. Narration in the first-person present tense

2. Multiple first-person narrators

3. Chapters beginning with the name of the present narrator

For whatever reason, these three things combined to create a style that kept me from liking the novel. Since then, I've only read one novel that makes the same three choices (Old Magic by Marianne Curley, which I read on vacation when I had run out of other books in a non-English-speaking country), but I've read many more that meet one or two of these criteria -- especially #1.

So why do these things bother me?? Is it just because I've been conditioned to believe that the first person should be an exclusive perspective, or that novels should be written in the past tense? Why is it that first person and present tense narration don't bother me when used separately, but feel so inelegant in combination?

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say part of it is about the conditioning. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of present-tense novels I've read, and they are by and large very recent productions (excluding portions of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, because including it would just open up a whole new can of worms). Same goes for novels with multiple first-person narrators -- although these have been more prevalent in the literary canon, with Wilkie Collins infamously producing novels like The Moonstone out of a series of stitched-together witness accounts.

But part of it may go deeper than that. How often do you find yourself thinking or speaking about yourself in the present tense? Not the present progressive -- "I'm doing this, I'm going here" -- but the present -- "I do this, I go here"? Maybe this is just me, but I don't go around narrating my life to myself as it happens. So when a character in a book starts, effectively, to do just that, it sounds strange because it's not a mode of speech I'm used to.

In contrast, first-person past tense isn't as strange. We're all used to relating stories of what we've done after-the-fact. We're incredibly familiar with third-person past-tense, as it is, essentially, the narrative mode of gossip: "He did this, they went there, and she wore that hideous dress." I'm not sure how third-person present-tense narration fits into all of this (and to the best of my knowledge I've never read any long-form works in this style), but for whatever reason, "He walks across the room" is easier in my head than "I walk across the room."

Still, this isn't to say that good works of fiction can't be written in the first-person present-tense. I flew through Holly Black's White Cat despite its use of this exact style, and now that I'm halfway through the sequel, Red Glove, I hardly even notice the narration as strange. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, though not as much to my taste as the Curseworkers novels have proven to be so far, also uses the same style and is no less worth reading because of it.

Maybe I've realized that it's stupid to dislike books specifically for their style of narration. Or maybe I've just read enough of this style, now, to be conditioned out of seeing it as anything out of the ordinary.