The Future Tense
Hi, friends.
How are you doing? I’m tucked away at a writer’s retreat trying to get as much novel finished before school starts. I’m trying not to look at the news. But failing miserably. Worrying about all the things I can’t control. Then taking a deep breath and putting my head down and writing some more. Right now, today, all I can do is take this little imaginary world I’ve created and make it better.
Story.
This week’s story speaks to feeling out of control. It’s Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It’s an old favorite. Probably one you’ve already read. Worth another read, I think, especially when there will be so many folks in the coming days arguing about what should and shouldn’t be done on the battlefield. All of it in hindsight, of course. What gets lost in all of these soundbites is the personal. And that what O’Brien wants us to remember.
Craft tidbits.
When I was drafting the last newsletter about endings, I thought perhaps I might do a series on ways to end things. And that’s the main reason that I picked this story - for the moves it makes at the end. But we’ll circle back to that. First, let’s take a look at the beginning:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
There’s so much to admire here. The detail. The rhythm. The longing. We see his want immediately. It is tangible in the care and the process. We learn later that this want, his unrequited love of Martha, his coping mechanism in the face of so much uncertainty, is also his limitation. He dreams of her at the expense of his men. It’s an obstacle that he must overcome if he’s going to be the leader he wants to be.
Not only is his want tangible, it’s universal. We feel for him. Even if we have not carried the burden of war, we have, I am guessing, been smitten with someone who does not feel the same way. We have pretended, doodling their names on notebooks. Taping pictures to walls. Squirreling away all manner of talisman. We have been Jimmy Cross carrying that pebble in our mouths.
The story is almost all exposition. Breaking the rule of show, don’t tell, O’Brien makes long lists cataloguing all the things the soldiers carry, including the weight of the items. A lot of it is information but it also has a beautiful rhythm to it. The listing, the repetition of “they carried” conveys the motonoy of their days, their constant walking and soldiering, the precision of the weights. We’ve been on long walks where we do not want to carry whatever we’ve brought with us. Raincoats. Backpacks. The burden here is so much greater.
But O’Brien also interrupts the machinery of war, the things, and infuses it with the personal. The fears and regrets that they carry.
At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns … Lee Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. … Kiowa carried his grandfather's feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine—3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades—14 ounces each. … They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried
Okay. Let’s talk about that ending. It echoes the beginning. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross blames himself for Lavender’s death. He shouldn’t have been daydreaming about Martha. (His one solace in the field.) And so, he has resolved to put her away.
Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams.
He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee
Strunk's slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would
impose strict field discipline. He would be careful to send out flank secu-
rity, to prevent straggling or bunching up, to keep his troops moving at the
proper pace and at the proper interval.They would police up their acts. They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.
Here O’Brien switches tense. Jimmy Cross looks forward to what he intends to do. Will he? Who can say. But it allows a kind of optimism, a kind of control that is absent the previous pages.
Ending in the future tense is one of my favorite moves, especially in stories where the present is so fraught. It offers a little bit of hope that we grasp for in those moments. I think it works well, too, in essays where you are closing the gap between the past and what you know happens later.
Sparks.
Writing Prompt: How can you make characters come to life through objects? What holds special meaning for them? Why?
O’Brien taps into his knowledge of tactical gear in this story. What are you an expert in that could give texture to a story? How could you define a character’s life not through the things they carried, but through the things they wore or ate or the cars they drove….
Revision Prompt: Where could you switch to the future tense to open things up? What kind of imaginative space might be useful to your character? When they are fighting with their spouse, or slogging through another commute, what are they daydreaming about?
Other tidbits.
Grub Street is seeking pitches for presentations for its Muse & the Marketplace 2022. It looks like some of it will be in person and some online. Applications due 9/6.
Shenandoah is open for CNF & novel excerpts through the end of August. They open for fiction September 1 with the theme of border crossings. Also, if you have any writings on the theme of dirt, Guernica is looking for those through Sept. 1.
University of Iowa Press is accepting short story collections for their Short Fiction Award through Sept. 30.
Okay scribblers. Heads down, pencils up. That blank page is one of the things you can control today. And tomorrow. And next week too. So, we shall put all our hopes and fears and doubts upon it. The weight of a pencil is just 6 grams. But the weight of not doing it… well, it can crush you. Off you go~
Marsha