Using Present Tense in a Story About the Past

A couple of months ago, I ran an episode that contained part of an interview I’d done with Laura Bergells, a business communication coach and storytelling expert. If you listened to the episode, you might remember that she made a suggestion about how I could heighten the drama in telling the story of how I began doing the Grammar Girl podcast. 

Here’s a short clip of how I began the story when I told it to Laura: 

[AUDIO CLIP]

Actually, my background is in science and technology. I'm a Ph.D. program dropout in biology, and I was working as a science writer and editor, and frankly, I was quite bored. And so I got interested in this thing called podcasting. I love technology, I love gadgets. So I started a science podcast called Absolute Science. And, you know, I just I fell in love with it. ... And I did that podcast for about eight months. But I was working as a freelance writer and editor. And time really is money when you're a freelancer, and the podcast was taking so much time that I couldn't justify doing it anymore. But I didn't want to give up on podcasting. 

Laura suggested that I could try telling it in the present tense instead of the past tense:

[AUDIO CLIP]

Picture it, it's 2005, I'm a science writer, I'm living in Santa Monica, and for fun, I'm doing a science podcast every week, and the science podcast is really complicated. It's taking me a lot of time. And then on top of that, I'm doing lots of other writing, and I'm getting burned out. 

This use of present tense to describe past events is called the historical present tense. I loved the “you’re right there with me” feel that it gave the story, and it got me to wondering about how English speakers use historical present tense when telling their stories. A paper published in 1981, by Deborah Schiffrin, gives some interesting answers. 

Historical present and narrative structure

Schiffrin used a framework for analyzing narratives that was proposed by William Labov. In Labov’s framework, the first part of a narrative is called the abstract. It’s the part that tells the listener they’re about to hear a story. Laura did this part for me in our interview; here’s what she said: 

[AUDIO CLIP]

So you must have a story about how your wildly popular podcast all got started.

It’s no surprise to have present tense in the abstract of a story because it comes before we’ve gotten into the actual events of the narrative...

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