To start, let me say how much I admire Seth Abramson and the work he has done in the last few years.
Fearlessly and diligently, he has documented the sprawling cases of collusion, coverup, and corruption in the Trump White House. A lawyer, a former criminal investigator, and professor of communication art and science at the University of New Hampshire, Abramson practices what he calls “curatorial journalism.” That is, he pulls together the complete public record–journalistic accounts, books, reports, interviews, and more–to create a unified account of what happened. He curates existing sources into one mega-narrative.
For this, Abramson deserves our eternal appreciation. His books will provide a great foundation for historians who seek to make sense of this mad age. He is also, by all accounts, a terrific person. I’m a fan.he
And so I hate to say the next word: But . . .
But along the way he makes a strange mistake. He tells his story in the present tense, presumably to create a you-are-there immediacy and urgency. With the right subject, this can be done effectively. Andre Agassi’s memoir Open, written by J.R. Moehringer, uses the present tense too. It works because Agassi’s story is relatively simple. It involves a limited number of characters and does not require reference to hundreds of articles, reports, and accounts.
Abramson’s story is much more complicated. In almost every paragraph, he needs to place even the simplest event into a broader context. He has to define terms and note sources. To tell a story, he often has to refer to previous and (sometimes) future events. Often, to make a simple observation he has to provide an extended description of whole sequences of other events, with all kinds of strange names (often, Russian and Saudi!) and arcane relationships.
Abramson’s reliance the present tense undermines his work for two reasons.
First, to maintain the present tense he often has to change the tense that others use. That means lots of brackets to change verb forms. So many brackets creates a distraction.
Second, to provide context, he constantly switches tenses. These switches create cognitive whiplash. We have to tell ourselves, through the story, that the present is really the past. So when he switches to the past tense, to say what happened before the scene in question, we have to go through a conscious process of asking: Wait? What? When? Especially with a complex subject matter, you should never require the reader to make an extra effort.
Consider the following passage from Abramson’s forthcoming book, Proof of Corruption:
According to the New York Times, the “sobering” Crimson Contagion data, which circulates within the Trump administration in October 2019, “[drives] home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Nevertheless, after the COVID-19 outbreak begins in the United States, President Trump will falsely declare that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion” and “nobody ever thought of numbers like this.” In fact, writes the New York Times in March 2020, “his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory” and “accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.” In addition to ignoring the lessons of the Crimson Contagion report and the work product of economists contracted by the White House, Trump also, per Politico, “ignore[s]” a sixty-nine-page 2016 National Security Council document, “Playbook for High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” that “provide[s] a step by step list of priorities” in a pandemic.
(You can see a whole excerpt of his new work here.)
Abramson’s problem goes beyond the confusion with tenses. Too often, he gets in his own way. He uses long setups and attributions. Since he uses so many footnotes, these are often unnecessary.
So how do you fix this? It’s simple, really: When talking about the past, use the past tense. The drama of any story comes not from the tense but from the actions and issues being described. The less work you make the reader do, the more she can focus on what’s happening. And believe me, Abramson tells a harrowing tale.
Writers often try to be clever when simplicity works better. As I sometimes tell my students, always begin an account with this simple formula: First, this happened. Then that happened. Something else happened. Finally, the whole shebang concluded when another thing happened.
Usually, you can write using only the simple past tense. Sometimes it helps to use simple past perfect to provide a backdrop (“He had just graduated from college when he met her at a party”). And sometimes it helps to use the progressive past perfect to describe continuous events in the past (“She had been planning to move when he asked her to marry him”).
Of course, we don’t need to use the past tense all the time. In fact, this blog post uses the present tense because it describes issues that we all face right now. We also use the present tense to describe what happens in artistic works (e.g., “Hemingway sets For Whom the Bell Tolls during the Spanish Civil War” and “At the end of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine dies”).
But when describing past events, use the simple past tense as much as possible. Don’t distract the reader. Avoid being too clever. Let the subject of your work create the drama.