Tenses and Tension

 This week I've started writing a new novella.  One of the characters I absolutely love is Martha Wells' Murderbot.  Murderbot is a construct, half-human, half-robot, and it's one confused being.  It's it's struggles to relate to humans and cope with its emotions which make the character so relatable.

I wanted to translate the character into my own version of Murderbot, so I put my construct into big cat form.  (No surprise there.). I've turned Murderbot into Predatorbot.  I reckoned that if you wanted a secret spy and strike force then maybe sending a cat would work well.

I decided my character would be created by a secret project run by the interstellar government.  It's an ethically dodgy project.  But my character is a rogue.  She and the sentient starship she travels around in give the impression of working for the government while often secretly working against it.

At one point my character says that she, the ship, and its captain are walking a permanent tightrope.  They live in fear of their operations to stop slavery and to help colonists defend their worlds from greedy miners being discovered.  Because most of those operations are run by the government, or it is allowing them to take place.

So most of the time my characters are working undercover, and this fear of constant exposure is what provides a lot of the tension in the story.  They're never quite sure who they can trust and who they can't.

I also love the style the Murderbot books are written in.  The narrative has a short and snappy style with many short sections within chapters.  There are also many one-line paragraphs for emphasis.  But the most distinctive thing about the style of the books is the first person past tense viewpoint.

I've written many stories in first person present tense, and I've used that combination as a contrast to the third person past tense viewpoints in several multi-viewpoint novels.  But I've never written anything in first person past tense.

I've found it quite a challenge at times, and sometimes I'm not sure which is the correct word to use.  Oddly enough, that's often in the backstory sections when the character is telling the reader about something that's already happened.  So I'm writing more slowly than I do with a more familiar person-tense combination, and it's stretching my writing muscles quite a bit.

I'm aiming to produce a story which is original enough to avoid all accusations of plagiarism, but which has a similar style and feel to the Murderbot books.

So far I'm five chapters in and it seems to be working.  So I'll continue on in the past tense and challenge myself to finish the novella.