Explore Narration in Fiction Over Time
Explore how first-, third-, and alternating-person narration intersects with past, present, and dual tense across NYT bestsellers. Switch between joint combinations and either dimension alone.
This is the data behind an essay on Idle Rambling, Popular Fiction Is Using Present Tense More Than Ever. Read it first for the story, then come back to dig into any year or any book.
Read the essay on SubstackHow has narrative tense in fiction changed over time?
Present-tense narration was almost absent from bestselling fiction for most of the twentieth century. Of the 126 New York Times bestsellers from 1931 to 1989 in this panel, only one, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968), is narrated in the present tense. The share rose to 11.8% in the 2000s and 13.2% in the 2010s, then jumped: 33.8% of 2020s bestsellers are written in present tense, and another 9.0% move between past and present.
Narrative person shifted too, more gently. First-person narration went from 16.7% of bestsellers before 1990 to 31.7% in the 2020s, and first-person present, the voice of much recent fiction, from a single book to 15.9%. Third-person past is still the most common combination, but its share has halved, from 70.6% before 1990 to 35.9% in the 2020s.
| Decade | Books | Present | Past | Dual | First person | Third person | Alternating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | 13 | 0.0% | 92.3% | 7.7% | 0.0% | 92.3% | 7.7% |
| 1940s | 21 | 0.0% | 95.2% | 4.8% | 19.0% | 71.4% | 9.5% |
| 1950s | 20 | 0.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 30.0% | 60.0% | 10.0% |
| 1960s | 23 | 4.3% | 91.3% | 4.3% | 17.4% | 69.6% | 13.0% |
| 1970s | 24 | 0.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 20.8% | 62.5% | 16.7% |
| 1980s | 25 | 0.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 8.0% | 84.0% | 8.0% |
| 1990s | 56 | 1.8% | 92.9% | 5.4% | 25.0% | 66.1% | 8.9% |
| 2000s | 102 | 11.8% | 86.3% | 2.0% | 31.4% | 53.9% | 14.7% |
| 2010s | 152 | 13.2% | 78.9% | 7.9% | 24.3% | 62.5% | 13.2% |
| 2020s | 145 | 33.8% | 57.2% | 9.0% | 31.7% | 51.7% | 16.6% |
Before 1990 the panel has 13–25 books a decade, so read those rows as “almost none” rather than as precise percentages. “Dual” means a book narrated substantially in both tenses.
Person × tense over time
Loading the books…
The chart describes this deterministic bestseller panel, not all published fiction. “All eligible books” preserves the original denominator when series are hidden; “Visible categories” renormalizes the displayed bands to 100%.
Selection summary
Books and quote-level annotations
| Year | Book | Person | Tense | Confidence | Quotes |
|---|
About the data
The panel covers 581 novels from the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, 1931–2025. Books are drawn from each year’s ranked list: from 1931 to 1995, extended until each year had at least two labelled books; from 1996 to 2015, toward ten a year; and from 2016 to 2025, every book in a fixed top-30 pool with enough quotations to judge.
Each book’s tense comes from its Goodreads quotations, 21,316 quote annotations in all. Every quote is sorted into narration, dialogue and other kinds of text, the tense of the narration is recorded, and those signals are pooled into a past, present or dual label following a written methodology. Narrative person adds web research on top of the quotations. The labelling was done by language-model agents, and every book in the explorer above shows the reasoning, the evidence cited and each quote behind its label.
Data, code and the full methodology are on GitHub. The story behind the numbers is in the essay, Popular Fiction Is Using Present Tense More Than Ever.