Writing in the present tense of a place

There is a scene in The Agency that I rewrote eleven times. Not because the plot was wrong, or the dialogue flat, but because Lagos kept slipping into the past tense.

I would write: the traffic on the bridge was thick. And it was accurate — true to the moment in the story. But it was also dead. The reader could observe it from a safe distance, the way you look at a photograph rather than standing in the room.

What I wanted was for the reader to be inside the traffic. To feel the heat coming off the car in front of them. To hear the bus conductor shouting over the noise of an engine that sounds one bad gear-change away from giving up entirely. To smell the suya from the roadside stall three cars ahead that keeps drifting through a window the air conditioning is too exhausted to keep closed.

That is what I mean when I say literary virtual reality. It is not a technique so much as a standard — a commitment to placing the reader inside the scene rather than describing it from outside.

Lagos, more than most places I know, demands this. It is a city that exists in a perpetual present tense. It does not wait to be described. You are either inside it or you are not, and the reader can always tell the difference.

The eleventh draft of that scene begins: The bridge is not moving. Three words. Present tense. And suddenly the reader is there.