Avoid losing clarity when mixing tensesīecause stories show us chains and sequences of events, often we need to jump back and forth between earlier and present scenes and times. Can’t hear much other than the wind scraping branches along the gutter.Ģ. In a thriller novel, for example, you can write tense scenes in first person, present tense for a sense of danger unfolding now. Tense itself can enliven an element of your story’s narration. When you attempt to return it, you get sent on a wild goose chase after the book you want. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, you, the reader, are a character who buys Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, only to discover that there are pages missing. This tense choice is smart for Calvino’s novel since it increases the puzzling nature of the story. You run your usual route to the store, but as you round the corner you come upon a disturbing sight. To rewrite Sarah’s story in the same tense and POV: This has the effect of a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ novel. Sometimes authors are especially creative in combining tense and POV. In Italo Calvino’s postmodern classic, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), the entire story is told in the present tense, in the second person. Simplicity: It’s undeniably easier to write ‘She runs her usual route to the store’ then to juggle all sorts of remote times using auxiliary verbs.Immediacy: The action unfolds in the same narrative moment as the reader experiences it (there is no temporal distance: Each action happens now).The present tense, for example, has the virtue of: When you start drafting a novel or a scene, think about the merits of each tense. She ran her usual route to the store, but as she rounded the corner she came upon a disturbing sight. The majority of novels are written using simple past tense and the third person: Decide which writing tenses would work best for your story (You could also say ‘Sarah will be back from the store by the time you get here so we won’t be late.’ This is a simpler option using the future tense with the infinitive ‘to be’.) Here are some tips for using the tenses in a novel: 1. Sarah will have run to the store by the time you get here so we won’t be late. You could use the future perfect tense to show that Sarah’s plans will not impact on another event even further in the future. Sarah had run to the store many times uneventfully so she wasn’t at all prepared for what she saw that morning. In the past perfect, Sarah’s run is an earlier event in a narrative past: Present perfect: Sarah has run to the store.įuture perfect: Sarah will have run to the store. Past perfect: Sarah had run to the store. Here’s the above example sentence in each tense, in perfect form: Perfect tense uses the different forms of the auxiliary verb ‘has’ plus the main verb to show actions that have taken place already (or will/may still take place). Present (simple) tense: Sarah runs to the store.įuture (simple) tense: Sarah will run to the store Past (simple) tense: Sarah ran to the store. The simple tense merely conveys action in the time narrated. In English, we have so-called ‘simple’ and ‘perfect’ tenses in the past, present and future. How do you mix past, present and future tense without making the reader giddy? What is the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘perfect’ tense? Read this simple guide for answers to these questions and more: What are the main writing tenses? Understanding how to use writing tenses is challenging.
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