The tense of your writing allows you to frame your story in a specific time frame, describing past events, future events or even events that are occurring at the moment of the writing. Proper tense use helps you clarify your writing, improving the accuracy of your writing while alerting your reader to specific transitions of time within your writing. Additionally, verb tense can be used to indicate different types of writing, differentiating between proposals and research papers. Remember that past tense refers to a perspective where your narrator is describing events that happened in the past and present tense describes events that are occurring at the time of the writing.

Use future tense to describe the future, possibly in the sense of a prophetic statement or to describe an action that you intend to perform. Remember that most writing occurs in either past or present tense, with the exception of proposal writing, which usually occurs in future tense. For instance, if you intend to write a story where your primary narrator is living the story as the story develops, you should be using present tense throughout your narration.

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Understand that your tense will shift during dialogue, or if the perspective of your narrator changes during your story. Keep your narration consistent throughout your story but be aware that your tense will change in dialogue as your characters refer to other time frames. As an example, if your character, whose narration is present tense, begins telling someone a story that happened to them in the past, your dialogue will switch to past tense. Use tense shifts to denote specific changes in narration, such as when a character takes over the narration to tell a story from the past or predicts something about the future.

Avoid random or unintended tense shifts, as they can become confusing and ambiguous for your reader. Avoid ambiguous sentences by paying close attention to the implications of the words you use and asking yourself what a sentence seems to suggest. For instance, the past tense sentence john built cars for a living implies that john is retired, while the past perfect statement john had built cars for a living implies that he is still working at building cars. time: 2016 02 21 1:53 utc 1456076693 reporting this problem: the problem you have encountered is with a project web site hosted by sourceforge.net.

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This option may be re enabled by the project by placing a file with the name .htaccess with this line: when the literary historians of the year 30 write about the fiction of our time, i believe they will consider our use of the present tense to be its most distinctive and, perhaps, problematic feature. Whereas present tense narration was once rare, it is now so common as to be commonplace. In 1987, robie macauley and george lanning dubbed it the most frequent cliché of technique in the new fiction, and since then, it’s appeared with even greater frequency. Although there are signs that its use is diminishing among established writers, it’s becoming the default choice for many younger writers.

Recently, i asked one of my talented undergraduate students why she wrote all of her stories in the present tense. Present tense has become something of a fad, and we often use it even when past tense would serve the story better. Whatever the causes for the prevalence of the present tense in today’s fiction, it is important that we understand its advantages and disadvantages so we can better decide when to employ it. Present tense has more immediacy than past tense. past tense narration is of course immediate in a way, since the events of the characters’ past are happening in the reader’s present. But the immediacy of the present tense also allows us to convey a character’s change as it happens, not after the fact. In present tense, we are there with the narrator step by step as he changes, and hence the story’s climax can be both more immediate and intense.

Present tense can contribute to the characterization of a work’s protagonist. as joyce cary said, he chose the present tense for his novel mister johnson because its title character lives in the present and he wanted his readers to be carried unreflecting on the stream of events, just as mister johnson is. As johnson swims gaily on the surface of life, so i wanted the reader to swim, as all of us swim, with more or less courage and skill, for our lives, cary said. Many of the most successful present tense novels and stories deal with characters who, like johnson, are boxed in the present. The present tense can reflect not only a character’s nature but a work’s theme. one major theme of charles baxter’s the feast of love is the presentness of the past, and therefore the use of the present tense when narrating past events makes excellent sense. Whereas the character charlie baxter fears the erasure of the past, his friend bradley feels the present is, at times, less present than the past and therefore more subject to erasure. The past soaks into you, he says, because the present is missing almost entirely.

As he says, that day was here and then it was gone, but i remember it, so it exists here somewhere, and somewhere all those events are still happening and still going on forever. Bradley does more than merely state his view that past events continue to happen in the present he demonstrates it. At one point, after two young lovers, chloé and oscar, have been housesitting for him, he hears the sounds of their lovemaking coming from the basement. He goes to investigate the source of the sounds, and once there, he says, i felt the two of them passing by me, felt the memory of their having been physically present there. � and then the narrative, appropriately, shifts to present tense: i follow them up the stairs. I watch them go into the kitchen and observe them making a dinner of hamburgers and potato chips. Present tense simplifies our handling of tenses. whereas past tense stories often contain the majority of our language’s 12 tenses, most present tense stories employ only four the simple present, the present progressive, and a smattering of the simple past and the simple future and many consist almost entirely of the simple present tense.

Using fewer tenses reduces our ability to convey the full complexity of time relationships, of course, but there’s something to be said for this kind of simplicity. For example, when we’re writing in present tense, we can simply shift into the simple past when a flashback starts and then return to the present when it’s finished. Present tense restricts our ability to manipulate time. altering chronological order and varying duration both work against the primary purpose of present tense, which is to create the feeling that something’s happening now. It seems natural to alter the chronology of events in past tense, when the narrator is looking back from an indeterminate present at many past times, but it seems unnatural to do it in present tense, when the narrator is speaking from and about a specific present. It is more difficult to create complex characters using present tense. while it is certainly possible to create complex characters in present tense fiction, it’s more difficult to do so without natural access to the basic techniques that allow us to manipulate order and duration.

These techniques allow us to convey our character’s subjective experience of time and thereby achieve more psychological depth and realism. They also help us complicate a character by placing her in a larger temporal context. The more we know about a character’s past, for example, the more we can understand her present.

Without the kind of context flashbacks provide, our characters tend to become relatively simple, even generic. The present tense can diminish suspense. because present tense narrators do not know what is going to happen, they are unable to create the kind of suspense that arises from knowledge of upcoming events. The narrator of doctor faustus provides a good example of this kind of suspense: the truth is simply that i fix my eye in advance with fear and dread, yes, with horror on certain things which i shall sooner or later have to tell. Laments that we have to sacrifice this particular kind of suspense when we use present tense. Present tense fiction can create another kind of suspense, of course the kind we feel when no one knows the outcome but not this kind. The use of present tense encourages us to include trivial events that serve no plot function simply because such events would actually happen in the naturalistic sequence of time. as a result, a present tense story sometimes seems, in the words of macauley and lanning, less the work of an author than an unedited film. Take, for example, kate mccorkle’s slice of life story the last parakeet, in which for no apparent reason we watch the today show with the narrator while she eats a bowl of rice krispies.