Tense Situation
Using Narrative Tense to Ease or Aggravate Your Reader
Welcome back to Shelf Life. It’s my absolute favorite thing to write so logically it follows that it’s your absolute favorite thing to read.
Shelf Life wishes an early happy birthday to Joe, Shelf Life’s biggest fan, who never misses an article and even beta reads my terrible short stories. To celebrate Joe’s birthday, I’m going to try to grant his wish by writing one (1) short story that does not contain any profanity (difficulty level: very, very hard). I know I don’t look like a sailor but I’m tattooed like one and I swear like one. Also, I used to drink like a sailor. I’m at high risk of developing skin cancer like a sailor, too. Honestly I’m only missing the actual sailing.
On Tuesday we talked about point of view (POV)—how to choose it and how to use it. We touched on defamiliarization and the way using a less-familiar, less-comfortable POV (like second person) can draw attention to your narrative voice and storytelling technique while using a familiar, comfy POV can help your narrative voice blend in and disappear. Today is about verb tenses in storytelling and, in much the same vein, how to use them effectively and intentionally in your writing.
I’m going to confess up front that I have a verb tense problem. I write everything in the present tense on the first draft because that’s how words come out of my head. There’s nothing wrong with the present tense, per se, but it’s not the best tense for every story.
Let’s talk about the choices we have for tense when writing fiction. First of all there’s the past tense:
Charlotte got in her car and drove to the store.
The present tense:
Charlotte gets in her car and drives to the store.
And the future tense:
Charlotte will get in her car and drive to the store.
To be clear, these are not the only grammatical tenses that exist in English, but as far as I know they’re the ones you can write fiction in. For instance, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) includes several verb tenses that Standard American English doesn’t have, such as the recent past, the pre-recent past, post-immediate future, and indefinite future; as well as a number of aspects to verb tense—like the habitual and continuative aspects—that can also modify the verb tenses. You can certainly use all of those verb tenses in your fiction writing—that is, if you know how; please don’t try to write AAVE if you do not speak it. But the narrative tense of your novel will almost certainly fall into past, present, or future tense.
On Tuesday I wrote that the third-person POV is the most common and therefore the most comfortable for readers, while the second-person POV is rarest and most likely to disorient them. Likewise, with narrative tense, the past tense is the most common and familiar to (most) readers and, therefore, easiest and most seamless to read. The present tense is next-most used, but still fairly common; you see it more often in literary or non-genre fiction than in genre. Then, least-common is the future tense, which is much more likely to distract readers. It’s not that readers can’t parse it or understand what you’re writing, they can. Readers are quite smart. It’s just an unusual and uncomfortable construct for narration so the grammatical tense will continually draw attention to itself, which may or may not be what you want.
Before moving on, it’s worth noting that past tense can be broken into two sub-categories: True past tense and literary past tense. In the literary past tense, the story is written using past-tense verbs, but the events of the story are unfolding around the characters in, essentially, real time. The story is not being told as though it happened a long time ago, but as though it is happening right now. This is the most common form of the past tense that you’re likely to see. The Harry Potter novels are written in the literary past tense. Here’s an excerpt from the first book:
When he was dressed he went down the hall into the kitchen. The table was almost hidden beneath all Dudley's birthday presents. It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the second television and the racing bike.
This story is being told as though it’s happening now; the narrator does not know what will happen next. But the verbs are all in past tense (“was dressed” “went” “was almost hidden” “looked” “had gotten” “wanted”).
In the true past tense, the story is being told with past-tense verbs but also from a point in time in the future, after the events of the story have concluded. The action is over and the narrator knows the whole story and what will happen. Here’s an example from The Secret History by Donna Tartt:
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.
I would like to stress that this is not a spoiler for The Secret History; these are the first lines of the prologue. But you see the difference: The narrator is talking about something that happened long ago. You can tell because the narrator is describing the events with foreknowledge of what will happen: Not only that Bunny is dead, but that the authorities won’t find his body for ten days, and that the narrator and his companions will realize something about the events surrounding his death in the weeks following the death.
To provide a few more examples in context, let me lean on The Hunger Games, which I often cite and cited on Tuesday, as an example of a story told in present tense:
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother.
Katniss narrates from the present tense and only uses past tense to describe events happening before whatever she’s doing, seeing, or thinking. In the present, she’s waking up and looking for her sister. In the present, she realizes her sister left their bed some time before she woke up.
I can’t provide an example of the future tense in fiction, because I genuinely don’t know any. If you were to find an example, I suspect it would be short, flash, or micro fiction that doesn’t go on too long because it’s not a very useful way to tell a story. You’re most likely to see future tense used at the end of stories to tie up loose ends and give you a glimpse of what will happen to the characters after you stop reading. You probably won’t find too many stories written entirely in future tense (but if you can write one, more power to you).
Now we’ve all got a good handle on the narrative tenses available to us: To wit, true past, literary past, and present. And, for the really brave or experimental, future. Let’s devote the rest of our time together today talking about how and why you would choose any of the above.
The true past tense, in which your narrator is describing events that have already happened and which they know the outcome of, inspires the least amount of urgency in the reader. This is for the simple fact that the narrative tense conveys that this isn't happening now. It’s already happened. Whatever consequences there are for the events described in the story, those consequences have already been visited upon the lucky or the unlucky (or both). The true past tense is also excellent for creating a sense of nostalgia and for telling stories with an element of myth or legend. The downside of this tense is—well, it’s the least urgent. If you’re using the true past with a first-person narrator, then the reader knows right off that this character’s life isn’t at stake. They’re going to make it out alive to tell the story.
The literary past tense is the bread-and-butter grammatical tense; the meat-and-potatoes tense; the pizza-and-beer tense! This is your back-to-basics, most-familiar narrative tense to use when you don’t want to draw attention to the narrative tense. This is the one that is most likely to fade into the background. It implies no sense of urgency nor, conversely, any sense of inconsequentiality. Like the third-person limited narrator, this narrative tense stands back and lets the characters and events on the page take the spotlight. Downsides to the literary past tense? None, really. While it doesn’t have any standout, exceptional strengths, it has no weaknesses either.
The present tense is best for instilling a sense of urgency and immediacy in the reader, because the events of the story are told as though they are happening right now. It’s great for ramping up dramatic tension as there’s no sense of the events being retold or filtered through memory. There are two major challenges with the present tense: First, writing in present tense limits your storytelling options because if you try to switch around between different points of view, they all have to be concurrent and happening in the present time. Second, some readers and editors dislike the present tense, either viscerally or on principle, and prefer not to read or buy it. This is particularly true in genre fiction, which is almost always written in literary paste tense—though I cited sci-fi franchise The Hunger Games as an example of present tense fiction, so, an exception for every rule.
Before I sign off, let’s talk about some perfect pairings from this week. What combinations of POV and grammatical tense work best together, and for what? Well:
For telling a story with an air of myth, legend, or folklore, the true past tense plus a third omniscient narrator is very Tolkienesque.
When you don’t want to draw the reader’s attention to the storytelling and let them immerse fully in the story, close/intimate third-person limited plus literary past tense is a great choice.
To connect your reader closely to your main character and the series of their experiences your story describes, first person plus present tense are like peas and carrots.
And a final note. While you shouldn’t bounce around between narrative tenses willy-nilly in the course of a story, you can switch tense midstream if you do so carefully. For instance, a story that describes past events until the reader catches up to the present day, and is told in the present from that point on, is completely plausible. So is a story told in the present or literary past, with forays into the true past to describe events prior to the beginning of the story.
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