Struggles with keeping tense consistent

[Duleigh]

I have yet come across any story written in present tense except statements found in "quotation marks." Our very first introduction to literature almost always started with

Once upon a time...
-or-
There once was a...​

How do you put that in present tense? I can't consider a fiction narrative written in present tense. I admit I occasionally slip choosing the correct transitive such as "has" instead of the correct "had" which I believe comes from lazy speech patterns rather than an actual confusion of tense

 

[SimonDoom]

Twilight and Harry Potter weren't published 'today'. Maybe our sense of 'today' is off.

Very, very true. I have no doubt you're right. I have difficulty adjusting to the idea that Nirvana and Tupac were over a generation ago, when I was well into adulthood.
I never read "young adult" fiction when I was a teenager. I read fiction. I probably read more YA stuff in my 40s than in my teens because I was curious what it was about. I wonder to what degree young people who are truly avid readers fill their time reading YA fiction as opposed to fiction, generally. I don't know.

 

[JGittes]

"Girl With the Dogs" is a YouTube channel featuring dog grooming. (I know I have issues, I'm seeking help, now go away.)
The woman doing the grooming narrates the video in the present tense, and god almighty is it odd. She doesn't speak while she's doing the grooming, so it is clear the action already happened in the past.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

It's the nature of story telling in general, which is the root craft of the art of prose fiction. What else might one possibly expect the default to be?

I'd expect storytelling to have flexibility and just not have a default.

and move away from the idea that present tense is somehow superior.

Not once have I said any tense is superior to another. Don't put words in my mouth.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Can you give examples? I'm puzzled how ANYONE can say that the majority of fiction they've read is in present tense, because it is so much less common. I mean, The Cat In The Hat is in past tense.

Although Seuss's The Places You'll Go is in mixed present and future tense, and second person at that!

I agree that past is the norm for text fiction - I'd guess about 80% for present day, maybe 90-95% for 20th century - and I'm surprised that AWD's reading has been so dominated by present tense. I don't mean that in disbelief or judgement, just "gosh our experiences are different! is it because I'm old".

But I'm almost as surprised by the people who've read a lot of 20th-century lit and don't recall ever encountering present tense. It's not the norm but it shows up often enough that I'd expect them to have hit at least a couple of examples. (Re-checking the ones I gave earlier, add One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and qualify Bleak House: it's alternative past and present, not all present as I'd said.)

Edit: also quite a bit of present-tense narration in Dracula, e.g. in Mina and Seward's journals.

All children's literature I can think of is in past tense. Nearly all classic literature. Nearly all Pulitzer Prize winners. Genre fiction, like horror, detective and crime, westerns, romances-- almost all of it is in past tense. I may be wrong but 50 Shades may be in present tense.

I think so, yes.

Twilight and Harry Potter weren't published 'today'. Maybe our sense of 'today' is off.

This is true, and I'd also note that even at the time it was written, HP was a bit of a nostalgia trip with heavy influences from English schoolboy/schoolgirl novels, Roald Dahl, and so on.

Harry Potter seems to appeal to everyone,

Enh. It certainly has wide appeal, but by no means universal. I'd say more but I have a feeling the discussion would get derailed in unproductive directions (not referring to either you or Simon here!)

 

[ElectricBlue]

But I'm almost as surprised by the people who've read a lot of 20th-century lit and don't recall ever encountering present tense. It's not the norm but it shows up often enough that I'd expect them to have hit at least a couple of examples. (Re-checking the ones I gave earlier, add One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and qualify Bleak House: it's alternative past and present, not all present as I'd said.)

You're right, but it's a tiny sample. Without checking, Last Exit to Brooklyn has a present tense section, as do some of Le Carre's more recent novels - and that reads very strangely.

It's an oddity, in my reading, that's for sure.

 

[lovecraft68]

Very, very true. I have no doubt you're right. I have difficulty adjusting to the idea that Nirvana and Tupac were over a generation ago, when I was well into adulthood.
I never read "young adult" fiction when I was a teenager. I read fiction. I probably read more YA stuff in my 40s than in my teens because I was curious what it was about. I wonder to what degree young people who are truly avid readers fill their time reading YA fiction as opposed to fiction, generally. I don't know.

I get hit whenever I hear Journey's Don't Stop Believing. I remember buying the cassette when it came out.
41 years ago.
Jeez that makes me feel old.

 

[SimonDoom]

I get hit whenever I hear Journey's Don't Stop Believing. I remember buying the cassette when it came out.
41 years ago.
Jeez that makes me feel old.

Part of the problem is the acceleration of the pace of popular culture. Spiderman with Toby Maguire came out in 2002, and to me it doesn't seem like it was that long ago, but it's already been rebooted twice, which seems ridiculous to me. To the current ideal movie market cohort, Toby Maguire is an old guy.

I've gotten used to the idea that the music I listened to in high school is old. I have a lot more trouble knowing that the music my kids listened to is now old.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

View attachment 2190537
"Well read" largely depends on who is defining what is and is not literature. I've had professors count film as literature, I've also had professors that say poetry is not literature. Personally, I'm of the opinion that if a work was made with the intent to tell a story, it's literature. "Literature" does not mean good, it does not mean bad, it's just stories.

A person who's seen a lot of movies and TV can gain the same grasp on narrative as someone who reads a lot of books because at the end of the day both modes of fiction have a writer credited for their existence.

And yes that puts me in Narrative Neutral + Presentation Rebel. Note all of the examples in the squares are stretching their respective definitions to the limit, don't take it too seriously.

 

[TheRedChamber]

View attachment 2190537
"Well read" largely depends on who is defining what is and is not literature. I've had professors count film as literature, I've also had professors that say poetry is not literature. Personally, I'm of the opinion that if a work was made with the intent to tell a story, it's literature. "Literature" does not mean good, it does not mean bad, it's just stories.

A person who's seen a lot of movies and TV can gain the same grasp on narrative as someone who reads a lot of books because at the end of the day both modes of fiction have a writer credited for their existence.

And yes that puts me in Narrative Neutral + Presentation Rebel. Note all of the examples in the squares are stretching their respective definitions to the limit, don't take it too seriously.

I'll have to disagree with this. The first issue is that the question of what is and isn't 'literature' (or similarly 'art') is a meaningless one. Everything on your list is at least a form of creative endeavour, has it's place in a society's culture and can be studied with a view to doing it better.

But a lot of these forms are fundamentally different. Film a Shakespeare play without changing the script and it is very clear you are filming a play, not making a movie however you stage it.

Similarly the stories of video games are often hamstrung by writers who want to make them into movies (The ending to Empire Strikes Back is one of the greatest in movie history but would be difficult to pull off in a video game because the mechanics of video games require success rather than abject failure)

Or consider opera versus the novel - in an Opera so much time is 'wasted' with the singing, that you've gotten very little time to do anything other than the most bare bones plot. In a novel version of Tosca, I'd expect more about the politics of the rebellion, but in the Opera there's no time - it's all stabby murder suicide. Similarly a novel of Madame Butterfly would have more detail about Japanese culture. Again - no time. You have to crank up the melodrama quickly in most Operas because it's going to take several hours anyway and you want to composer to have strong emotions to work with.

The point is all the various forms of literature have some value (yes arguably some more than others), but the skills of one don't necessarily transfer from one to the other.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Film a Shakespeare play without changing the script and it is very clear you are filming a play, not making a movie however you stage it.

View attachment 2190550

Film a Shakespeare play without changing the script and it is very clear you are filming a play, not making a movie however you stage it.

View attachment 2190550
I'm not saying it's a good movie but it adheres to the plays text verbatim and is definitely a movie. Shakespeare is generally easier to adapt to radio and screen productions because the man very rarely included stage direction and when he did it was minimally descriptive.

Hence why there's also a sci-fi Manga adaptation of Macbeth that retains all of its ye-old English. It's not the Shakespeare play I would've pitched for a Manga (like for fucks sake pick a comedy or the one history with the tennis balls), but it's definitely a Manga.

Xanadu is a good example of a play that makes a bad movie because that script has stage direction that only works well in live theatrical settings. I mean seriously, just look at the movie. Characters walk past their scene partners so that neither person in the conversation is facing one another.

Like yeah sometimes adaptation is hard but writing as a skill is universal. Don't strawman me here, aight, anyone smart enough to write a movie is gonna know that a book is not a movie. They're not a frothing mass of lobotomized garden snails puppeting a scarecrow for the benefit of your argument.

If someone who has only ever written operas, writes a book they're not going to first write an opera to then poorly adapt into a novel. They're gonna jump right in and write a novel. And it's most likely not going to feel weird to read. Even in the cases where the book conventions are different from opera, like for example dialogue, the person making this hypothetical book is still a living breathing person whos talked to another human being before. The number of books person has to read in order to get a feel for the conventions and pacing specific to the written word is not a lot. Especially considering Google and TVtropes.com exist.

One of the few authors in traditional publishing that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out is Andy Weir. He's a computer scientist, not a word drunk book sommelier drowning in a pool of other people's literature. (And yes, I know sommelier is the wine term.)

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'm not saying it's a good movie but it adheres to the plays text verbatim and is definitely a movie.

I'd argue (and it's been a good quarter century since I've seen it) that Romeo Plus Juliet is such a dogs dinner of a movie that it makes my point for me. The director is so worried about the audience losing interest in the text that all the speeches are destroyed by messy jumpcuts, fireworks and other completely unnecessary shenanigans. I remember feeling patronized by it at the age of 16.

Like yeah sometimes adaptation is hard but writing as a skill is universal.

Yes and no. If you gave a concert violinist and a plumber one year to learn the trumpet, the smart money would be on the violinist but that doesn't mean Violining and Trumpeting are the same skill. And I think a lot of writers come acropper when they assume they are.

Don't strawman me here, aight, anyone smart enough to write a movie is gonna know that a book is not a movie. They're not a frothing mass of lobotomized garden snails puppeting a scarecrow for the benefit of your argument.

If someone who has only ever written operas, writes a book they're not going to first write an opera to then poorly adapt into a novel. They're gonna jump right in and write a novel.

But someone who has only read librettos operas is going to struggle with prose and descriptive paragraphs. They might struggle to make speech sound natural. They might also struggle with plot and find that their original outline only get them 20k of the way through a novel. They may find plot points that audiences accepted in operas are thought unbelievable in a book. And most importantly, while Madame Butterfly sang of the loneliness of waiting in the opera, they're going to have to find another way to convey that equally beautifully in a book.

And reading more operas isn't going to help with any of that.

And it's most likely not going to feel weird to read. Even in the cases where the book conventions are different from opera, like for example dialogue, the person making this hypothetical book is still a living breathing person whos talked to another human being before. The number of books person has to read in order to get a feel for the conventions and pacing specific to the written word is not a lot. Especially considering Google and TVtropes.com exist.

Again, yes and no. If you only listen to the Sex Pistols you may be able to make half-decent three chord punk. If one day you then stumble on the Eurythmics you might then discover you were better at synth pop all along. The more you read the more you get to hone your skills. And, yes, sometimes people just write and are naturally brilliant at it but encouraging them to pick up another book isn't a bad idea.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I love the idea of being approached by a book sommelier!

"What mood are you in today, madam? May I suggest the 2011 publishing of an Andy Weir, 'The Martian'? It's rooted in a terroir of hard science, with a running theme of competence porn underlying notes of human resilience over adversity and a positive emotional arc..."

Harry Potter is now for 'little kids' and the last book and two films are now generally ignored, rightfully, because they're shit. The prior ones are decent enough kidlit - completely sweeping up all the 'magical boarding school', 'chosen one' 'school drama' tropes of a century of British children's books, but none the worse for that.

Re present tense, I see more books written in a conversational style. Which if done by someone near me would likely result in "You want to know what happened to me last night? Right. So I'm walking down the street, right, and this geezer he says to me, right, he says to me, 'What you looking at?', and I go, 'Nothin',' and he goes... And next thing I know, there's this roadman yelling..."

The past told in present tense.

 

[Voboy]

I enjoyed Romeo + Juliet at the time. I've not seen it since, but I thought it was very clever.

I do agree, though, that setting up a camera on a tripod in the center aisle of the theatre while the stage actors are performing Macbeth is not "a movie."

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

The past told in present tense.

Past and present tense third person to me is the difference between sitting around a campfire and telling ghost stories and checking in on what your friends on the page are doing.

I don't understand why narrative has to be synonymous with things that have already happened. Narrative can be happening now, unfolding in front of us as described by a live sports style commentator.

There are lots of reasons to write in past tense. Being the "default" isn't one of those reasons. It's really good for pulling off unreliable narrators and the grandeous stories worthy of reciting to a friend over a campfire.

 

[Bramblethorn]

[re. Luhrmann's R+J]

I'm not saying it's a good movie but it adheres to the plays text verbatim and is definitely a movie. Shakespeare is generally easier to adapt to radio and screen productions because the man very rarely included stage direction and when he did it was minimally descriptive.

It does keep large chunks of the Elizabethan dialogue intact, mostly without modernising the parts it keeps, but it's far from verbatim.

Shakespearean script: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/entire-play/
Film script: https://imsdb.com/scripts/Romeo-%26-Juliet.html

Obviously there are major differences in setting, but leaving those aside and focussing only on the spoken content:

Luhrmann's version omits the Prologue and the first several lines of dialogue from Act I Scene 1. The dialogue that remains switches "Montague" for "Capulet" - Luhrmann apparently decided to change Gregory and Sampson's house - and Gregory and Sampson have mostly swapped lines.

We have to go to lines 14-15 in Folger ("That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall") to find a line of dialogue that's survived unaltered from the play, albeit reassigned from Gregory to Sampson.

Shortly afterwards, in the play, Gregory has a line "The quarrel is between our masters and us their men". In the film, Benvolio says the first half, and Gregory yells the second half as a rejoinder, turning what was a statement by one character into an argument between two.

Abram becomes Abra (and switches from Montague to Capulet). "My naked weapon is out" gets cut. Tybalt's "I hate the word as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. Have at thee, coward!" is cut short at "all Montagues, and—".

And so on. I'm not going to do the whole thing, but I noticed a couple of other significant changes. Capulet's statement that "[Juliet] hath not seen the change of fourteen years" (i.e. is not yet fourteen years old) gets cut from the film. Perhaps most significant: Act 1, Scene 5, where R&J meet and fall in love at first sight.

In the play, Romeo and Juliet are in a crowded room when he sees her, and he asks a serving man: "What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand Of yonder knight?" Then monologues:

"O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night."

Tybalt, overhearing, starts a confrontation with Romeo.

The film leaves out the first 24 lines of dialogue from this scene (mostly servants talking to one another) while giving Mercutio a line that originally belonged to Benvolio in an earlier scene. Romeo and Juliet are alone when they see one another through a fish tank, the confrontation with Tybalt happens before Romeo's monologue, and everything in that monologue before "Did my heart love till now?" gets cut.

The love-at-first-sight scene also leans very heavily on a song to establish that they are Falling In Love, something that's not part of Shakespeare's script.

I won't do the rest of the play, but the docs are there if anybody else feels like comparing them.

I haven't heard Luhrmann's reasons for those changes. I could probably guess why he didn't want to dwell on Juliet being 13, or have the hero's love declaration include a patch of casual racism; for the rest, I'm not even going to guess. But evidently he felt the film would be better if he didn't stick word-for-word to Shakespeare.

Like yeah sometimes adaptation is hard but writing as a skill is universal. Don't strawman me here, aight, anyone smart enough to write a movie is gonna know that a book is not a movie. They're not a frothing mass of lobotomized garden snails puppeting a scarecrow for the benefit of your argument.

Some aspects of writing are universal, but different media have their own quirks and traps for the unwary. One that we see a lot here is people who've been doing a lot of one-on-one sexual roleplay - which I'm happy to acknowledge as a form of creative writing - and then try to write a story here in the same way they'd write a RP, without recognising how the different medium and audience calls for a different approach.

Neil Gaiman was a very successful, experienced writer in comics and prose fiction before he got into the screenwriting side of things. Here's a short video where he discusses some of the challenges he encountered in that transition, due to the collaborative nature of screenwriting. (Relevant bit goes to 1:20; everything after that is Harlan Ellison venting his spleen as he was wont to do.)

Put it this way: there are many writers who've made successfully the transition between different spheres of writing, book to film to poetry to whatever. Any time I've heard one of them talk about that transition, they have given the impression that it was a challenge with a lot to learn.

(I don't have a glamorous fiction career, but I do have some experience in non-fiction writing and editing. To some degree, it's useful for erotica - things like cultivating the ability to put oneself in the reader's shoes, ignorant of authorial intent, and understand how they are likely to experience the text, that does translate - but there's so much that doesn't. Many of the conventions that work for me in non-fic would be completely wrong for erotica.)

If someone who has only ever written operas, writes a book they're not going to first write an opera to then poorly adapt into a novel. They're gonna jump right in and write a novel. And it's most likely not going to feel weird to read. Even in the cases where the book conventions are different from opera, like for example dialogue, the person making this hypothetical book is still a living breathing person whos talked to another human being before. The number of books person has to read in order to get a feel for the conventions and pacing specific to the written word is not a lot.

In theory, maybe. But in the same way that some people can read heavily without ever encountering a book written in present tense, while others can read heavily and rarely encounter a story written in anything but present tense, there's no guarantee that this person will end up reading the right "not a lot of books" to get a comprehensive understanding of conventions and pacing. They're more likely to end up as the person who figures "I've read dozens of Tom Clancys so I know all I need to know about writing a romance novel".

Especially considering Google and TVtropes.com exist.

They exist, but that doesn't mean every writer has read and assimilated them.

Even for those who do, there's a lot that's not covered by TVtropes. In particular, a significant amount of content related to mature topics got censored a few years back in order to appease the advertisers that pay for the wiki. For instance, one of the most commonly discussed tropes here is BTB; anybody dabbling in LW probably needs to know what it is, even if they're not writing that trope themselves, just to understand what's going on. But as far as I can tell, TVTropes doesn't acknowledge the term's existence.

(Site's search function appears to be broken, so I'm using Google instead; apologies if I've missed something.)

Or take some of the other perennial questions here: "how long should a story be?" "how much sex should my erotica story have?" Sites like TVtropes may help you learn about choices other authors have made, and give you a name to attach to those choices, but they're not terribly helpful in actually knowing what decision fits the story you're writing. Other authors can sometimes help a little bit, but mostly our answers come down to "as much as it needs". Ultimately, each writer has to figure out the path that works for them, with their own foibles, and then adapt as necessary.

 

[SimonDoom]

There are lots of reasons to write in past tense. Being the "default" isn't one of those reasons. It's really good for pulling off unreliable narrators and the grandeous stories worthy of reciting to a friend over a campfire.

I agree, basically, except in this way. Most people are more familiar with writing fiction in the past tense, and whatever one thinks of the merits of one tense or the other, there is no question whatsoever that tense errors are extremely common in Literotica stories, they are annoying, and the overwhelming cause of them is that authors begin writing in present tense and unthinkingly shift to past tense.

They write like this:

x x x

I walk to the bedroom, eager to see Mindy. I open the door, and there she is.

"Hello, Mark," Mindy said.

x x x

That drives me absolutely bonkers. I'm thrown out of the story right away.

If authors stuck with past tense, this wouldn't happen. I think for newer writers it makes sense sometimes to take the easier or "default" path, especially when, as in this case, it results in little or no artistic sacrifice.

Sometimes I think there's too much high-minded kvetching about abstract principles here at Literotica by authors who would be better served focusing on the nuts and bolts of writing.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I think for newer writers it makes sense sometimes to take the easier or "default" path, especially when, as in this case, it results in little or no artistic sacrifice.

If someone is new to fiction writing, (and I'm talking has only ever written when asked to by a teacher in school), sticking to present tense might actually be easier. As past tense is explicitly incorrect on every paper until you get to a college level where creative writing is an available course.

The newbie writer tense shift has less to do with attempting something other than the default and everything to do with newbie writers not realizing tense shifting is a bad thing. In the same way newbie writers don't pick up on head hopping. They know it's from a new perspective, they just don't know you're not supposed to do that without a transition.

The suggestion here shouldn't be write in x or y tense. "Pick a tense and stick to it" is much better advice.

 

[TheRedChamber]

If someone is new to fiction writing, (and I'm talking has only ever written when asked to by a teacher in school), sticking to present tense might actually be easier. As past tense is explicitly incorrect on every paper until you get to a college level where creative writing is an available course.

Whoopsie, I have to say you have a very strange relationship with tenses. The traditional primary school essay "What I did on my holidays" would be written in the past tense, as would every history essay (and any create writing in English class would use either) Most people would not have any problem writing in past tense. The problem, I believe, comes in fiction where either past or present are both acceptable and people forget which one they're doing (sometimes because its not a concious choice).

 

[SimonDoom]

The suggestion here shouldn't be write in x or y tense. "Pick a tense and stick to it" is much better advice.

Agreed. But I'm confident that it's much easier for most writers, young and old, to accomplish this goal by writing in the past tense. The evidence bears out that conclusion. All one has to do is read stories at Literotica to see that this is true.

I remain curious about and skeptical of what you are saying about young writers. I have children a few years out of high school. They read novels and other fiction in school, and also on their own time. Most of those stories were in the past tense, just like the stories I read in school. When you write about young people writing mostly in the present tense, I don't know what you're writing about. Are you writing about the authorship of fiction? Short stories? Novels? That's what we're talking about here, because that's what we do at Literotica. It remains true to this day that the majority of published fiction of all kinds is in the past tense, not the present tense. Your experience may be different, but if so I think it is unusual and not representative.

I'm not trying to be dismissive or disparaging, but the impression you give is that you don't read much fiction and you are unfamiliar with what the norms of fiction are. You talk about school papers. I assume you mean essays. Of course, that has nothing to do with fiction. When I was in school, I also wrote essays in the present tense, unless they recounted historical events, but I understood that had nothing to do with the standards of fiction. In middle school and high school, for every book I read for a class I read dozens on my own for my own pleasure. I'm fairly confident that young people today who are avid readers have an experience that is not that different from my own. If that's not where your interest lies, that's fine, but I think you have to be careful about generalizing when your experience may be quite different from that of others.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Agreed. But I'm confident that it's much easier for most writers, young and old, to accomplish this goal by writing in the past tense. The evidence bears out that conclusion. All one has to do is read stories at Literotica to see that this is true.

I remain curious about and skeptical of what you are saying about young writers. I have children a few years out of high school. They read novels and other fiction in school, and also on their own time. Most of those stories were in the past tense, just like the stories I read in school. When you write about young people writing mostly in the present tense, I don't know what you're writing about. Are you writing about the authorship of fiction? Short stories? Novels? That's what we're talking about here, because that's what we do at Literotica. It remains true to this day that the majority of published fiction of all kinds is in the past tense, not the present tense. Your experience may be different, but if so I think it is unusual and not representative.

I'm not trying to be dismissive or disparaging, but the impression you give is that you don't read much fiction and you are unfamiliar with what the norms of fiction are. You talk about school papers. I assume you mean essays. Of course, that has nothing to do with fiction. When I was in school, I also wrote essays in the present tense, unless they recounted historical events, but I understood that had nothing to do with the standards of fiction. In middle school and high school, for every book I read for a class I read dozens on my own for my own pleasure. I'm fairly confident that young people today who are avid readers have an experience that is not that different from my own. If that's not where your interest lies, that's fine, but I think you have to be careful about generalizing when your experience may be quite different from that of others.

School teaches kids to write in the present tense. It becomes habitual. People who haven't written fiction before would by virtue of having more experience writing in the present tense because of school, be less likely to fuck it up.

In my creative writing class of seventeen only two people write in the past tense. I've only seen one tense shift the whole semester and it was a typo.

 

[Voboy]

School teaches kids to write in the present tense. It becomes habitual. People who haven't written fiction before would by virtue of having more experience writing in the present tense because of school, be less likely to fuck it up.

In some subjects, perhaps. Not in social studies, and mine didn't teach kids to write present tense in English, either. I'm talking about those silly 5-paragraph essay formats, where the kids comment on Moby-Dick or whatever, not creative writing. And those 5-paragraphers are most of what kids write on the secondary level.

We'd occasionally do creative writing in English, and on those days I don't recall the teacher caring about verb tense: the point was creativity, not grammar. That was the exception, not the rule.

 

[KeithD]

I use what seems to fit the circumstances. On rare occasion that's first person, present tense. It's all good to try.

I was beta reading a friend's mainstream novel once (which did really well commercially) and was about a fourth of the way through it before it even dawned on me that it was in first person, present tense. I stopped to consider whether it would be better in another mode, and eventually went "duh." The story was about a young man's coping with dying from leukemia. He was going to be dead at the end, so of course it could only be in first person, present tense. The whole point was it was about his thoughts/feelings, so first person, and it couldn't be told in the past tense.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Enh. It certainly has wide appeal, but by no means universal.

I've never read any Harry Potter but even I would admit its universality. If Harry Potter isn't 'universal', nothing is.

School teaches kids to write in the present tense.

ONLY present tense? Since when?

 

[MillieDynamite]

I use what seems to fit the circumstances. On rare occasion that's first person, present tense. It's all good to try.

I was beta reading a friend's mainstream novel once (which did really well commercially) and was about a fourth of the way through it before it even dawned on me that it was in first person, present tense. I stopped to consider whether it would be better in another mode, and eventually went "duh." The story was about a young man's coping with dying from leukemia. He was going to be dead at the end, so of course it could only be in first person, present tense. The whole point was it was about his thoughts/feelings, so first person, and it couldn't be told in the past tense.

Mum has written in third person present tense several times. The present tense of her stories keeps you reading as it seems in the moment. I think a first-person story that would be even more the case. Most of my stories are in the first person, but I always write in the past tense.