Struggles with keeping tense consistent

[Brutal_One]

Hi all,

I wonder if there are any tips for Keelung the tense consistent in writing. Oft times I write and realise I write in the past tense where I mean it to be the present. In general the present tense is more engaging to pull readers into a story. Of course there are things and events that can be written about that are in the past but are being narrated in the present.

I can usually spot this in editing. I know I have had good advice here in the past and recently to keep case consistent otherwise it can jar readers out the story. I also aware of ‘voice’ and narrative voice and Viewpoint.

Do regular writers have any tips or is it just a matter of practice over time. I can understand when I write and write fluently and quickly which is often I guess my narrative voice is thinking about things that have already happened hence the reason (I.e. how my brain works) but is there a trick / technique that would help me to keep things in present tense writing wise. I guess I find dialogue easier as it is present tense as you write the conversation even if you are writing about it in present.

i guess I may just have to get used to catching it in the edits but if there is a way I could get the tense correct as I write it this would be preferable.

it’s relevant too as I plan to bring once again an older story that I have had to modify to fit being suitable for Lit content wise so at least I can start with current version (again nearly all past tense) and as having to edit for Lit anyway I can pick up the edits for tense.

Brutal One

 

[SimonDoom]

My tip is to stick with past tense, if this is an issue. Most stories are written in past tense. This is a very common problem because authors get it into their heads that for some reason they should write in present tense, but past tense is far more common and more natural so they revert to past tense without thinking. You eliminate the problem if you just always write in past tense. That's what I do. I have never written a story in present tense. I see no reason to do so. I don't agree at all that present tense does a better job pulling readers into the story. The proof against that position is that the vast, vast majority of stories and novels are in past tense and they do just fine.

If you want to write in present tense, then go ahead, but proof your story very carefully. I'll just say, for myself -- I hate careless tense-shifting. It takes me right out of the story. It is, to me, one of the top-5 errors of shoddy writing, and it's an extremely common problem at Literotica.

 

[TheRedChamber]

My tip is to stick with past tense...

I agree. I tend to find present tense stories irritating to read even without tense mistakes.

 

[Carnevil9]

I rarely write a work, even a short one, in one sitting. So when I sit down to continue the story, I always read it through from the beginning to where I left off. This gets me back into the mood, pace, and style of the story so far. It might help you stay in the same tense, too.

One other suggestion: put "check tense consistency" on your editing checklist, along with typos, its/it's, name consistency, and whatever else you always check for when the composing is done.

 

[Voboy]

Pick and stick. Don't shift during a piece.

I'm in the camp who will immediately click out of a present-tense story, but not everybody is. Go ahead and write that way, if you want to.

I have to confess I'm a little confused by the question; I've never had a problem with verb tense, probably because I don't write in present tense. What does sometimes get me into trouble is flashbacks, where I'm writing in past-perfect, since past-perfect feels repetitious very quickly. If it's a lengthy digression, I'll sometimes bookend the flashback with past-perfect but use simple past while I'm in the flashback, particularly for dialogue. I have no reason for doing this, other than personal preference, but it doesn't seem to have hurt my stories.

By all means catch it while editing, but in my mind a writer who keeps lapsing between past and present is probably just not paying attention whilst writing. Like I say, I've never had a problem with those two.

 

[Winter_Fare]

It tend to use it if there's a reason, but it's hard to be consistent. I have a 750 word story in pending and I had to go back for several edits to catch all the slip ups

 

[Blind_Justice]

Three easy-to-use tips I always use:

- Unless you're one of those savants able to crank out a long story in one sitting, write in comfortably-sized portions. Then, before starting the next writing session, go over the previous session's work and edit the living crap out of it. You'll be amazed how many typos, tense shifts or plain old garbage sentences you'll find.

- While doing the above, read your works aloud (or if you're in public, use a TTS system like SAPI to hear your sentences over headphones). If it's a clunky listen, you might want to polish and make it smoother. Besides fixing the flow, you should hear any issues regarding tenses right away.

- Ask a beta reader or editor to look over your work. Even using tips 1&2 doesn't make you immune to missing things. The brain is shockingly good at glancing over letter mixups (like "from" and "form"). Honestly, without my second pairs of eyes, everyone would see that English isn't my native language...

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Write, edit, then go through and check every single verb for tense and while I'm at it, every pronoun to make sure it's clear what it's referring to.

Normally I write in past tense but one of my characters narrates his life in present tense and won't change. Which caused some clunky changes in my most recent stories which had to be told from a different timepoint. I'm not sure I'm totally satisfied but the main story works, just the framing of it is slightly askew.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Whenever I've deliberately tried to write in present tense (to see if it in fact does enhance the intensity as its proponents suggest) I find myself automatically lapsing back into past. So I usually give up and slog the first paragraphs back into past tense and get on with it.

I think I've got some present tense stories, but I couldn't tell you which ones.

I never edited the one Simon (rightly) called me out on (where I subconsciously drifted into present tense for the sex scenes but went back to past tense for the story telling), but interestingly, it's one of my most commented on stories, and nobody else commented on that. Which tells me more about Simon than it does about anyone else .

His comment, though, focused my attention on what was in fact an unconscious thing I did - and I'm still not fully convinced that it's a mistake when writing erotica.

 

[neuroparenthetical]

From an objective, technical standpoint, past tense is more complicated to write in. You're shifting everything away from the natural tense structure. You're creating a tension between "this happened in the past" and "this is happening right now." You're running into ugly kludges like using "now" and "this" while in the narrative past tense that, frankly, I find distasteful and nonsensical. Not only that, but you're shifting "past" events into the past perfect tense. If you stay there for any length of time, it gets super awkward. Your readers experience "had" overload. It's ungainly.

Moreover, if you insist on having a character in the story be your narrator while using the past tense, it's just outright fucking bizarre. Even if you're perfectly consistent in your narrative voice, there is an inherent tension. If the person in the story, in its very moments, is narrating, then they shouldn't be using the past tense in the first place! That implies some kind of distance from the events in question!

If you're committed to writing in the past tense, visualize the story being told by somebody around a campfire. Never forget the storyteller, who's telling your readers a story about what already happened. He/She/It is obviously never going to slip into the present tense by accident, because, well, that would imply that things are happening around that very campfire. Clearly, they're not! His audience would notice. Present tense = campfire tense. Past tense = story events tense.

That should get you most of the way there. As always, you need to know the rules for each tense. If you clearly intend to talk about a past-of-past event, then it's past perfect. If you clearly intend to make an arch proclamation about some persistent law of the universe - for example, "everybody knows that dogs hate cats" - then it's present tense. You can't avoid learning the rules entirely.

 

[ElectricBlue]

From an objective, technical standpoint, past tense is more complicated to write in. You're shifting everything away from the natural tense structure. You're creating a tension between "this happened in the past" and "this is happening right now." You're running into ugly kludges like using "now" and "this" while in the narrative past tense that, frankly, I find distasteful and nonsensical. Not only that, but you're shifting "past" events into the past perfect tense. If you stay there for any length of time, it gets super awkward. Your readers experience "had" overload. It's ungainly.

Moreover, if you insist on having a character in the story be your narrator while using the past tense, it's just outright fucking bizarre. Even if you're perfectly consistent in your narrative voice, there is an inherent tension. If the person in the story, in its very moments, is narrating, then they shouldn't be using the past tense in the first place! That implies some kind of distance from the events in question!

If you're committed to writing in the past tense, visualize the story being told by somebody around a campfire. Never forget the storyteller, who's telling your readers a story about what already happened. He/She/It is obviously never going to slip into the present tense by accident, because, well, that would imply that things are happening around that very campfire. Clearly, they're not! His audience would notice. Present tense = campfire tense. Past tense = story events tense.

That should get you most of the way there. As always, you need to know the rules for each tense. If you clearly intend to talk about a past-of-past event, then it's past perfect. If you clearly intend to make an arch proclamation about some persistent law of the universe - for example, "everybody knows that dogs hate cats" - then it's present tense. You can't avoid learning the rules entirely.

You've not noticed that most novels are written in past tense?

"Ungainly"? Who tells you this?

"More complicated to write in"? Many, many writers fall into past tense naturally, because they find it easier. I, for example, find present tense very hard to stay consistent in, because I naturally lapse into past tense. Editing present tense, for me, is hard work and tedious, to keep it consistent - so I usually give up and stick with past tense.

"Outright fucking bizarre"? To you, maybe, but not to many others.

These are your opinions, don't sprout them as facts. Just as these are my opinions, but I'm not saying, "you should only write this way." There is no one way or right way to write.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I really don't have any trouble with this. I just know which point of view that I have for each story that I write and I generally don't write anything until I get into a brainstorm groove first (which decides that point of view), even if I'm picking up where I left off last week or last month. Often that is achieved by simply reading back some or all of what I have already written and once I'm in that groove, the the voice (and tense) for that story just speaks on its own and that's what I write.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

From an objective, technical standpoint, past tense is more complicated to write in. You're shifting everything away from the natural tense structure.

Perhaps from every day speech, but not in story telling. Past tense is the default for all story telling. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single novel that I've ever read that wasn't written in past tense. The only thing that I can think of is the short Flowers for Algernon, which was basically if I recall correctly I daily diary structure.

Even the print news is past tense.

The only way that past tense would seem more complicated is if one didn't read anything.

 

[Voboy]

The only way that past tense would seem more complicated is if one didn't read anything.

Yeah, that comment puzzled me too.

Everything I grew up reading was in past tense, and it still is. I find it quite intuitive.

 

[SimonDoom]

From an objective, technical standpoint, past tense is more complicated to write in. You're shifting everything away from the natural tense structure. You're creating a tension between "this happened in the past" and "this is happening right now." You're running into ugly kludges like using "now" and "this" while in the narrative past tense that, frankly, I find distasteful and nonsensical. Not only that, but you're shifting "past" events into the past perfect tense. If you stay there for any length of time, it gets super awkward. Your readers experience "had" overload. It's ungainly.

Moreover, if you insist on having a character in the story be your narrator while using the past tense, it's just outright fucking bizarre. Even if you're perfectly consistent in your narrative voice, there is an inherent tension. If the person in the story, in its very moments, is narrating, then they shouldn't be using the past tense in the first place! That implies some kind of distance from the events in question!

If you're committed to writing in the past tense, visualize the story being told by somebody around a campfire. Never forget the storyteller, who's telling your readers a story about what already happened. He/She/It is obviously never going to slip into the present tense by accident, because, well, that would imply that things are happening around that very campfire. Clearly, they're not! His audience would notice. Present tense = campfire tense. Past tense = story events tense.

That should get you most of the way there. As always, you need to know the rules for each tense. If you clearly intend to talk about a past-of-past event, then it's past perfect. If you clearly intend to make an arch proclamation about some persistent law of the universe - for example, "everybody knows that dogs hate cats" - then it's present tense. You can't avoid learning the rules entirely.

This is a good example of logic going off the rails and ignoring reality.

Experience matters more than logic. Logic is valuable, some of the time, but it loses its value when it becomes unmoored from reality.

A thousand years of literary experience rebut this post. The reality is that the vast majority of fiction is told in the past tense, and it works just fine that way for most people--both readers and writers. You can argue whatever you want against it, but you're wrong, as a matter of experience.

Past tense is simpler, not more complicated. There are more possibilities when you tell the story in past tense. It makes more sense to people.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Perhaps from every day speech, but not in story telling. Past tense is the default for all story telling. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single novel that I've ever read that wasn't written in past tense. The only thing that I can think of is the short Flowers for Algernon, which was basically if I recall correctly I daily diary structure.

Past tense is the norm, especially for older literature, but there are plenty of exceptions. The Handmaid's Tale, Hunger Games, even Dickens' Bleak House.

Even the print news is past tense.

IME print news varies tense between and within articles, as appropriate to the content. For instance, take this article about COVID politics. First paragraph is past tense, describing past events:

Something happened while we were all distracted by the election. Slowly, maybe imperceptibly, the number of Australians dying of COVID-19 has ticked upwards. On April 10, the day Scott Morrison called the poll for May 21, the seven-day rolling average of deaths was 25. It has now doubled.

Second paragraph uses present tense to describe the current situation, before twitching back to past to mention our recent election:

For some in the medical community this is cause for serious alarm. Not only is COVID on the rise, but we seem less bothered by it. The political class is over it; the pandemic barely rated a mention during the campaign, the media has lost interest and most people seem to have moved on.

But then later it switches back to present tense even when relating something that's now in the recent past:

...“COVID has been hiding in plain sight throughout the whole election campaign,” Phelps says.

And for headlines, present tense is the norm. "Smith wins election" not "Smith won election".

 

[neuroparenthetical]

You've not noticed that most novels are written in past tense?

Sorry, but "more complicated" and "more difficult" are not the same thing. People have acclimated to the past tense through repeated exposure, but when it comes time for them to actually write in it, they actually end up making more mistakes. Number one with a bullet is their failure to consistently, properly apply the past perfect tense. The analogous situation when defaulting to the present tense - failing to use the past tense to refer to something that happened in the past - simply does not crop up as often.

The biggest issue with present tense, by contrast, is people slipping into a narrative past tense due to that same acclimation. The tense-to-reality correlation is 1:1. That is, objectively, less complicated.

Which is less complicated?

1) "When referring to something that is happening in the story's present moment, right now, use the present tense;" or
2) "When referring to something that is happening in the story's present moment, right now, use the past tense?"

Come on, now.

Further, just like I said, "this" and "now" are used constantly in the narrative past tense, and neither of those words technically belong in it. That's an ugly kludge. It's evidence of the fact that "narrative past tense" can be a partial contradiction in terms, and often is.

As for there being more possibilities: you're failing to recognize that the expansion of the possibility space is overwhelmingly due to having a third-person omniscient narrator, rather than using the narrative past tense. Having a third-person-omniscient narrator while using the present tense isn't technically impossible. It only "sounds wrong" because most people don't think to do it.

As a side note, guess what else regularly happens when writers opt for the narrative past tense without using a third-person omniscient narrator? They slip into using a third-person omniscient narrator, which disrupts the narrative voice. The analogous error is far, far less common when a writer defaults to the present tense.

 

[XerXesXu]

If you're committed to writing in the past tense, visualize the story being told by somebody around a campfire. Never forget the storyteller, who's telling your readers a story about what already happened. He/She/It is obviously never going to slip into the present tense by accident, because, well, that would imply that things are happening around that very campfire. Clearly, they're not! His audience would notice. Present tense = campfire tense. Past tense = story events tense.

Think pub fire. I've sat around a lot of those. The skilled raconteur does switch between past and present, it's the natural way of storytelling. It's the way they tell it, and their audience laps it up. Schoolmarm's rules are guidelines for those who are not natural storytellers.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Sorry, but "more complicated" and "more difficult" are not the same thing.

You're totally overthinking this.

What is more jarring to a reader, the use of this or now in a past tense every few pages or a story completely told in present tense?

I went to the store and bought a loaf of bread.

I'm at the store and buying a loaf of bread.

The latter would give such a weird vibe to the reader that you would need a weird plot/narrative to warrant it (something like L'Etranger for instance), otherwise the reader would be a bit freaked out by a conventional story told that way. Plus, it would be more difficult for most writers to get into that frame of mind to tell a present tense story throughout its entirety.

Past tense is the natural tense of story telling, as generally one must experience a story or hear one before one can tell it. That's irrefutable.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As for there being more possibilities: you're failing to recognize that the expansion of the possibility space is overwhelmingly due to having a third-person omniscient narrator, rather than using the narrative past tense. Having a third-person-omniscient narrator while using the present tense isn't technically impossible. It only "sounds wrong" because most people don't think to do it.

As a side note, guess what else regularly happens when writers opt for the narrative past tense without using a third-person omniscient narrator? They slip into using a third-person omniscient narrator, which disrupts the narrative voice. The analogous error is far, far less common when a writer defaults to the present tense.

Since omniscient third person is pretty much my go-to prose style, with no disruption of my narrative voice, I'm going to differ in opinion in just about everything you are saying here.

And from a quick look at our relative scores, I think my readers reckon I'm doing okay, whereas yours might not be so sure. But of course, scores don't really mean a thing - they're just how readers respond to your writing.

You've making a bunch of sweeping statements, stating them as truths about writing styles, but they're not truths at all, they're your preferences.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of popular mainstream authors whose works are often written in the present tense, meaning the story is being told as it unfolds.

Most of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child are present tense. The same with a lot of David Baldacci's works. Present tense is common in action/adventure writing, maybe not so much in erotica.

 

[oggbashan]

The free version of Grammarly should help.

 

[neuroparenthetical]

And from a quick look at our relative scores, I think my readers reckon I'm doing okay, whereas yours might not be so sure. But of course, scores don't really mean a thing - they're just how readers respond to your writing.

Mmmm, and I imagine you don't put any stock into the endless conversations on these forums about how voting is affected by considerations apart from that on a regular basis. I imagine you think that LW one-bombing - and all kinds of similar one-bombing from various categories' communities - is all about the writing, not about the substance. I imagine you also don't care to do a review of just how weak the negative correlation is between vote scores and objectively-incorrect writing.

Honestly, dude, if you're appealing to yours, or anybody else's, Lit vote scores as a meaningful point during a disagreement about writing quality, you've communicated very little besides pettiness and desperation.

As far as my comments so far go, I'm actually not expressing opinions exclusively. I'm sticking my neck out on truth claims. I'm asserting that writers who write in the narrative past tense do in fact end up making more errors, proportionally, relating to confusion surrounding the tense they ought to be using to reference past events. I'm making an argument that "write in the present when things are happening in the present" is simpler than "write in the past when things are happening in the present, and then switch to past perfect for most references to discrete past events."

If you're looking for an opinion, look no further than "narrative present tense sounds weird to me, so I don't like it."

 

[Voboy]

I'm asserting that writers who write in the narrative past tense do in fact end up making more errors, proportionally, relating to confusion surrounding the tense they ought to be using to reference past events.

How on earth do you suppose you'd know that, given the sheer number of people writing in different formats, cultures, and languages, their different processes, their different editing styles, and the different ways in which their work is presented to the public? I mean, really, you must know there's no way to prove your assertion, no?

And, more to the point, why do you assume every writer is so easy to generalize? You've already read several replies here that indicate many of us have no problem with making errors in past-tense writing. Are they lying? And why would they?

 

[Magineer]

Ability to handle tenses correctly is one of the hallmarks of an educated writer. The appalling lack of familiarity on the part of most writers here with the pluperfect tense is a particular annoyance and example of this lack of education. If one writes a narrative in the simple past and then tries to use it again when referring wthin that narrative sequence to a previous occurrence, one is straightforwardly wrong to the point of being misleading/misunderstood, at least to the extent of lacking clarity. One cannot say: 'He phoned at midday as he did (correct: had done) at eleven'.

It gives me no pleasure at all to say that our North American friends specifically are bad in this regard... the tense seems to be on the point of extinction on the other side of the Atlantic....