I'm tense about tenses. I'm always amazed at how many students submit work without first having a rigorous look at the tenses they are using: they wander, they meander, they double back, they go shooting forward and for a reader it can be extremely discombobulating.
If you are telling a story in the present tense, stick with it, unless you are writing passages of flashback. If you are writing in the past, don't go drifting into the present. Verbs are the spinal column in the body of your work, they are the architecture that holds a story together. A good verb, well chosen, is an extraordinarily dynamic device, so make sure that you do them (and the story you are telling) full justice by putting them in the right tense.
Here's a consciousness-raising exercise you might like to try: write a story in the present tense, then rewrite it in a past tense and compare the effects. It might help you to be more tense -- aware. Write consistently: nothing in your work should be inadvertent.
One of the things I love most about poetry is the scope to ignore this piece of sage advice! I love playing with time, making it pool and then torrent. Potentially disastrous in prose, though.
ReplyDeleteTime pooling and torrenting - there's a bit of that going on here at the moment!
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