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Is it me, but when I read a story in the present tense, it kind of puts me off.
The stories. I am sure are fine and well crafted, but I am much more comfortable with past tense.
Am I being a silly girl and should I get a life?
Hugs
Worried Sue from the UK.
Comments
Current time
Im sorry but you are nuts.
Too tense for words
I tend to use perfect tense for mine, but now and again when I want something immediate or particularly dramatic I drop into present tense. It's the way I write. Some people prefer to do it another way, doesn't work for me either, but each to their own. Maddy Bell wrote 'Mary' in alternating first and third person, and I can see how that would work, but it needs to be well done (enough said there)
I'll read a story and either like it or not, but if I see something like your present-tense stuff I am usually curous as to why the choice.
Not a criticism, folks, just curiosity.
I tend to be imperfect in the present tense....
...does that count?
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
Conjugalation
I am pluperfectly imperfect, of course, but future...perfect?
"Once upon a time..."
There is this girl named Goldilocks, see?
Storytelling uses past tense as a convention, allowing an omniscient framework for the narrative voice (hindsight?), even in biography. Even in tales of the future.
Could this be the problem?
Michelle
Yeah, okay, maybe you are (LOL!)
I'm more comfortable writing in the past tense, but that's me-I've never been bothered by the way anyone else writes, as long as it's fun to read!
Wren
It isn't you alone
From 1992 till 2005 I worked with a group of up to 42 mentors and we fought hard to eradicate what we called 'Bad Joke Tense'.
The rule we taught was this:
Narration is done after the fact, and needs to be past tense.
DIALOG, however, whether spoken or thought dialog, is present tense.
The only exception is when the narration tells the reader about the thoughts of a character, in which case it needs to be past tense, but still not present tense.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
To each their own
I've had people tell me they don't really care for when I write in present tense and I've also had people tell me they don't care when I write in the past tense. Hmmm, maybe they just don't like my writing. :)
Oh well, as for me, I'm always tense until I've had a nice hot relaxing shower or bath. ;P~
Hugs,
Connie
presently
We don't even ever hardly talk in the present tense, do we? "I go to the store." What does that mean? Right now? Once a week? OK, I know, we do use the present progressive a lot but, to me too, it sounds like an old interactive computer game. "The gnome opens the door. You are in a dungeon." Certainly some great writers can pull it off, some have even written things in the second person too, but they find ways to escape from it quickly. {I wrote two paragraphs in the future tense once, but it was a future that took place in the past.} To me, even if things are unfolding currently, by the time they can be spoken by the narrator, they have happened.
The French used to (well, still do because the books still exist, but I hear it's seldom used in modern fiction) have a special past tense for stories, but then they also have a present subjunctive which makes my mind boggle (and Sarkozy used it in a speech and caused massive commentary.)
French
The French have TWO literary past tenses, both of which are heavily used in books. Modern fiction has it everywhere except in dialogue. The English terms are past anterior and past historic. The first is pluperfect, the second perfect, and where the perfect in French uses an auxiliary verb (j'ai eu) the 'simple past' (PH) is inflected, j'eus. When you read a novel in French, it becomes very easy to adapt.
The present subjunctive, similarly, is really common and used all the time (quelque chose que tu puisses faire)
bleedin' 'eck
Now I just have to figure out if I'm here in the moment or still coming up on it. Maybe I'm past it.
Kris
Past Present Future
I'm so confused
Eh?
Anyone for tense?
Would that be after be being right?
Angharad
Angharad
My English Teachers
RAMI
I guess my Jr. High School and High School English teachers would have to change my grades. I must have forgotten, most of what I learned about different tenses, because the discussion had be totally lost.
When I wrote my stories, I just wrote and did not give to much thought actually, any thought to tenses. Perhaps, my stories would have been better if I had given it any thought.
RAMI
RAMI
Tense
I couldn't agree more.
You're telling a story. Present tense makes it seem like you're showing us a movie of your life. Home movies are horrible . . . usually.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
no past or present, just NOW
This whole thread is making me tense.
It's just a tool
Present tense is a tool. It's supposed to bring more immediacy and make the story more, well, tense. I find it works for short pieces, but gets tiresome for longer fiction.
Each narrative style conveys a subtly different mood. First-person is more intimate than third-person, and so on. It depends on the story you are trying to tell. Myself, when I write (not often), I'm pretty conventional -- I usually go for third-person (sometimes omniscient, sometimes limited), past tense. Once in a while I feel the voice of the character is the important thing about that story, and then I go for first-person.
By the way, present tense is the standard for theatrical and movie scripts. Sometimes a mock-script form can work well for a particular story, and that calls for present tense.
Present Tense: Not Just You...
A problem: sometimes a narrative in present tense reads like a summary of things we need to know before we get to the story, or a synopsis of what's happened so far.
Many stories begin with such a present-tense summation. As an example, picking a book at random from a pile that fell off a bookshelf here sometime back, we see that it opens with one paragraph of present-tense background, then the start of a past-tense story:
"The story is of a man, a woman, and a world. But ghosts pass through it, and gods. Time does, which is more mysterious than any of these.
"A boy stood on a hilltop and looked skyward..."
(Genesis, by Poul Anderson)
A story written in present tense risks being discomforting (as Sue says) at least partly, I think, because we're waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, the point where we're past the "preliminaries" and things start being recounted in past tense.
I know I had that concern during Teddi Aldoennetti's excellent Tranquility: Sorcerer/Sorceress, written entirely in present tense: there were a number of places, particularly where events took place without dialogue, where I felt that I was reading a synopsis ahead of the "real" story to come.
Eric
One curious exception has been remarked upon by sportswriters: when an old baseball man is telling a story about some past experience of his, it's frequently done in the present tense: "So I come to the plate with two men on and two out, and Koufax blows two fastballs by me; I think I'm dead meat. But then he comes back with a curve..." Roger Angell, in an old New Yorker essay, saw it as an extension of baseball's timeless character as the game without a clock. (No idea if cricketers do the same...)
I suspect that's overblown; it seems to me we hear the same thing when someone's describing a play or movie or book: "The Enterprise is in orbit around a planet, answering a distress call, when an alien suddenly materializes in the transporter room..."