Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Tense Confusion

When I say, 'tense', I'm meaning present tense and past tense, '-ed' and '-s', you know?

The reason I called this post Tense Confusion is because I've been having trouble with it. Like whether or not to use it.

Oh, I've decided to use past tense all right, not only because other writers do it, but because I feel more comfortable doing it. But for some reason, I'm still arguing with myself.

Voice 1; "But present tense sounds more epic!"
Voice 2; "It's harder to read."
Voice 1; "It is not."
Voice 2; "Yes, it is."
Voice 1; "Is not!"
Voice 2; "Is too!"
Voice 1; "Is not! Plus, it sounds epic."
Voice 2; "You already said that."
Voice 1; "I know, it's important."
Voice 3; "Aw, just be quiet. We're using past tense, and that's that!"

And so it goes. I finally decided to use past tense, for the reasons named above, but I couldn't resist dabbling a bit with present tense in my prologue.

When I have finished the scene, I went back to past tense, and for the next page, I unknowingly mixed present and past tense.

I ended up editing the entire thing back into past tense.

The lesson here? Use only one tense when writing a story. :)

3 comments:

Son of the King said...

Wow, now this is a helpful blog! I have a ton of problems when I am working with tenses and am always having to get my sister to help me. lol. *humiliated look*

Thanks for posting this!

~Son of the King~

RED~Scribe said...

Hehe! Funny post. Seriously, though, I've done the same thing. Definitely not a good idea to mix and match tenses! Also, I really like your posts on villains. Your tips are helping me define my main and secondary villains (which is kind of hard to do when the villains aren't in plain sight).

~God Bless~

Jake said...

Son of the King and Eldra: Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you like my blog.