Miss Midnight wrote:Hi,
I've read a lot of these tips online, but I still find myself losing the battle with my tenses.
How do you guys keep from slipping between them?
What is "so 19th century" about 3rd person omniscient past-tense telling is strict adherence to one person---and this applies the 1st person limited narration, too --- telling of the story which, though natural, can tend to be tedious and predictable. It is now acceptable for an author to mix it up by interjecting inner thoughts and perceptions of more characters while still in the context of author's omniscient telling. Present tense effectively gives that in-the-moment personal feel to a character's telling. This is perspective writing. For example, in my Maximilian's Achilles and Patroclus (which is an experiment in alternate perspective writing) Alec is telling the story of a meeting between Chris and him in Hammock Park as if it has already happened, but Chris is telling the story -- a different story in a different, his own, perspective from that of Alec -- in the here and now.
I stood beside Pa’s Buick in Hammock Park in Ocean Ridge waiting. I was there because the men on the other side of the cameras let me. The Intracoastal Waterway and the cameras were the barrier-island town of Ocean Ridge’s moat against Boynton Beach. [etc.]
But two chapters later ... Chris on the same event ...
There in Hammock Park I wrap my arms around Alec and hug him not from strategy but from pure destination; so he is surprised, and I am happy to have my friend back if only for that moment to remember the day when we were twelve fighting together. [etc.]
So what I am suggesting that you try as an exercise is to write short piece from one character's POV in past tense and then the same event from another POV of a character, also part of the event, in the present tense, as if it was still going on, almost like a running commentary.
I find a whole story written in the present tense annoying, at the very least for the reasons in the article I cited -- it is limiting to absurdity, but if tense change is treated like a spice added cautiously, it can add an appealing flavor.