Is there a complete guideline for which tense to use?
There are questions here about specific use of tenses, but I wonder if there is a more complete guide on what tense to use when?
For a fictional novel, Past Tense is the accepted choice. But which one? Simple, Perfect, Progressive, Past Progressive? When would I change? Would I be mixing tenses as part of the normal flow?
For example, take this:
He was hiding in the dumpster. He had been hiding here for more than two hours already, and he knew that it would be at least two hours before we could leave. Finally, they were gone and he climbed out of the trash. He unsuccessfully tried to hail a cab -- even cab drivers have standards here -- and walked to his hotel.
This is mixing past (and even future) tenses without use of a device that I would normally consider an acceptable reason to change (e.g., Flashbacks or reading out a Newspaper article).
Is there a guidance I could use to figure out what specific past tense I should be using in what context?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/12196. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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When it comes to fiction there is no accepted tense. As long as you don't change tense, perspective or person midstream you're fine.
Yes past tense is most common but I've read future, present, and past tense and I've read first, third and even second person (that one took a little getting used to but was very well used by Charles Stross)
The real answer is that there is no right tense, person or perspective. Instead it is very much down to what suits the specific story.
The most out-there I've managed was a present tense, third person from the protagonist's perspective, in which she is being interviewed about her past. Much of the story is in first person past tense. Here the transition between tense and person is made clear in that the first person/present tense sections are strictly restricted to her dialogue.
So just keep an eye on you tense usage, but feel free to use whatever feels natural. For your example I would write:
He was hiding in the dumpster. He had been hiding here for more than two hours already, and he knew that it would be at least two hours before we could leave.
Finally, they were gone and he climbed out of the trash. He unsuccessfully tried to hail a cab -- even cab drivers had standards here -- and walked to his hotel.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12198. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Well, the way I understand the tenses is as follows (warning: this is my personal understanding, which might not be entirely correct, especially since I'm not a native English speaker; if anything is wrong, corrections are welcome):
There is a "baseline" tense, past, present or future, which tells you the time of the main event line relative to the narrator. Since in everyday life, if we tell someone about real events it is almost always about events in the past, the "natural" tense for narrations is the past tense. However if you think about a reporter telling you about current events, he'll certainly use the present tense. Thus the present tense gives you some "immediacy", like if you were reported some current events. The probably rarest "baseline" tense would be the future tense, which would be used for example in prophecy.
Note that this also affects what the narrator can know: In a present-tense story, I'd be very surprised if the narrator could tell you about events which haven't yet happened in the story timeline, unless it's a prediction. In a past tense story, there's no such restriction; after all the whole story "already happened" so it's to expect that the narrator knows something about events to come, because for the narrator they already happened.
And then there's a "modifier" telling you the ordering of events relative to the current point in the story line. The story line itself goes in the simple time. Perfect time is for things which already have happened at the "story current time", "relative future" ("is/was going to", "would", I don't know the correct grammatical term) for events which have not yet occurred in the story timeline, continuous for ongoing actions. Since most of the story telling is chronological, those would be used more rarely.
Of course, things can get more complicated: If a narrator is part of the story, parts of the story can be at different times relative to the time of narration. For example, someone telling his children about past events would report about the events in the past in past times, but in between switch into present time to tell something about what it means for the current situation, or even to the future tense. For example: "Then I finally had enough money to buy the house. It is the very house we are currently living in, and I hope I will be able to stay in it until the end of my life."
Also, if you make a longer detour, the baseline will naturally shift to the story line of the detour, and back after the detour (this is what Dale Emery stated as "past perfect for timeframe transitions"). Also, a temporary switch from past tense to present tense for action scenes could be done to give that specific scene more immediacy. And of course, the story may itself have an embedded narrator whose time of narration then is the story baseline, while the baseline of his narration would then be timed relative to that.
So to summarize:
There are actually three time frames determining the tense:
- The "narration time", possibly not explicitly specified, which is the time when the narrator tells the story,
- the "baseline time" which is the "current" time in the story, and
- the "event/action time" which is the point in time or timespan when the event happens.
Note that the "baseline time" is not independent of the "event time", but essentially a sort of running average "event time".
- The relative position between narration time and baseline time determines the "base tense" (past/present/future).
- The relative position between baseline time and event time determined the "modifier" (simple/perfect/"relative future"/continuous).
However the actually used tense may temporarily deviate from the tense determined by those rules for dramatic effect.
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