"That's when" vs "That was when."

−0

Should I use the former or the latter in a story written in first-person past tense?

Example:

My heart started to race, my adrenaline to spike, and that's when the thought hit me: I had to find out. I had to solve this mystery.

My heart started to race, my adrenaline to spike, and that was when the thought hit me: I had to find out. I had to solve this mystery.

I've found both ocurrences in fiction.

fiction tenses creative-writing

posted over 9 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Alexandro Chen‭

995 reputation 144 3 104 0

Raw

Markdown

History

is a duplicate

This question has been asked before and has already been answered. It should be marked as a duplicate.

Please enter the URL of the proposed duplicate in the details field below.

not constructive

This question cannot be answered in a way that is helpful to anyone. It's not possible to learn something from possible answers, except for the solution for the specific problem of the asker.

This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/15934. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

0 comment threads

2 answers

Score Active Age

−0

From a strictly grammatical point Lauren's answer is right -- you're talking about something that happened in the past, so "that was" is correct.

However, dialogue is often more colloquial and a first-person narrative can be more like dialogue than strict narrative. If you're trying to evoke the feel of the narrator actively telling a story to a room-full of listeners, you might find "that's when" to fit the style better. If, on the other hand, your narrator is dispassionately and remotely retelling past events, the way somebody might write an event chronology in a police report for example, he'd probably say "that was when". Whichever you do, be consistent -- if your narrator usually writes more formally, dropping a colloquialism in will stand out. So unless you want it to stand out for dramatic effect, I suggest avoiding mixing styles.

posted about 9 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0