"Am I mixing my tenses?" She asked, scratching her head
I'm very confused about tenses. I am not sure if I am mixing modifiers up or slipping from past to present. Can someone help me please, here are a few examples:
Stooping, he lit a fire, warming himself as he swigged from a bottle.
He flexed his fingers above the flames, glancing at her uneasy expression.
He swung himself up as she reached for the bottle, elbowing her in the chest, palming a coin and holding it out to her.
Thank you so much
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2 answers
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Stop worrying about this stuff. English tenses are enormously complicated, but they are tools of analysis, not composition. If you are a native English speaker you will have learned how tenses are used in English by osmosis. Trying to follow the explicit rules that have be developed to explain how tenses work in natural English will be both agonizing and pointless.
Natural English is a very fluid and flexible language full of particular bits of usage that are very hard to fit to rules. Thus attempting to come up with a grammatical system to fully encompases all of natural English is very difficult -- and has not yet been achieved. English, in particular, is a language that has to be learned by ear, not by rule. The rules are as apt to lead you astray as they are to lead you to clarity -- not because they are wrong necessarily, but because they are so hard to apply. You have to be already a fluent writer of English to be able to tell how grammatical "rules" actually apply to natural English.
Most of the problems in this area are not caused by failure to understand tenses as described by grammarians -- not one writer in a hundred knows all the categories and terminology. The problems come from an unwillingness to recast awkward sentences. If you have a sentence that seems awkward or unnatural to you, don't waste time trying to fix it by the application of grammar rules. Rewrite it so it is simple and more direct and all will be well.
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The short answer, which Termite Society stated is correct. A motivation for doing so is to show some sort parallelism or simultaneous actions.
In my opinion, fiction writers should focus on cause and effect as opposed to events taking place at the same time.
Using your sample text:
She asked and scratched her head.
or
She scratched her head and asked.
Notice in the two versions of cause and effect. She asked and something happened afterwards or she scratched her head and something happened afterwards.
Another reason I choose cause and effect over progressive tense is verb strength.
Stronger: she or he asks. He or she asked
Weaker: she or he is asking. He or she was asking.
As writers, we could seek out a balance where there may be points during a story’s plot where parallelism makes sense or seems plausible, epically in scenes where less showing and more telling may be appropriate like transitioning between plot points and moving time forward.
A plausible example:
He walked, smoking a cigarette.
That’s easy to do for any tobacco user. It happens every day.
But again, I emphasize cause and effect overall.
I also emphasize the evidence of smoking in this example as opposed to progressive tense.
He walked and took in a drag, a warm, airy flavor flowed into his mouth and into his lungs. He forced three short exhales and three smoke-rings floated into the air.
Solid exceptions using the progressive tense:
Character dialog – We use progressive tense naturally when speaking and so should our characters.
Character Internalization – Same as dialog. Internalization is our thoughts and our characters think also.
Similes – Making similarities to show vs. tell.
Hopes this helps.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28441. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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