Le Guin offers excellent advice on mixing past and present in her writing manual, Steering the Craft: This is wrong because the verbs do not consistently use the same tense, even though it is clear (from context) that Sarah’s run is a continuous action in a single scene. As she turned the corner, she came upon a disturbing scene. The fragmented break in continuity makes it hard to place actions in relation to each other. It’s confusing when an author changes tense in the middle of a scene. This is especially true in novels where characters’ memories form a crucial part of the narrative. Avoid losing clarity when mixing tensesīecause stories show us chains and sequences of events, often we need to jump back and forth between earlier and present scenes and times. Can’t hear much other than the wind scraping branches along the gutter.Ģ. In a thriller novel, for example, you can write tense scenes in first person for a sense of present danger:Ī muffled shot. Tense itself can enliven an element of your story’s narration. When you attempt to return it, you get sent on a wild goose chase after the book you want. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, you, the reader, are a character who buys Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, only to discover that there are pages missing. This tense choice is smart for Calvino’s novel since it increases the puzzling nature of the story. You run your usual route to the store, but as you round the corner you come upon a disturbing sight. To rewrite Sarah’s story in the same tense and POV: This has the effect of a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ novel. Sometimes authors are especially creative in combining tense and POV. In Italo Calvino’s postmodern classic, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), the entire story is told in the present tense, in the second person.
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