Timey-Wimey Tenses: Past-Tenseception

Finding the most efficient order in which to tell a story can be a tricky process. Sometimes, a perfectly linear narrative storyline will suffice—the story begins, progresses through a series of events, and then comes to an end. More often than not, however, your narrative will have important background information: events that happened before the book itself began that are important for understanding the plot. Some stories have only a little background information to be worked into the narrative; other stories are made up of fifty percent or more backstory.

When the characters learn a backstory that they didn’t know, it is usually easy to work into the narrative—the audience learns it in the same manner as the characters. Luke finds out that Darth Vader is his father, he wants to find out how this could be true, he asks Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan tells him (and us) the backstory. Simple as can be. Other times, however, the characters already know their backstories, and your task as an author is to find a smooth way to inform your audience of the information.

The problem that often arises with backstory is one of tense: if your story is already written in past tense, then how do you relate information that is even more past tense?

Because it's timey-wimey and past tense within past tense! Eh? Eh?

Past Perfect Tense

The answer lies on our list of the sixteen different tenses in English. Most stories in past tense employ the “Past Simple” tense (Freja picked up the gun and pointed it at the guard). In order to relate events that happened before the current narrative, you simply need to switch to “Past Perfect” tense—it’s the tense that uses the word “had” a whole lot:

     Freja studied the ramshackle warehouse from the pub across the street. There were no signs of activity around it. But she had visited every other building on the list, and had found nothing. If this wasn’t where the cultists were hiding, then the list was wrong.

Most of that paragraph is written in past simple tense: “Freja studied,” “There were,” and “This wasn’t.” But that third, highlighted sentence is relating events that happened before the rest of the paragraph, so it uses had to drop into past perfect tense—even further in the past than the rest of the story.

Many writers forget the hads, leaving background events in the same tense as the rest of the narrative, like so:

     Freja studied the ramshackle warehouse from the pub across the street. There were no signs of activity around it. But she visited every other building on the list, and found nothing. If this wasn’t where the cultists were hiding, then the list was wrong.

See the problem? Now there’s nothing in that third sentence to indicate that those events happened before the rest of the paragraph—it almost sounds like Freja sat in the pub studying the warehouse, left and visited a bunch of other buildings, and then returned. Readers would probably puzzle out what the writer really meant, but it’s needlessly confusing.

So, you can use “had” in past perfect tense to relate events that happened before the current events of the narrative, but there’s still a problem: all those hads can really clutter up your prose. Past perfect tense can become really tiresome to read and to write if it goes on for more than a paragraph or so. For backstory that would take any longer than that to relate (anything you might call a bona fide flashback), you’ll probably want to use another method to share the information.

Past Perfect Introduction

One method is to use a few passages of hads to introduce your flashback, and then transition back into past simple tense for the rest of the backstory. Then, when you return to the “present” events of the narrative, you mark that transition with the word now or something similar. For example:

     Freja approached the warehouse empty-handed and alone. She had learned that weapons and backup would do her no good when she had gone up against the cult at the apartment complex in Copenhagen. She had been armed with an H&K MP5 rifle and her 9mm pistol, and had brought along two AKS squadrons for the raid.

     The first squadron went into the complex through the front doors while Freja led the second squadron through the rear. They rammed in the doors, forgoing stealth for speed and surprise.

     [More events, etcetera.]

     When her backup pistol jammed as well, Freya was forced to withdraw with the rest of the squadron. It had been an unmitigated disaster.

     This time, Freya was armed with only her wits and the small book of spells that Emil had given her. But with her new understanding of what the cultists were, she knew she could stop them on her own. She walked up to the warehouse door and pulled it open.

See how it works? A few sentences of past perfect tense at the beginning (and one at the end) let readers know that we’re jumping backwards in time. This can still be a little confusing for readers if you’re not careful with it, but it is far more readable than umpteen paragraphs of hads.

Break and Flashback

An even clearer method of relating a flashback is to simply use a line break or chapter break to show your readers that you are switching gears and to then relate your flashback in the same tense as the rest of the story. This method is used quite often by many authors. You can find some professionally-done examples in several books that I can think of off the top of my head:

The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan (Book four of The Wheel of Time)—this is the method by which Mr. Jordan related the history of the Aiel when Rand went to Rhuidean. Note that he used an in-world method of delivering the flashbacks; that is, these were memories being projected into the mind of the protagonist, and we received them as he did.

The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson—the first two books of The Stormlight Archive have both featured entire chapters devoted to the backstory of one of the characters (Kaladin in the first book and Shallan in the second). These chapters are scattered throughout the book, effectively serving as a series of flashbacks.

Holes by Louis Sachar—this book is actually unusually complex compared to most middle-grade stories. The story continually jumps around between the “present day” events of the story to the recent background of individual characters to various historical events that pertain to the narrative. In fact, in this book Mr. Sachar employs every single method of delivering backstory that I’ve outlined in this post. If you want to improve your flashback delivery, go read Holes and pay close attention to his tense usage. In fact, that’s your homework—who doesn’t want to read Holes again, am I right? Go do it.

Timey-Wimey Tenses: Getting Future Tense Right

Last time we discussed the sixteen different tenses of the English language, all of which you’ve probably used before. Of course, some of them get used more often than others. All of those “future in the past” tenses, for example—those are complicated and strange enough that you surely won’t need to use them often, right?

Wrong.

The future-in-the-past or relative tense is used when speaking of an action or event that will be in the future for a particular person whose actions are being related in past tense. It’s a bit of a convoluted notion, and that’s why many people consider it an obscure tense when they first encounter it—I know I did. But think about it; the vast majority of stories are written in the past tense, right? So if a story is written in past tense, and the author needs to discuss actions that the characters plan to undertake later on in the narrative—in their future but not ours—then the author will need to use the relative tense.

Yes, I am going to use Doctor Who memes for every single post on tense that I ever write. I may even go back to old posts on tense and put pictures of the Doctor in them, because he can go back in time like that.

As it turns out, authors use the relative tense all the time. Here . . . I will grab the nearest book to me and flip through it; I can almost guarantee that I will find some usage of the relative tense. The book is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (italics added for emphasis):

     The two talked of small matters as they worked. And while they moved around a great deal, it was obvious they were reluctant to finish whatever task they were close to completing, as if they both dreaded the moment when the work would end and the silence would fill the room again.

There you go. The story is told in the past tense—“the two talked” and “they moved around”—but the author needed to refer to a moment that was yet to come for the two characters. The moment is in the future for the characters but not for us, the readers, so the proper tense to use is the relative tense.

I often see errors when it comes to future tense in stories, and it’s usually because writers use the future tense where they should have used the future-in-the-past tense. The mistake might look something like this:

     Callie kept glancing at the clock as she worked. Her shift will finish at five o’clock, and then she will go hunt down the nightbeast.

Callie’s shift finishing and her hunting down the nightbeast are events that are in the future for her, but not for us the readers, since the whole story is in past tense. Therefore, those wills should be woulds:

     Callie kept glancing at the clock as she worked. Her shift would finish at five o’clock, and then she would go hunt down the nightbeast.

Simple as that. Note, however, that if this had been dialog, the normal future tense would have been required. If the narrator is speaking of future events, then you need to use future-in-the-past tense; but the characters themselves still speak of their future in future tense.

     “Callie, you need to take care of this,” Maria insisted.

     Callie glanced at the clock. “My shift will finish at five o’clock, and then I will go hunt down the nightbeast.”

The same rule applies to stories told in the present tense:

     Callie keeps glancing at the clock as she works. Her shift will finish at five o’clock, and then she will go hunt down the nightbeast.

But if you’re writing a story in past tense, keep an eye out for situations where the narrator refers to events that haven’t come yet—these will often require the relative tense.

Tense Errors: Switching Between Past and Present

All right. Now that we’ve gone over the two types of tense that most stories are written in (past or present) we can get to the fun part—how people screw it up!

The most common type of tense error is simple: the narrative switches from past to present tense or from present to past tense when it shouldn’t. This is usually a quick, momentary mistake.

 We've all learned that switching back and forth between past and present when we don't intend to is a dangerous thing.

Here's an example passage:

     Spring had finally arrived in Chicago. I stood at my window, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my face and admiring the blossoms on the trees. The last of the snow has finally melted into puddles that are perfect for children to splash in. I smiled, glad that the long winter was finally over.

     Winter ending meant that my brother would soon return home. I was a little nervous. My brother was an unpredictable, even volatile man. There were times that he loses his temper unexpectedly but then calms down almost immediately. He inherited the trait from our father.

There’s a few errors of tense in that passage. Fixing them is simply a matter of identifying where the tense is incorrect and switching it back. If you have trouble picking the errors out, remember that tense is always contained in the verbs.  Nouns, adjectives, adverbs—every part of the language remains the same from past tense to present tense except for the verbs.

So, let’s highlight the verbs in that passage. We'll skip the gerunds and participles (the "ing" verbs), the unconjugated verbs ("to _____"), and other verb forms that won't generally change from past to present usage.

     Spring had arrived in Chicago. I stood at my window, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my face and admiring the blossoms on the trees. The last of the snow has melted into puddles that are perfect for children to splash in. I smiled, glad that the long winter was finally over.

     Winter ending meant that my brother would soon return home. I was a little nervous. My brother was an unpredictable, even volatile man. There were times that he loses his temper unexpectedly but then calms down almost immediately. He inherited the trait from our father.

Simple enough, right? Now let’s separate them by their tense—past tense in green and present tense in orange.

     Spring had arrived in Chicago. I stood at my window, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my face and admiring the blossoms on the trees. The last of the snow has melted into puddles that are perfect for children to splash in. I smiled, glad that the long winter was finally over.

     Winter ending meant that my brother would soon return home. I was a little nervous. My brother was an unpredictable, even volatile man. There were times that he loses his temper unexpectedly but then calms down almost immediately. He inherited the trait from our father.

The passage is written in past tense, so we simply need to take the present tense verbs and switch them to past tense.

     Spring had arrived in Chicago. I stood at my window, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my face and admiring the blossoms on the trees. The last of the snow had melted into puddles that were perfect for children to splash in. I smiled, glad that the long winter was finally over.

     Winter ending meant that my brother would soon return home. I was a little nervous. My brother was an unpredictable, even volatile man. There were times that he lost his temper unexpectedly but then calmed down almost immediately. He inherited the trait from our father.

And that’s that. If this seemed easy to you, that’s good—this should come pretty naturally to most people. If this didn't seem easy to you, that's okay—it's because tenses aren't actually as simple as just "past" and "present." In the future, we’ll discuss how errors can crop up in tenses most people don’t even know exist!

Tense Overview: Past vs. Present

Quite a while ago, I did an overview of the different forms of perspective and tense in which stories are commonly written. Since that time, I’ve done more in-depth looks at each type of perspective and have gone over numerous perspective errors. But what about tense? I never got around to returning to that topic, so let’s do that today.

There are two primary tenses from which stories are written: past and present.

There's a reason "Future" isn't checked: unless you have an amazingly good reason for it, you shouldn't bother trying to write a story in future tense.

I mean it.

Don't.

Past Tense

Past tense is the most common form of tense in fiction. Stories written past tense are being told as though they have already happened and are being related to the reader after the fact, whether by a character in the story, an omniscient narrator, or an implied, invisible narrator.  Here’s some examples.

     When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt. (from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

     “Good evening,” said Lucy. But the Faun was so busy picking up its parcels that at first it did not reply. When it had finished it made her a little bow.

     “Good evening, good evening,” said the Faun. “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?”

     “My name’s Lucy,” said she, not quite understanding him.

     (from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis)

Advantages of Past Tense

It’s common and familiar: Most stories by far are written in past tense, which means most readers are accustomed to reading it. Past tense presents no barriers to them; anyone can pick up the book and get straight to important things like plot and character. With present tense, on the other hand, readers can often get irritated or confused because the tense feels unfamiliar and foreign. Odds are that the more reading your readers have done, the less they will like present tense.

Believability: Part of the difficulty of present tense is that it is unrealistic—is this character standing here narrating to someone while events happen? Is there some sort of chip in their brain translating their thoughts into diary entries? Past tense, on the other hand, uses a perfectly common convention—that of someone telling the story of something that once happened. “I went to the store this morning, but they were out of the bread I like.” That’s a past tense story that you might hear any day.

Present Tense

Stories written in the present tense are told as though they are currently happening. The most well-known example of this is probably The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins:

     “Look what I shot.” Gale holds up a loaf of bread with an arrow stuck in it, and I laugh. It’s real bakery bread, not the flat, dense loaves we make from our grain rations. I take it in my hands, pull out the arrow, and hold the puncture in the crust to my nose, inhaling the fragrance that makes my mouth flood with saliva. Fine bread like this is for special occasions.

     “Mm, still warm,” I say. He must have been at the bakery at the crack of dawn to trade for it. “What did it cost you?”

     “Just a squirrel. Think the old man was feeling sentimental this morning,” says Gale. “Even wished me luck."

Advantages of Present Tense

Immediacy: Stories told in the past tense tend to have a reflective nature, since the narrator presumably knows the whole story and is now telling it from a position of comfort and safety. Present tense stories, however, give the impression that not even the narrator knows what will happen next—readers are seeing everything as it happens, so anything could happen!

Easy flashbacks: In a present tense story, it can be very easy for your readers to keep track of the when of the story if you flash back to earlier events—the majority of the story will be told in present tense, and flashbacks will be told in past tense. Easy to see and follow. In past tense, however, it can be difficult to tell when the author jumps backwards or forward in time. Everything will either sound the same, or the author will be forced to dive into awkward past perfect continuous sense—a complete mess of a task for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

In the future, we’ll take a look at some of the ways that tense errors can crop up in your writing.

Word Mix-ups: Passed vs. Past

Passed and Past are two words that are often mixed up, because they can be used in a very similar manner. Remember:

He walked past something; or, he passed something.

Past, in this usage, is an adverb which must be used in conjunction with a verb. Past will always have a verb with it when being used to describe movement.

 Passed is the past-tense form of the verb "to pass," and will not be paired with a verb. If you don't have another verb (like "walked" or "drove"), you may use passed.

So, in review:

Wrong: She walked passed the table without looking at him.
Right: She walked past the table without looking at him.

Wrong: She past the store and had to double back.
Right: She passed the store and had to double back.

Perspective and Tense Overview

Ah, perspective and tense. These are a vast and thorny topic—too vast for me to cover in only one blog post. So, for today, we’re simply going to run through what perspective and tense are and which of them are best for writing. Once we've established a solid understanding of what perspective and tense are, we'll be able to discuss the ways in which writers can make mistakes with them.

Perspective

Put simply, perspective means “point of view”—who is telling the story and in what manner. There are only a few perspectives from which a story should be told:

First Person

This is when your story is being told from the point of view of one of the characters. It’s usually easy to pick out—if the word “I” crops up a lot in the prose, than it’s probably first person.

Third Person Omniscient

This is when your story jumps from character to character, showing many points of view over the course of any given scene at once. There may be an implied narrator or there may not.

Third Person Limited

This is when your story is limited to the point of view of a single character at a time, but that character isn’t personally telling the story, as they are in first person. It is marked by frequent use of the words "he" or "she."

While it is technically possible to write a story from a different perspective (many choose-your-own-adventure stories are told in second person, for instance), it’s not something that should be done with any sort of regularity or without a very, very good reason.            

Tense

Perspective’s pernicious twin sister is tense. Tense is the “when” of the action. Did it already happen, or is it happening right now? When we’re speaking to one another, it is very easy to keep our tenses straight; but when you’re trying to string together a coherent set of several thousand to several hundred thousand words, tense can be difficult to keep track of.

Past Tense

Past tense stories are told as though they have already happened, finished, and are now being related to the reader.

Present Tense

Present tense stories are told as though they are currently happening (“Jason runs to the car” instead of “Jason ran to the car”). This is increasingly common in first-person stories but is very unusual in third-person.

When we combine our common modes of perspective and tense, we end up with four results that encompass the majority of literature:

First person, past tense: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Animorphs series by Katherine Applegate, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan

First person, present tense: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth

Third person omniscient, past tense: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy, Dune by Frank Herbert

Third person limited, past tense: The Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

Over the next week or so, we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of these narrative modes, and then we'll be set to discuss some of the many, many ways in which new writers tend to break their perspectives and tenses.

P.S.

Before we finish, a word of warning: many novice writers are tempted to look at a list like this and think, “But I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. I want to be original! I’m going to write a novel in second-person perspective and future tense! That will get some attention.” To you, hypothetical reader who is even now nodding to yourself in confident satisfaction, I have one very important word: no.

Don’t do it. And because I’m afraid you won’t listen to me, I’m going to attempt to convey the gravity of that sentiment by isolating it as its own paragraph, capitalizing it, bolding it, and italicizing it.

NO.

I really can’t make it any clearer than that without opening up a live video chat with you and screaming it in your face. Do not attempt to write in a perspective/tense combination outside of the four that I’ve shown you here. You’re not the first person to think of that idea, not by a lo-o-o-o-ng shot. You won’t come across as clever and original, you’ll come across as amateur and inept. Editors won’t even read your story—they’ll take one look and go, “Second-person future? Why is this person wasting my time?” And then they’ll give your story to an intern and tell them to send you a rejection. I know they will, because I’ve seen editors do this, and I have done it myself.

Now, I know: There are some excellent and original books out there that are written in unusual narrative modes. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is in second-person perspective, while Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones are written in first-person omniscient. Maybe you’ve read something else that was written in an unusual narrative mode that just blew your socks off.  Great. Send it to me, I’d love to read it. 

But those stories are atypical. They probably got to print because the author was a well-known, respected professional with a history of turning out great work—the type of person that an editor can trust to not waste their valuable time. The type of writer who has learned the rules inside and out and now knows how to break them to spectacular effect. You’re not that person, not yet. For now, stick with the tried-and-true basics until you've mastered them inside and out.