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The use of tenses in fiction (and writing in general) seems like a self-evident thing. You use the past tense when things happened in the past, the present tense when they happen in the present, and the future tense when they will happen in the future. It seems so simple, and yet picking the right tense at the right time is a crucial element for success in writing fiction.

You see, one major aspect that most writers don’t seem to grasp, is that a novel is not an exercise in writing “proper” English. Instead, a work of fiction is a necessary medium for an author’s thoughts to reach an audience. As a result, rules are secondary; affect is primary.

Still, even within a “playing-by-the-rules” context, the choice of the right tense isn’t always an obvious thing. In today’s article I’ll let you know how to pick the right tense at the right time. By “right”, we mean the tense that allows affect to be expressed. We are not concerned about “proper” English. We are concerned about affective power.

A very Quick Outline of Tenses

Before we talk about breaking the rules, we must know what the rules are. I’ve said that many times in my articles containing fiction writing tips, because it is important. If you’re interested in a truly scientific (i.e. the rules, pure and simple) volume on English grammar, I recommend A Communicative Grammar of English, by Leech & Svartvik. For our purposes, I’ll offer a simple, just-the-basics, list.

Note: the following list is not exhaustive. There are several other tenses in the English language, but I do not include them since they are not very relevant for our discussion. For the purposes of this article, we are dealing with the use of tenses in fiction in terms of affect. For the same reason, my definitions/descriptions lean toward directions which will be useful further below, in our discussion on the right use of tenses in fiction. 

• Present

  I play.
  The simplest tense of the English language. It indicates an action occurring in the present, or habitually.

• Present Continuous

  I am playing.
  Still referring to the present, with an emphasis on the duration or immediacy of the action.

• Present Perfect

  I have played.
  It describes an action that began at some undefined point and has finished in the present.

• Past

  I played. 
  An action that began and finished at some point in the past.

• Future

  I will play. 
  An action which has not occurred yet, but which will occur in the future.

Notable tenses that are absent from this list include Past Perfect (I had played), Past Continuous (I was playing) and Future Continuous (I will be playing). I don’t include them because they are comparatively more rare and, more importantly, they don’t affect… affect to the same extent. There are all kinds of other, more arcane constructions, especially if there are conditionals in the sentence. But we’ll stick to fiction, narrative, and style.

Using Tenses in Your Novel: Picking the Right One

Picking the Main Tense of Your Book

The first thing to decide is the main tense which you will use throughout your book. Almost always, this is the past tense.

Mary opened the door. She saw John standing there. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “You’re here already.”

Every now and then, you might see a novel written in the present tense throughout, but it’s much more rare.

Mary opens the door. She sees John standing there. “Hi,” she says with a smile. “You’re here already.”

Personally, I favor the past tense. It’s for a reason that it’s so popular. Unless for stream-of-consciousness narratives, the present tense – if it’s the main tense of the novel – comes off as too immediate and “unprocessed”. However, this is precisely the reason why it can be very effective when it is used as an accent tense.

Picking Accent Tenses

Now we come to the real deal. Having picked a main tense, you can deploy accent tenses for creative purposes. In other words, by introducing a different tense in a paragraph, in a scene, or in a chapter, you create an accent. You effectively draw the reader’s attention to there being a difference. The kind of affect you create depends on the way you deploy this narrative strategy.

The secret in the use of tenses in fiction (and knowing how to pick the right tense) is a result of understanding the emotional weight each tense brings to the scene. Let’s see this with some examples.

Example 1: Using the Present as an Accent Tense.

Let’s see a short, paragraph-level example.

I opened the door and entered the small bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and looked in it. My eyes seemed tired, yet fully aware of the memories that came to drown me. My mother yells, she runs away from my father, but he catches up. He beats her mercilessly, and there is blackness. As I turned on the faucet and washed my hands, I realized I could not remember anymore.

The main tense is the past tense, but deploying present tense to indicate the person’s memories brings an immediacy to the scene which would’ve been absent without it. Try to imagine the same scene with past perfect (My mother had yelled, she had run away from my father…) and you will notice how much more impersonal or even cold it feels.

Technically speaking, past perfect would be a more “correct” tense to use. It would describe a scene that had occurred at some point in the past before the point surrounding it. In other words, since the narrative is in the past tense, to describe events from a time further past, you would need past perfect. But, as I explained, an author should focus on affect, not strictly following rules. The use of tenses in fiction is a matter of conveying an emotion, a thought, or a state of mind.

Example 2: Using the Present and the Present Continuous as Accent Tenses

Let’s take the same example as above, with a slight variation.

I opened the door and entered the small bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and looked in it. My eyes seemed tired, yet fully aware of the memories that came to drown me. My mother yells, she runs away from my father, but he catches up. He beats her mercilessly, but suddenly the bell is ringing. He stops. And there is blackness. As I turned on the faucet and washed my hands, I realized I could not remember anymore.

See what happened there? Present continuous allows you to essentially interject yet another level of depth. The main narrative (past tense) morphs into the character’s memories (present tense), but present continuous (the bell is ringing) feels akin to the reminiscent itself being “interrupted” by the bell ringing. Obviously enough, this adds even more immediacy to the scene.

Example 3: Using the Future Tense as an Accent Tense

This is less often used, but notice the effect it creates.

I opened the door and entered the small bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and looked in it. My eyes seemed tired, yet fully aware of the memories that will come to drown me. My mother will yell, she will run away from my father, but he will catch up. He will beat her mercilessly. But suddenly, there is blackness. As I turned on the faucet and washed my hands, I realized I could not remember anymore.

It’s more subtle, but the future tense brings a sense of inevitability and recurrence to your narrative. Again, this isn’t 100% “by the book”. A phrase such as My eyes seemed tired, yet fully aware of the memories that would come to drown me is, strictly speaking, more correct. But it lacks the immediacy and emotional aspect of the future tense.

In a way, you can think of it like this: there is an implied passage to present tense (as in the first example, further above), with future tense used subsequently. You can perhaps notice the more overt passage to the present (there is blackness), before switching completely back to the main tense, that is, past.

The Use of Tenses in Fiction: Understanding the Emotional Impact of Time

Perhaps you can blame my academic background, but it’s hard for me not to find aspects of time in virtually every narrative expression. Indeed, the process of narrative itself is a temporal series of events. In other words, a sense-making narrative has to display an evolution; a change from one state to another. And for this to happen, events (the plot of the novel, that is), need to be organized temporally.

So, what does that have to do with the use of tenses in fiction writing? As the examples above hopefully showed, tenses come with… emotional baggage. Depending on the context, tenses can “nudge” the narrative in a temporal direction. They can make a certain scene appear more distant or more immediate; more clinical or more personal. As a result, picking the right tense can be crucial for authors who want full control of their narratives.