BlackHippyChick Day: Tenses

Since a few of you are struggling with your tenses, I thought it’d be a good idea to cover them for BlackHippyChick Day. Let’s start with the most basic of basics: There are 12 tenses. Yes, 12. Don’t worry. If you speak English, you will probably know how to use them, even if you can’t list them. The most important thing you need to keep in mind for your writing is you have to pick a tense and stick to it as much as possible. See? Not so complicated.

I am currently writing in the present continuous tense. If I were writing in the present simple tense, I would have said, “I currently write in the present tense.” See the difference? You’d choose the present tense if you wanted a sense of immediacy. You might have noticed that Netflix asks all its documentary interviewees to speak in the present tense, even when speaking about the past. This is why. It’s more immersive for the reader.

When you’re writing in the present tense, you’re extremely limited in the facts you can share. You don’t have a narrator who’s looking back and thus has omniscient knowledge of the entire story. For that reason, present tense writing can be more disciplined and authentic, but it’s not adequate in all cases.

We have the same two categories for the past tense:

Past simple: I wrote in the present tense.
Past continuous: I was writing in the present tense.

To make things more complicated, we’ve also invented the past perfect continuous tense: I had been writing in the present tense.

You’d choose the past tense if your narrator or protagonist is reflecting upon the past. Obvious, right? The past tense feels natural, so it might also be the easiest for you to write. It’s easy to understand, too. It’s the most common tense selected for storytelling, but it’s not particularly powerful if you want an unpredictable ending. There’s a sense of inevitability involved in writing about the past. If the events in your story have already happened, there’s little anyone can do about it, so it can give the reader a sense of comfort.

That’s not always a good thing. If you’re writing a horror or thriller, discomfort is one of your highest goals. This is particularly important if, for example, your narrator may die in the end. A narrator who’s telling the story is generally assumed to still be alive. If you want your reader to be uncertain about such things, you’ll either have to choose a different tense or narrator. Either will do.

The past tense can tempt you to do undisciplined things like sharing knowledge your narrator can’t possibly know, so while it might be easiest to write on a technical level, the present tense is a pretty good way to keep your stylistic integrity.

These will generally be the only options you’d consider for writing fiction. They’re the most useful for storytelling, so if you’re a beginner, you might want to focus on these five for a while. The only time you might veer into the future tense is, naturally, on the rare occasion that you or your characters speak about what might occur in the coming days or years. I’m going to cover the future tense on a different day in the hope that it’ll be less confusing for beginners.