Sorry to be a pain but I hope that someone can advise me on this. I am writing my first novel so I am a bit green about it all really. I think I have a great idea for a novel and a plan of the storyline and I have even created a crude timeline. My writing skills are ok but maybe could be improved. The problem I am facing at the moment is that I have decided for better or worse to write the story in the 1st person. In other words I am actually playing the part of the main charachter. However I have begun to realise that it is not quite as simple as that. I am now tearing my hair out a bit over tenses. I have seen novels written in the 1st person that are written in the present tense as if the action is occurring right now. To me that sounds a little odd so I have plumped for writing it in the past tense. That is fine if I am writing about something of the same time frame, but what happens if I then want to recollect something which happened even earlier and then come back to the original past time frame. Will it work ok just to keep the same format there. Also when I talk about things in the past but I am describing someone who actually looks like that now for example I have a dog in my story called Oscar who I am going to be describing. As I am writing in the past tense do I still keep the past tense by saying for eg "Oscar was the most adorable little dog, with rough hair and coloured white, brown and black", or should I talk about the dog in the present tense and say " Oscar is the most adorable little dog etc" Please help or direct me to some archives that may help me with this.
Problem with tenses in my novel
- Thread starter Yvonne N
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Yvonne, I think one thing you may be struggling with is the identity of your narrator. If it's first person, then it's the main character - but what the tense does will depend on when that person is doing the narrating. Putting it in present tense can be quite visceral, but is also very limiting as you noted. Putting it in past tense will be much easier if you decide exactly how long it's been since the story events occurred, and under what circumstances the character is now sitting down to write it. Has he/she just completed the victory party after the story's events? Is he/she now old? etc. Mixing past with present usually happens when you've placed a narrator in an intermediate spot, where they have to share both events that have happened in their past, and characters or thoughts which happen in their present (I have that very thing happening with a narrative done in journal form). So if you can figure out the placement of your narrator in time, that will probably iron out the tenses in a meaningful way.
I hope that helps.
I hope that helps.
Thank you very much Juliette I will try to think of it that way and see if it helps me to make more sense of the tenses.
Juliette. I have applied the technique you advised to the writing of the first part of my novel and it has made the tense issue much easier to deal with. However. In my novel there will be chapters involving another relevant storyline in the 17th century which will be written in the 3rd person, but not by the main character. I am not sure if this will work. Should I just leave those chapters as the 3rd person being written by some unseen person or should I also think about putting those story lines in the 1st person. I have one chapter that actually goes even further back and there are events that would occur outside of the 17th century characters knowledge. Help
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