What's the best way to have a novel be set in the present day (that is the time the novel is written/published) only to have one of the characters tell a story that becomes the bulk of the novel? I had to read Wuthering Heights over the summer between 9th and 10th grade and it follows this format. I want to write a novel that uses this format, but I'm afraid to re-read WH because I'm still psychologically scarred from reading about Heathcliff the first time. What should I do about verb tenses?
Tense in frame stories
- Thread starter DuncanClinch
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Look at other "frame stories". Some famous ones include The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, Ehtan Frome, by Edith Wharton, and Lord Jim and Victory by Joseph Conrad. I think you'll find that everything is narrated in past tense.
caw
caw
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Just past tense, or past perfect? I'm thinking of a story that has a GI returning home at the end of World War I and he goes to investigate some property that he inherited while he was in the War, but which he had only been to once in his whole life when his uncle tried to run off some squatters. While investigating the property the GI finds a diary that tells the story of the squatters who were living on the property in the 1920s. I could write the GI's homecoming in the present tense, but what should I do to let the diary tell the main story? Should I simply make up individual diary entries, or could I dispense with the diary and become a 3rd person omniscient narrator so I can tell parts of the story that the diarist may not have known about?