Be Your Own Editor

Jennifer writes:

I wrote a novel, and I am currently working on correcting the verb tense mistakes throughout. I am wondering, can I use some sentences in past (simple) tense and some in past progressive tense? Also, it is a novel written in first person, and I wanted to know if her interior dialogue can be written in present tense if she still feels the same way now, or if that also needs to be in past tense, as long as she felt that way then? Apparently I am totally confused and would appreciate help. Thanks!

Murky waters exist here, Jennifer, but I’ll try to help you navigate them more confidently.

First, the easier question: yes, you can certainly employ both past tense and past progressive tense. They have different purposes, but both describe action that took place in the past, so both are appropriate for a novel written in the past tense.

Past progressive is often used unnecessarily, however. Try to use it only when relating ongoing action—ongoing in the past, in this case, but different from action described by a past-tense verb, which happened once and was over. For example:

Mrs. Mulligan was weeding the garden when her son’s car pulled up.

Mrs. Mulligan’s activity is in the past progressive because, in the framework of the scene, her weeding has no definitive beginning or end. It was ongoing. Her son’s car, on the other hand, pulled up once and then stopped. An example of overdoing the progressive:

After her grandfather died, Amy was crying for days.

Amy’s crying was ongoing while it occurred, yes, but the “for days” describes a finite moment in time when that crying happened and then, presumably, stopped. The progressive, then, is most often used to describe action that is taking place while another, more finite action happens, the latter being in the simple past tense.

On to what you refer to as “interior dialogue.” You’re writing in the first person, so it’s difficult to know exactly what you mean without seeing an example. After all, every word in a first-person novel could be considered interior. (I assume by “dialogue” you mean dialogue with herself, or simply monologue.)

If the thoughts you’re talking about are what we call “direct,” that is, direct quotations of thoughts your character is having in the moment of a scene, the kind that might be expressed in italics or in quotes, then I would use present tense just as you would for spoken dialogue.

If your question is about more general first-person narration, in which the narrator reveals thoughts and feelings to the reader, you have a few factors to consider. The first thing to think about is consistency: she can’t be jumping around in tense arbitrarily; that will throw readers off.

Consider why you’re writing the book in past tense rather than present (aside from the fact that it’s more common to do so). If you decide to write some or all of your character’s “asides” to the reader in present tense, how will that affect readers? It will make them feel less “in the moment” in the past-tense parts of the novel, since you will, to some degree, be grounding them in the present. You say she “still feels the same way now,” but have you established a “now,” in time and place, from which she is narrating? Most past-tense novels don’t do so. We don’t know and aren’t asked to consider where the narrator is while she’s narrating.

So I’d say that unless it’s already a conceit of your novel that the narrator is relating past events from a specific, defined time and place in the present, you should, for the sake of clarity and flow, keep everything in the past tense. I hope that helps! Feel free to write again if you have more questions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Readers Q&A, Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.