Question to Writers

[DrewTheXenocide]

How do you decide what tense to put a piece of writing in? I usually end up going with past tense out of habit, but I'm curious as to how present tense works without accidentally switiching to past, or God forbid, future. Speaking of which, besides the whole "Make your own adventure" stuff, does future tense even work when telling stories?

[Sigil]

Future tense can work, although it's more suited to shorter passages then full stories (although I doubt it would impossible to pull that-off). Generally though, it's not something you see very often outside of dialogue or 'predictive-style' writing, possibly due to the many necesarry repitions of 'will' and 'shall'. It is, I feel, more interchangable with the other two styles than they are with each other though.

Present tense can work, although I find it can often give a surprisingly different 'feel' to a piece than the 'default' past tense. I haven't seen it used as the main tense in anything outside of games yet, but it can be just as effective a 'standard' tense as past tense.

On actually writing tenses, I find that, once you've got your head around it, you tend to be able to stick with it fairly esiliy. Decidng which tense to use when usually depends on what effect you'r trying to acheive. If something is a predicition or similar then future tense is probably the best one to use. Past and present tenses are more often used to denote a change in perspective. For example, the events of a 'flashback' episode could be switched into present tense to seperate them from the main body of the story. In Mortal Engines Philip Reeve uses present tense when dealing with events to some of the non-protagonists (mostly Valentine) when the protagonists are elsewhere. This makes those passages stand-out a bit from the others and creates a slightly more detatched feel to them.

[Kaos]

what he said

[Studcake]

Personally, (I may not know crap.) When I write a comic script, I talk to the artist in whatever way sounds good. In normal writing, I think you should just go with what sounds good to get your ideas down, then change it to proper tense later.

[Sigil]

Personally, (I may not know crap.) When I write a comic script, I talk to the artist in whatever way sounds good. In normal writing, I think you should just go with what sounds good to get your ideas down, then change it to proper tense later.
Scripts are a bit different to standard writing, although, from what I've seen, they tend to be predominantly in present tense (whereas standard writing tends to be past tense). I agree with you about writing in a comfortable way when you're sorting-out your ideas, since you really want to put them on paper as quickly and easiliy as you can.

Picking what tense to use in dialogue is usually fairly simple, provided you know keep in mind what they're talking about. This can mean that the tense can shift a lot, but that's nothing to worry about since it does in most conversations anyway.

[Hard Way Studios]

Scripts are a bit different to standard writing, although, from what I've seen, they tend to be predominantly in present tense (whereas standard writing tends to be past tense). I agree with you about writing in a comfortable way when you're sorting-out your ideas, since you really want to put them on paper as quickly and easiliy as you can.

Picking what tense to use in dialogue is usually fairly simple, provided you know keep in mind what they're talking about. This can mean that the tense can shift a lot, but that's nothing to worry about since it does in most conversations anyway.


You hit it right on the head!