Pet Peeve of the Day
Mar. 21st, 2002 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanPet Peeve of the Day: changing tense in stories.
Playing with tense seems to be popular in fanfic lately. I don't mind that, but it needs to be consistent and make some kind of narrative sense. If you have a story that's all in one tense except for one paragraph or sentence that's in another tense, well, most likely I'm going to put it down to poor proofreading. It gets more complicated if the changes of tense are scattered, apparently randomly, throughout the piece. (I'm not talking about the kind of thing where one character's POV is one tense and another's is another tense, or where current action in one tense and flashback in another, etc. That at least makes sense.)
I've seen this topic in a few livejournals lately, including mine (heh) and also![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladyvyola just the other day. The question of whether, or why, to use present tense over past is an interesting one for discussion. But that's kind of peripheral to the point that once you pick a tense, you should stick with it throughout the story; or if you choose to deviate from it, you should have a good, and a clear, reason.
And it's today's pet peeve because I just read a new story by a favorite author, and it has a few of those weird, apparently nonsensical tense changes. Because I adore this author, I want to go with the "she is a literary genius and I'm just too dumb to understand the deep aesthetic purpose behind her stylistic choice" theory, but unfortunately, a close reading of the story makes the "she (and/or her beta(s)) didn't read carefully enough" theory seem much more plausible. Which is kind of too bad, alas.
Playing with tense seems to be popular in fanfic lately. I don't mind that, but it needs to be consistent and make some kind of narrative sense. If you have a story that's all in one tense except for one paragraph or sentence that's in another tense, well, most likely I'm going to put it down to poor proofreading. It gets more complicated if the changes of tense are scattered, apparently randomly, throughout the piece. (I'm not talking about the kind of thing where one character's POV is one tense and another's is another tense, or where current action in one tense and flashback in another, etc. That at least makes sense.)
I've seen this topic in a few livejournals lately, including mine (heh) and also
ladyvyola just the other day. The question of whether, or why, to use present tense over past is an interesting one for discussion. But that's kind of peripheral to the point that once you pick a tense, you should stick with it throughout the story; or if you choose to deviate from it, you should have a good, and a clear, reason. And it's today's pet peeve because I just read a new story by a favorite author, and it has a few of those weird, apparently nonsensical tense changes. Because I adore this author, I want to go with the "she is a literary genius and I'm just too dumb to understand the deep aesthetic purpose behind her stylistic choice" theory, but unfortunately, a close reading of the story makes the "she (and/or her beta(s)) didn't read carefully enough" theory seem much more plausible. Which is kind of too bad, alas.
