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Oblomov Boblomov wrote:

DarkRula wrote:As long as it's consistent, I don't think it matters which tense you use.

But that's the problem I'm mixing past and present!

And that is perfectly fine to do. Past tense can go before present tense, even within the same paragraph, as long as you then don't go back to past tense. Think of it like the passage of time. It always moves forward, never back. So, within a single paragraph, you can go from past to present, or present to future, but never the other way around.

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:A question on writing in tenses, as I realise I might have been doing this without noticing.

Here is a brief extract:

The sound of the door shutting behind her released a breath that Daria realised she had been holding onto. Straightening herself up and regaining her confident stride, she resolved to focus on getting on with what needed to be done.

Should I be writing 'As she straightened herself up and regained her confident stride...' there, instead of using present verbs? I think I used them to give a more active, fluid style to the writing, but am I risking arrest if the Grammar Police show up?!

"-ing" doesn't always indicate present tense, it can sometimes indicate a progressive action taking place contemporaneously with the rest of the sentence. "Straightening herself up, she resolved to focus..." is all past tense -- it's not in mixed tense. The technique is called a "participle clause" if you want to search for it and check I'm not talking nonsense.

As for which is better, I think it's really about what reads better to you. I think your second example might be a bit verbose if this is a tense (ha) scene, but try it and see.

When it comes to actually mixing tenses -- it isn't always bad, but it should be logically consistent. If your narrative voice is relaying events that happened in their past, then they shouldn't drift to present tense. But if they're reporting a fact which is still true in their present, it may be appropriate to have them speak in the present tense for a sentence, or whatever. I'm far (very very far!) from being a confident writer, but for what it's worth, it strikes me as the kind of thing you might keep an eye on when editing but not worry about too much when drafting.

DarkRula wrote:

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:

DarkRula wrote:As long as it's consistent, I don't think it matters which tense you use.

But that's the problem I'm mixing past and present!

And that is perfectly fine to do. Past tense can go before present tense, even within the same paragraph, as long as you then don't go back to past tense. Think of it like the passage of time. It always moves forward, never back. So, within a single paragraph, you can go from past to present, or present to future, but never the other way around.

That's an interesting rule — one I'd not heard of before!

site23 wrote:

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:A question on writing in tenses, as I realise I might have been doing this without noticing.

Here is a brief extract:

The sound of the door shutting behind her released a breath that Daria realised she had been holding onto. Straightening herself up and regaining her confident stride, she resolved to focus on getting on with what needed to be done.

Should I be writing 'As she straightened herself up and regained her confident stride...' there, instead of using present verbs? I think I used them to give a more active, fluid style to the writing, but am I risking arrest if the Grammar Police show up?!

"-ing" doesn't always indicate present tense, it can sometimes indicate a progressive action taking place contemporaneously with the rest of the sentence. "Straightening herself up, she resolved to focus..." is all past tense -- it's not in mixed tense. The technique is called a "participle clause" if you want to search for it and check I'm not talking nonsense.

As for which is better, I think it's really about what reads better to you. I think your second example might be a bit verbose if this is a tense (ha) scene, but try it and see.

When it comes to actually mixing tenses -- it isn't always bad, but it should be logically consistent. If your narrative voice is relaying events that happened in their past, then they shouldn't drift to present tense. But if they're reporting a fact which is still true in their present, it may be appropriate to have them speak in the present tense for a sentence, or whatever. I'm far (very very far!) from being a confident writer, but for what it's worth, it strikes me as the kind of thing you might keep an eye on when editing but not worry about too much when drafting.

That is very helpful, thank you — the explanation of the participle clause is exactly what I was hoping to find, actually! I think I've been doing that exact thing quite frequently, so it would be a bit of a disaster if it turned out to be significantly wrong.

The narrative voice I'm using is in the past simple tense (although I have written a couple of distinctive sections in the past perfect, and one in the present simple).

Taking a part-time course in creative writing is definitely on my list of things to do when/if life slows down. It's interesting to learn this sort of stuff, particularly because the praxis is very much in reach!