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intothewood and analect.
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Have questions or want to discuss something? Fire away! Want some feedback on a piece of writing you're working on? Post it! Stuck with research, or found a fabulously useful resource others might benefit from? Step up and share!
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Date: 2011-06-03 04:20 pm (UTC)I'm honestly a big fan of third person, limited POV set in the past tense. I think that other tenses/POVs can work, but if you're going to use them, I sort of want a reason for why you just need the different tense/POV rather than the standard default. (i.e. I've seen second person POV, future tense work, but the author really thought out why he needed to use this tense vs. something a bit more standard)
So if there's a damned good reason for shifting POV/tense, I say go for it. But it's definitely a distraction to do that (and distractions tend to annoy me and other readers), so I'd be wary. Prologues, I think, can be especially daunting as we expect them to come first (chronologically), so it's hard to see why this would be in present, but stuff that came later would have happened in the past.
Again, though, a lot depends on the reason for writing it in present tense. If the idea is that the prologue happened later than the rest of the story, and so the view point character is using it to set the stage for the story as a whole, it might make sense that it's in present, and the rest of the story is the story that he/she is telling.
Then again, I also tend to hate prologues and epilogues unless there's a damned good reason for them, too, so I may not be the best person to ask as to whether or not you should use one as my default answer would be, "Cut out the prologue. Problem solved!"