A question on tenses: what is acceptable, and what makes people point accusingly.

[scarylady]

Hiya all.

I have a question for you, if you'll indulge me.  I'm planning my next, long, chaptered fanfic, and as I'm making my initial forays into writing it I'm strongly feeling that, to get the style and feel right, I want a third-person, present-tense Prologue, and a third-person past-tense Rest of Fic.

Is this allowable?  Or is it sloppy?  I would prefer not to write the entire thing in present tense, but the Prologue is resisting all my efforts to re-write it into past tense.

Comments

[scarylady]

The only reason to issue this section as a prologue, rather than the first part of chapter one, is because it works better in the present tense, but I can't pinpoint why.

It's setting the scene in a way that is quite seperate to the tone of the rest of the story, and although I've tried twice now to move it to past tense it just seems to lose something important and I wind up deleting the past tense version.

I wish I understood it better and could explain it. It certainly isn't following any kind of logical rule about when it is, compared to the later action, and I hate that.

[niniane]

Yeah...and to me, that would make me think that it probably needs a rewrite into the past.

I'm of the impression that there are no real "rules" to writing, as no matter what the rule is, you can find someone who's broken it well. But there are a lot of "generally good ideas", that can really only be broken when you know why you're doing it. (Well, in my opinion, anyway.) And sticking to the same tense/POV in a story is one of those "generally a good idea" things. (Although I've seen a lot veer between omniscient and limited third person POV, as long as it's not done in a single scene.)

What is it that reads/works better about the present tense? Is there a way to regain the immediacy in other ways? (i.e. using active rather than passive verbs, or something along those lines?)

[nightsfury]

Echoing what ninane said about prologue/epilogue and POV, I'll just add the following.
Are you trying for a feeling of immediacy? Tension? Maybe changing the rhythm of the prose, using hard sounding words and short sentences might help. What effect are you trying to set up in the scene? What do you want the reader to come away with after reading it?
Also, I've sometimes found that switching to a different character's POV sometimes helps a scene to gel better.
Hope this helps.

[niniane]

Yeah, I've definitely done a lot of "keep trying POVs until one works" things. It's pathetic how many scenes have been rewritten like...10 times...as I keep switching POV. But, you know, it's a handy trick! And whatever works!