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

[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?)