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

[noctuary]

Okay, now, I don't know if you've read "Hannibal", but whatsisname, Thomas Harris or whatever, he has a tendency in that book to jump between present and past tense from chapter to chapter. When I started reading it and noticed this I got a bit grumpy. "How sloppy!" I thought. BUT. The more I read of it, the more I liked it, and the more it seemed to well illustrate the story he wanted to tell. I ended up very glad that he'd done it that way. It gave the book an extra bit of depth and strength.

So if it works, go with it.