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

[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!