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]

I'm not sure that I'd call it "sloppy" per se, but confusing, definitely.

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!"

[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.

[analect]

^^ Yup. Sometimes, weird shit works. *grin*

I'd been warned against doing anything in the present tense. Then, when I went ahead and wrote the thing in present tense anyway, none of the people who'd said 'I hate present tense, don't use it' complained. IMHO, some things just 'want' to be that way, so if it feels better than past tense, don't deny it.

Equally, if it's a technical issue and *only* a technical issue, viz., immediacy and import, then nightsfury's point about changing the rhythm, using short sentences etc., is a great way of bridging the difference, and is probably a better idea than allowing present tense to be chronologically peculiar.

...if that makes sense. I've been on elderly duty for three days. Brain fried.