What to do with tense? I wrote about this briefly a few months ago, in the context of narrative mode, and I mentioned a few narrative modes and how they were used by their authors. But how do you pick a tense to use?

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person - First ("I"), second ("you"), or third ("he").
2. Tense - Past, present, or future.
3. Voice - Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

For now, I’m going to look in more detail at the second one, Tense, because of a question Paula B (of The Writing Show) recently asked on FaceBook. (I’ll look in more detail at Person and Voice in future posts.) She asked, “What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of present and past tense for novels and memoirs?”

Before we answer that question, let’s look at what we mean by “tense.”

Our word tense comes to us through Old French from the Latin tempus, which means “time.” And indeed tense tells us in what time the action is happening: past, present, or future. But what does it mean to write a story in “past tense”? It means that the action is being described as having happened in the past. But even in a past-tense narrative mode, individual sentences may occur in present tense, past-perfect tense, or even in future tense. How can that be?

The answer is that tense indicates what time the action occurred relative to the time the words were spoken. So for narrative tense to have any meaning, you must know who is doing the narrating. Or more precisely, when he is narrating it. And your mind—I’m convinced—subconsciously intuits the frame of reference of the narrator and adjusts its understanding appropriately.

A fundamental rule of style is that you should avoid the verb “to be,” preferring instead strong, descriptive verbs that show, rather than tell.

As an example, instead of writing, “The light was bright,” you should prefer, “The light blinded her as a hot-white flame,” or some such. So every time you use am, is, are, was, were, be, been, or being, that’s a signal that you need to rephrase…

EXCEPT...

As it turns out, this common rule of thumb oversimplifies the issue, sometimes to the point that confusion can result.

No less a writer than Holly Lisle gives a misleading example, on her web page about one-pass manuscript revision:

Is your scene full of weak words? How many times have you used is, was, or were?… Eliminate forms of the verb “to be” wherever you find them, rewriting the sentence with a stronger verb. “It was raining,” becomes “The rain slashed down, tearing up the gardens and ripping leaves from the trees.”

But the verb in that sentence is not the verb “to be”!