I was thinking about tense this week, in part because of this useful thread on Bluesky from editor David Thomas Moore about some of the grammatical tangles we writers can get into in present tense. Truth be told, I’m usually thinking about tense, when I’m not overthinking it.
It's an aspect of writing feature-style journalism that many students struggle with, which means that as an instructor, I have had to figure out ways to explain why past or present may be suitable for a given verb within the context of a piece — something a lot of writers do instinctively.
As an author, I have particular ways of thinking about tense — in some sense, what tense means to me as the author at the story level is distinct from the way tense manifests at the sentence level. So I thought I’d explore that this week.
(This is going to get into very nerdy weeds and I fear it might seem either obvious or unhinged or both, in a "have you ever really thought about your hands?" sort of way. Sorry. Feel free to skip the rest if you're not into it. My only news to share this week is that the US paperback release of The Tapestry of Time hits shelves on July 22, hooray! Available from anywhere that sells books — you can order if they don’t yet have it in stock — and please do request from your library if you can.)
THE PAST
Past tense is my default starting position when I'm planning a story of any length (I'm using story here to include novels; I mean the story-telling within the novel.) It's what most readers are used to, and I know that I'm not likely to lose any readers by using past tense. (I do lose readers when I use present tense, but that's a cost I choose to pay, sometimes.)
So, what do I mean when I decide that a story is "in the past tense"? For me as a constructor of stories, it's not fundamentally a grammar thing at all, although of course one will tend to find past tense verbs in a past tense story, outside of dialogue.
What past tense generally means to me is that the Now of the narration doesn't need to be explicitly pinned. It's possible in a past-tense story to leave the reader some freedom to assign a Now to the narration, perhaps subconsciously. Perhaps the Now of the narration is even the Now of the reader, or can be assumed to be – the author and reader are sitting at the same campfire.
The farther we get from the authorship of a story, though, the more the Now might feel historical – the campfire's gone cold and it gets harder and harder to pretend otherwise.
If we read the opening of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for example, it feels pinned to a time before our time, even though the narration takes place in some nebulous future for the characters. Here’s one translation, by Constance Garnett: "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge."
We know that the action is happening in the past relative to the narration, but when is the narration? We 21st century readers might assign it to the 1860s, when it was published, or we might just have a general sense of old-timiness that comes from the style, voice and context clues.
We can also create this sense of a historical meta-Now as a fake-meta-Now-within-the-world of-the-book through pastiche or parody, so this gets complicated. For example, I wrote a short story in the style of Edith Wharton, which is in third person past tense. If I was successful, it should feel to some degree like it was written a century ago (but also not!), so there's a doubled Now created by the voice – I'll come back to this when I talk about narrators, below. There's a big relationship between voice and the Now of a story, even when authors think they're writing a sort of timeless voice-from-nowhere. (No such thing!)
So to sum up, what matters to me as a storyteller about the past tense is that the Now can be left a bit loose, implicit, arguable, or even changeable over time, outside the construction of the story itself (but as you can see, I think it's actually very difficult to have no Now at all – all stories have a campfire.)
Here are the published novels I've written in past tense and the opening lines of each. (My upcoming novel The Swordmaster is in past tense, as is the 2027-ish novel I'm currently drafting, but since they're still in early stages, I won't share their opening lines yet. I did talk about playing around with tense in the novel-in-progress in a recent newsletter, though.)
The Chatelaine
Supper was salt herring again, skinny and bony.
Assassin's Creed: The Magus Conspiracy
Simeon Price tried to shut out the sound of whispered prayer, and the groaning of the ship.
Assassin's Creed: The Resurrection Plot
Pierrette Arnaud sat on the edge of a four-story roof and pulled her cloak tightly around her, so the blue ballgown beneath wouldn’t draw attention.
THE PRESENT
Present tense, on the other hand, does have an explicit Now assigned to the narration that precisely matches the Now of the story. This might seem obvious, but it matters on a story level.
I wrote The Embroidered Book in present tense because it's the story of Marie Antoinette, a very well-known figure, and I wanted to untie my fiction from the narrative already laid down by history. If I write "Marie Antoinette stood on the scaffold", that feels like a statement of fact written from a perspective in which she’s history, while "Marie Antoinette stands on the scaffold" feels like an invitation to enter an experience. At least, that was my hope.
When I wrote Mercutio, I kept trying to keep it in past tense, and I kept failing and switching to present. Eventually, I just accepted that the book wanted to be in present tense. I think it's for similar reasons to The Embroidered Book – I was writing about a famous character (Mercutio) and a famous writer (Dante Alighieri) and I wanted to undermine the sense readers might have that these things have already happened.
My other present tense books are my two time-travel novellas, partly because it just felt more clear when writing time loops. In past tense, flashbacks are typically signalled by using the past-perfect tense, ie, "Alice had gone to school near where she robbed carriages." But it's common practice in a long flashback to slide into simple past after a few past-perfect verbs, so you can end up with both flashbacks and the Now of the Action scenes happening in the same tense. As I had characters repeating very similar scenes because of time travel, l liked keeping it very obvious when the characters were experiencing something in the rolling Now of the story, as opposed to a memory of when they experienced a similar event before.
Also, in a less pragmatic sense, a story that tells you its events are happening in the narrative Now can also be a feeling that this is happening forever, which can be useful to a writer. That stretchy eternal Now connects the reader experience and the character experience, which can be thematically useful in a time loop book – or in a retelling of a familiar story.
Alice Payne Arrives
The highwayman known as the Holy Ghost lurks behind the ruined church wall.
Alice Payne Rides
Alice Payne’s dinner party fractures in the dessert course.
The Embroidered Book
If only Antoine could find a love spell. [This is a funny one because "could" wears a lot of hats, but it is in present.]
IT’S COMPLICATED
The Tapestry of Time is in the present tense, for the most part. I wanted to define the summer of 1944 as the Now within the story, because a large section of the book (Ivy's story leading up to summer 1944) is in flashback, and I wanted that to be a distinct Then. I could have written both the flashback and the Now in the same tense, either both in present or both in past – many books do that successfully – but I like having a constant reminder for the reader that they're occupying the novel's past in that section, because for various reasons that part of the story should feel gone, ghostly, fixed in the past. The flashback is informing the mystery of the Now, but the tension is in the Now. I wanted to keep that present-tense string vibrating while I went back to the past, and when we return to the present, it's still vibrating right where we left it.
I don't expect that to register for the reader on a conscious level, but I think (hope?) it helped me guide the reader's experience through the book.
The Valkyrie is even deeper into the "it's complicated" category when it comes to tense. I wrote it in first person past for various reasons, but I resisted that choice for a long time because I knew it would expand the story construction into a narrative Now, which meant more thinking for me. First person means the book has an overt narrator, which tethers the telling of the story to a moment – by implication, at least. If someone in-world is telling this story, why are they telling it? Who’s their audience? One can vaguely assume it’s the reader, even without a fourth-wall break, and keep it unpinned in time like any other past tense book. For some reason, I have trouble doing that when a character is the narrator. I need to pin it. I decided that Brynhild and Gudrun would alternate telling their stories to each other, which made me want to decide what stage of their lives they were at when telling these stories.
In other words, for me as a story-teller, first person past typically = first person present on some level, no matter what tense the majority of the verbs are in. The narrator’s present is part of the story, even if the narrator is using the past tense to tell the rest of that story.
Another example of this: I'm listening to the audiobook of The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carré. That novel’s first-person narrator tells the story in past tense, but makes present-tense asides, such as "George Smiley does not gossip." That suggests the story has an explicit present, and that it is a time when the narrator and George Smiley are still alive. So is this book "in" past or present?
I find it most useful as a story-teller to take the view that every story with an overt narrator is in the present at the story level, even if most of the narration is in past.
For example, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke has an omniscient narrator and most of its sentences are in past tense. The first line is "Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians." For the narrator, there is a Now for which "some years ago" has meaning; that sentence is grammatically in the past tense but narratively in the present. But not our present. The voice and style of the book tell us that it is not being narrated from 2025. (Or even 2005, or even anywhere on our timeline; the narrator is clearly in-world.) So if I were the author constructing the story, I'd think of it as being "in" present on the story level – part of the story exists within a defined and constructed present, even if it's barely seen by the reader behind all those past tense sentences.
A lot of stories whose sentences are in past tense are "actually" in present tense by this definition, I realize.
Honestly I could take the position in a pub argument that every story is in a state of either potential or actualized present tense. There are some novels where the narrator just has a present-tense aside now and then, or reveals themselves in the present tense at the end. The campfire's always there.
The Tapestry of Time
Halfway between the Louvre and the canteen for Nazi soldiers, Kit becomes uneasy.
The Valkyrie
Like all stories, I have more than one beginning.
(My other irritating pub argument is that all novels are fantasy novels, so I have a few of these. Luckily for everyone, I'm hardly ever in pubs anymore.)