How to Master Tenses in your Writing

As an editor, one thing that I find trips up a lot of writers is tense consistency. They’ll switch from past to present, or vice versa. It’s an easy mistake to make, and when you look at the way we talk it’s not surprising. If I’m telling a story to a friend, I might switch tenses several times over the course of the story. It’s not unusual in speech to casually intersperse recounting a prior event with commentary on how we think or feel. Even sometimes relating elements of what happened then in the present tense!

When we’re talking casually, it doesn’t really matter if we switch up the tenses. The person we’re talking to is likely to understand what we’re getting at, and if they don’t? Well, we’re right there to clarify. In writing though, it’s a little different.

In today’s blog post I’m talking about tense consistency and why it matters. I’m also going to try to provide some advice for anyone out there who knows they struggle with sticking to one tense!

What are we even talking about? What do we mean by ‘tense consistency’?

When we talk about what tense something is written in, we’re talking about how the writing is indicating when something happened. Broadly speaking, we split things into past, present or future tense. You can break these down further, but we’re not going to right now, because three tenses are quite enough to get your head around.

Past tense means something that happened earlier, and it’s probably the easiest to write in.

She went outside and waved at her neighbour. The neighbour scowled at her in response and slammed their front door.

I’ve put the verbs (the actions taken) in italics, because they’re the part that change when you change tenses.

In the present tense, the things are happening right now. This seems to be pretty popular in writing at the moment, but it can be tough to do consistently. Our previous example would look like this in the present tense:

She goes outside and waves at her neighbour. The neighbour scowls at her in response and slams their front door.

And then, of course, you have the future tense. Which I guess you could write a whole story in, if you really wanted to… but why would you want to? Still, for the sake of completion, here’s what those sentences could look like in the future tense:

She will go outside and wave at her neighbour. The neighbour will scowl at her in response and slam their front door.

So that’s the tense part, what about the consistency? Well, once you’ve chosen a tense for a piece of writing, it’s important that you stick with that tense. I see a lot of writing that does something like this:

She goes outside and waves at her neighbour. The neighbour scowled at her in response and slammed their front door.

Why does it matter?

It doesn’t change much on the surface, but this kind of tense switching is unnecessarily confusing for readers. Mixing and matching distracts readers from the story while they figure out what time things are happening in.

It also makes you look like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s harsh, I know, and I’ve worked with brilliant writers who’s muddled tenses are just one element of their otherwise great stories. But when your tenses don’t match up, it makes your writing look clumsy, and it can be very off-putting.

How can you write more consistently in one tense?

Assuming you’re now on board with getting better consistency in your tenses, how do you actually go about doing that? The first thing I’m going to suggest is practice; it really is a skill like any other in writing, and the more you work on it the better you’ll get.

Specifically, practice going back through your work and highlighting all of the verbs. Every action taken. Then look and see whether they’re consistently written in the tense you intended to write the piece in. Re-write any sections that aren’t consistent. This may not be exciting, but it’s the first step to developing a better awareness of tense.

Journaling can also be good opportunity to practice this. Write about what happened in your life today, and focus on writing events in just the past tense. What did you do? What did you see and feel? What did you say and hear?

I’m also going to recommend, if you don’t already, shifting all your writing to the past tense. At least while you’re developing your tense-sense. In my experience, this is just the one that people find intuitively easier. If you’re reading that and shaking your head vehemently, “No, present tense is all I can/want to write, you can’t take that away from me,” then fine. I’m not the boss of you! I’m just saying that past tense seems to be the easier to write consistently in for most people.

Can you play with tense consistency?

Like with most writing rules, there are times when you can mess around with your use of tenses to achieve a specific effect. For example, in a past tense story you might bring in a present tense sentence to give your reader a sense that the narrator is speaking to them more directly. Or, in a present tense story you might use past tense to denote a flashback to a time before the action in the main storyline.

Some authors use tense to great effect, and if you know exactly why you want to switch tenses during your story then it can be something worth experimenting with! It can also be something that becomes clunky and confusing though, so proceed with caution…

How do you feel about tenses in writing?

Do you like to see them experimented with, or do you prefer things to be done by the book? And do you find it relatively easy to write in a single tense, or is it something you find tricky?