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88 Intermediate Te Tense Prose & Style

Tense

Telling the story in past or present tense.

What it is

Tense is where the telling stands in time, compared with the events being told. English fiction gives you two real options. In past tense, she turned the key, the narration sits after the events. In present tense, she turns the key, the narration sits right beside them.

That difference in position decides what the narrator can know. A past-tense narrator stands after everything has happened. They hold a finished story, and they're free to shape it. A present-tense narrator is pinned to the moment. They know as much as the character knows right now, and no more. The gap in knowledge is the real substance of the choice. Everything you hear about present tense being urgent either grows out of that gap or is simply wrong.

Here is what the gap means on the page. A past-tense narrator can fold a long stretch of time into a single clause. They can judge their younger self and write I did not understand it then. A present-tense narrator can't do any of that. What they get in exchange is a reader whose doubt is real, since nobody on the page is in a position to reassure them. Both choices work, and each one has a price. When you choose a tense, you're choosing how much your narrator is allowed to know. Every power you gain on one side, you give up on the other. So don't bother comparing the verb endings, which tell you very little. Compare what each tense lets the narrator do.

The common rule of thumb says present tense is urgent and past tense is comfortable. That rule misses the main difference, and books built on it fail in predictable ways. The thing that really changes is what the narrator knows. A past-tense narrator has already been to the end. The grammar itself tells you the events are over and someone is relating them, whether out loud or not.

Standing after the fact gives that narrator a whole set of abilities. They can say what followed. They can say what usually happened, what had happened earlier, and what would happen later. They can compress. They can judge. They can flag a detail as important before any character notices it: that mattered, though nobody in the room knew it yet. Because the narrator knows the ending, the telling can hold meaning the characters don't have.

A present-tense narrator has none of these abilities and can't fairly claim them. The events unfold while the sentence is being written. There's no finished story, no spot behind the action to stand on, and no future to hint at. The narrator knows what is in front of them.

Deirdre F. Baker, a critic of children's literature, made this point in an essay on the present-tense trend for The Horn Book Magazine. It appeared in the January/February 2012 issue and went online on December 29, 2011. Her argument runs like this. Telling a story in past tense admits that the story was shaped. The past-tense narrator quietly concedes that the account is one reading of what happened, since somebody picked the material and worked out the causes afterward. Present tense hides that hand, and its verbs step out onto nothing. Baker says openly that she's a skeptic about present tense, but her insight holds up even if you don't share her conclusion. Boiled down, it says this: a past-tense narrator owns a shape, and a present-tense narrator denies there is one. That may be the most useful single sentence anyone can learn about tense. Almost everything else here follows from it.

Past tense buys you four powers.

The first is the knowing aside. You can only do it because the narration sits later than the events. It costs you one clause, and it tells the reader a detail will matter. The reader takes that as a promise, and you have to keep it. He did not lock the shed that night, which is the kind of thing you remember for thirty years.

The second is compression. Past tense handles summary so smoothly that writers forget it's a technique at all. A finished action can cover any length of time. Three months fit in a clause and a whole marriage fits in a sentence, and then you drop straight back into the afternoon. The next two years went by in the usual way: two winters, a wedding she did not attend, and a slow argument with the bank. Pacing leans on this, and so does any book with a large scope.

The third is the confessional gap. I did not know then what she was going to do. You may not find a leaner sentence in first-person past. It does two jobs. It warns you that something is coming. It also shows the narrator, now, judging their younger self for missing it. You get plot and character from eleven words. First person covers the looking-back narrator in full, including the line between fair foreshadowing and teasing.

The fourth is dramatic irony built into the telling. The past-tense narrator knows how things end, so the narration can hand the reader what the characters lack, and nobody is cheating. A happy scene reads very differently once the teller has let slip how the year turned out. Present tense can't open that gap, since its voice knows as little as the characters do.

Present tense buys you three things in return.

The first is real uncertainty. A first-person past narrator has, by implication, lived to tell the story. So the reader's question shifts from will she live to what will it cost her. The second question is often the better one, but it's a different question. In present tense nobody has survived anything yet. The reader's doubt isn't a polite fiction.

The second is a narrator who can't reassure you. This one is easy to miss. Past narration leaks comfort. The steady, looking-back voice suggests that someone got out and wrote it all down. Take that away and the book turns colder. For a story about being trapped, about panic, or about a mind losing its thread, the missing comfort is the point.

The third is simultaneity. You're reading now. Present narration closes the gap between the time you spend reading and the time inside the story. The effect is real, and it's what most people mean when they praise "immediacy" in a book.

Present tense also has four costs.

The first is flatness over a long stretch. This objection has the most evidence behind it. A tense that suits one register keeps serving that register, page after page, without a break. Philip Pullman put the argument in one line: "if every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value". The issue is contrast, and taste doesn't come into it. An effect that never switches off stops registering.

The second is that summary gets hard. Past tense has special forms for things that happened again and again: she used to walk to the harbor, every Sunday they would argue about the same thing, for three weeks nothing much happened. Present tense uses one form for a habit and for a single event. Every Sunday they walk to the harbor and they walk to the harbor have the same grammar, so the adverbs carry all the information about how often. Drop the adverb and the reader takes a habit for a one-time event. Three quiet weeks become for three weeks nothing happens, which is fine once and thin the second time.

The third is that time jumps get expensive. Past tense takes Three years later, she was back in stride. Three years later, she is back works too, but now the whole jump hangs on one phrase. No change of tense underneath it steadies the reader. Put four of those jumps in one chapter and the reader gets lost.

The fourth is that present tense resists the long view. A lifetime, a family, an institution, a century: the mode suits a narrow now, so books on that scale end up fighting their own grammar. The best present-tense books either keep the time window narrow, such as one day, one week, or a stretch of confinement, or they use a structure that supplies what the tense can't.

Present tense keeps one tool for looking backward, the present perfect. It reports a past event from the vantage of now, and now is where the narrator stands, so it brings the past in legitimately. She has done this twice already and it has never worked. He has not spoken to his brother since the funeral. Knowing about this tool is what separates thin present-tense narration from narration that feels lived in.

The prophetic future is off the table. She will not see the house again for nine years sneaks a past-tense narrator into the book. In past narration, would looks ahead from an earlier point in time, and the voice saying it is a later one. A will in a present-tense book tells the reader that someone already knows the ending. You have two choices. You can commit to it, as a few present-tense novels do with a narrator who openly knows. Or you can delete the sentence.

Tense and viewpoint are two separate dials, and people mix them up all the time. The question here is how each pairing feels. The mechanics of viewpoint itself are in point of view.

First person past is a narrator looking back. You get two selves for the price of one: the person who lived it and the person telling it. This pairing gives the most room to judge, summarize and foreshadow. Its danger is comfort, a narrator so calm that the events seem to have cost nothing.

First person present is the tightest box there is. You're in one head, with only what that head knows, and with no distance from its own trouble. The typical problem is eloquence. Someone in the middle of a crisis wouldn't be shaping tidy sentences. Every novel in this pairing has to quiet that question, and most do it through voice rather than logic.

Third person limited past is the standard in most commercial fiction. Free indirect style, where a character's thoughts slip into the narration with no quotation marks, has its easiest home here. Those thoughts take on the narration's past tense and blend right in. Close third covers how that works.

Third person present is the hardest pairing, and in places the most interesting. Third person suggests a narrator, and present tense strips that narrator of knowledge. When it works, it reads like a camera with a nervous system. When it fails, it reads like the action lines of a screenplay. The standard example is Hilary Mantel's Cromwell novels. In a feature on the Booker Prizes site, first published in 2012, Mantel explained the choice. Cromwell was the person on the ground, and "the camera was behind his eyes". Events were happening now, as she watched, so she wrote them in present tense. Viewpoint and tense arrived together. When this pairing works, that's usually how the choice gets made.

Omniscient present is possible but rare. An omniscient narrator gets its view of the future from past tense, so present tense gives up the mode's best device.

Multiple viewpoints in different tenses is a design that works, and it comes up again under consistency below. Multi-POV deals with handling the separate heads.

Second person and future tense both exist. Each deserves a paragraph, no more.

Second person (you turn the key) is a person, not a tense, and it nearly always comes in present. The classic English-language example is Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, a Vintage Contemporaries original paperback from August 1984, which set off a short-lived fashion. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (Orbit, 2015) uses second person for one of its three viewpoints. That strand is in second person present, and the other two are in third person past, which shows that person and tense are independent. Second person announces itself on every line. What you get back is an odd pressure that feels like accusation and invitation at once. Alicia Rasley, in the chapter on second person in The Power of Point of View (Writer's Digest Books, 2008), points out that most you in fiction isn't second-person narration at all. A narrator talking to the reader is a friendly omniscient narrator. A character who says you never know with him is speaking dialogue. And English often uses you to mean one, which a first-person narrator may do to hold a painful subject at a distance. Real second-person viewpoint happens only when the you is the one acting in the scene. Rasley's test is to swap the pronoun for I and see whether the story still makes sense. In McInerney's novel it does, so the you is doing real work.

Future tense is rare, but it has been done. Christine Brooke-Rose wrote Amalgamemnon (Carcanet, 1984; Dalkey Archive Press in the United States) entirely in what she called "non-realizing" tenses and moods: future, conditional and imperative. No sentence in it says that anything happened. Carlos Fuentes's novella Aura (1962) pairs second person with future tense, in Spanish, so its instructions carry the force of something you can't refuse. Both are formal experiments with a purpose. Neither is a real option for a commercial novel, and saying so is only fair.

Past tense dominates out of habit. No rule requires it, and present narration in English fiction goes back much further than its reputation suggests. In Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë slips into present tense at emotional peaks. Pullman praises that use, since it rises out of a past-tense book and so carries meaning. Charles Dickens put four chapters of David Copperfield (serialized 1849 to 1850) into present tense on purpose. His Bleak House (serialized March 1852 to September 1853) runs two tenses side by side from start to finish. Damon Runyon's Broadway stories, collected in book form from 1931, stay in present the whole way through. His narrator writes he says, never he said, and the tense makes up half of how those stories sound. In the twentieth century, John Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (Knopf, 1960) in present from beginning to end, and he stated his reasons openly. Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) and Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975) are both in present. Philip Hensher, no fan of the present-tense fashion, places those two books in a time when present tense was a rare statement rather than a default. Jane Eyre came out in 1847. The Hunger Games came out in 2008. Present tense was in English fiction long before that book, long before young adult fiction, and long before creative writing courses.

Why it matters

A tense choice is hard to undo. Find-and-replace can change the verbs. It can't change what the narrator was and wasn't allowed to know, and that runs through every page of the book.

Working novelists disagree about tense in public. The argument has names and dates, and you can follow it step by step.

Philip Hensher made the case against first. On September 9, 2010, two days after the Man Booker shortlist was announced, he wrote a piece in The Daily Telegraph headed "The Booker judges should take a stand against the modish present tense". He counted three present-tense novels among the six on the shortlist, and a real majority on the longlist too. In his account the tense had spread through the English novel "like Japanese knotweed". He named its sources as lyric poetry, celebrity interviews and film treatments. Most of all he blamed a thousand low-level creative writing tutors, his figure, who believe that changing the tense makes writing vivid. His answer was that vivid writing is vivid on its own. He also reported that a London literary agent had thought about posting a notice on a website asking would-be authors not to send novels about dead twins, or novels in the present tense.

Philip Pullman followed nine days later. His piece ran in The Guardian on September 18, 2010, headed "Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense". He said he wasn't criticizing the shortlist, since he hadn't read any of it. His target was the trend. His reasoning went like this. Present tense is an expressive device. Expression depends on contrast. A device used everywhere expresses nothing. He found the tense cramped, as if he were being held up against the immediate moment. He wanted storytellers to take a wider view of time: what happened, what usually happened, what had happened before, and what would happen later. He compared the fashion to handheld camerawork in film. And he called the reluctance behind it "an abdication of narrative responsibility", a storyteller backing away from command out of timid doubt about having any right to tell the story.

Neither critic said present tense can't work. Hensher allowed that at its best it can be "nervy and energetic", and he pointed to Wolf Hall. Pullman's own examples of success were Jane Eyre and Bleak House. Their quarrel was with present tense as the default. The device itself they left alone.

The books answer back. Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy is in third person present from beginning to end: Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, April 30, 2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror & the Light (2020). The first two each won the Booker Prize in the year they came out. On the 2010 shortlist, the three present-tense books were Emma Donoghue's Room, Tom McCarthy's C and Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. The prize went to Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, a past-tense novel, on October 12, 2010, which proved nothing either way. Samantha Harvey's Orbital, the 2024 Booker winner, is in present tense. Before all of them came Updike, Spark, Bradbury, Runyon, Dickens and Brontë.

Present tense does more than one job. Alexander Chee's essay "In Defense of the Present Tense" ran in Literary Hub on August 5, 2015. He argues that the fault lies more with the workman than with the tool. His stronger point, for working writers, is that the objection treats present tense as one thing when it's at least four. It can create real uncertainty. It can give the feel of reportage, like a news report. It can show trauma that stays permanently in the now. And it can carry an everyday spoken register, borrowed from oral storytelling. Hensher's own article concedes that fourth one, since he calls present the tense of casual anecdotes and jokes. Start a joke in past tense with "a man walked into a bar" and it strains at once. David Jauss's essay "Remembrance of Things Present", in Alone with All That Could Happen (Writer's Digest Books, 2008; revised and expanded edition from Press 53, 2022), listed below, gives the fullest craft treatment, and it comes at the question from the other side. In his view the trouble lies in the tense's range, and poor execution is the smaller problem. Present tense doesn't do one thing badly. It does so many things that a reader may not know which one is at work on a given page.

No verdict settles the argument. As an automatic default, present tense deserves the case against it, which is strong there. As a technique chosen for a reason, the case against it is weak. Neither side seriously disputes the novels. So choose your tense on purpose, be ready to say why, and expect some readers to object whichever way you go.

Moving between layers of time is where manuscripts break. Little of the tense advice you'll find online deals with it. Every novel carries more than one layer of time: what happened before page one, a character's memory, a scene from nine years back that the reader needs to see. The grammar of getting into earlier material and back out is the hard part. Backstory deals with why that material is there and where it goes. Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction, listed below, calls this movement switchback time: the novel drops to an earlier layer and then climbs back out.

Past tense makes the move easy. Writers lean on it without ever noticing. You go in on the past perfect (had plus a verb), drop to simple past inside, and come out on a time marker. Here's how that looks: The lock had been changed. Her father changed it the summer before he died and told nobody, and for two months she rang at her own door like a visitor. Now the new key worked, and the door opened. One had opens the way. After that the flashback stays in simple past, which in past narration does double duty as both the main line and the inside of the flashback. Then now plus a simple-past verb brings the reader back to the main line without a stumble.

Keep the past perfect doorway small. Long runs of past perfect are unreadable. She had walked to the shed. She had lifted the tarpaulin. She had found the second set of plates. Three sentences like that is the limit. Over a full page nothing seems to happen, since every verb leans on a helper and points somewhere else. So use the past perfect as a doorway, and never as a room. Getting out costs nothing in past tense, because the tense you return to differs from the tense you left.

Present tense loses both of those helps. Its natural doorway is simple past. But simple past is also the everyday storytelling tense of English fiction, so the reader's ear may mistake the flashback for the main line. Here's the same moment in present: The lock sticks. Her father changed it the summer before he died and never told anyone, and for two months she rang at her own door like a visitor. The key turns, finally. The door gives. That paragraph works only because of its supports. It has short, physical present sentences on both sides, one long past sentence in the middle, and a concrete present action as the way back. Take away any one support and the paragraph goes soft. You have four ways to handle the problem.

The first fix is a sentence or two of simple past, braced on both sides. Keep it short. Make the way in and the way out physical, and put them in present. Without any other support, three or four sentences is the limit.

The second fix is a three-rung ladder. Present is now. Simple past is then. Past perfect is before then. She stands in the hall. Her father changed the lock the summer before he died; he had been talking about doing it since the first break-in. From the simple-past rung, the past perfect handles anything earlier, just as it does in a past-tense book. Present-tense drafts that muddle time usually have a ladder with only two rungs, with simple past doing double duty for two different depths.

The third fix is a section break or a headed section. Once the flashback runs past a paragraph, stop forcing grammar to carry it. A blank line, a heading or a dateline does the job grammar can't. Working novelists use this constantly. Readers pick it up instantly. Using it is no failure of nerve.

The fourth fix is present tense for the flashback too, marked by layout. Use headed sections such as Now and Nine years earlier, or dates, or place names, and write both layers in present. Most dual-timeline novels in present tense work this way, and the result is clean. The cost is that the grammar no longer signals anything, so the layout carries all of it. Your layout has to be consistent from chapter one and never waived, not even "just this once".

Documents and dialogue sidestep the problem. A letter, a diary, a deposition, a case file or a transcript can hold past tense on its own authority and leave the narration alone. Speech is free of the narration's tense in every book. When one character tells another what happened in 2011, it comes out in past tense inside a present-tense novel, and nobody minds. Exposition covers when that helps and when it turns into characters briefing each other on the plot.

The usual advice is to "stay consistent" and stop there. Most people take that to mean one tense from the first page to the last. Read that literally, the advice would rule out a lot of good fiction, Bleak House among it. What consistency really asks is that the book follow a rule the reader can pick up by the time it matters. Four designs do that.

Present for now and past for then is the most common deliberate blend. The main line runs in present and an earlier strand runs in past, with chapter or section breaks between them. The tense becomes a second, backup signal, and the backup is what keeps the reader safe.

Different tenses for different viewpoints also works. One narrator might be in first person present and another in third person past. That gives the clearest signal of a head change you can send, doing in one syllable what a character's name at the top of a chapter does clumsily. Done carelessly, it looks arbitrary. The test is whether you can explain why this character gets this tense. Jemisin's second-person-present strand in The Fifth Season passes, since the tense and the person say something definite about that character's bond with her own past.

The frame is the oldest mixed-tense structure. A present-tense shell holds a past-tense story, or the other way around. An old woman sits in a chair now, and the story she tells happened then. The frame explains itself.

A tense change can mark the shape of the book. The David Copperfield pattern shifts from past to present at four points, and the shifts mean something because they're rare. Brontë's present-tense passages at the emotional peaks of Jane Eyre work the same way, and Pullman openly admires this kind of blending. The design holds up at three or four shifts in a novel. At thirty, it falls apart.

Consistency fails in three ways, and drift is the first. A chapter opens in present, and by page four it's in past, and nobody planned it. Readers sense an error even if they can't name it. Drift shows up most in scenes heavy with summary, since summary pulls toward past, and in scenes drafted on a different day from the ones around them.

The second failure is the flashback that never comes back. In a book otherwise in present, the narration slips into simple past to remember something. The memory swells into a full scene ten pages long, and now the novel is in past tense without telling anyone. The usual cure is a section break going in and another coming out.

The third failure is slippage inside a paragraph, and it's common and embarrassing. Sorcha sets her case on the step and works the pick. Inside, the hall smelled of her mother's floor polish. For a moment she isn't a locksmith. Count the verbs. There are four, in three positions. Sets and works belong to the story's present. Smelled is a past form with no marker and no motive. Isn't comes back to present. The middle verb can't be a flashback, because the smell of polish is there now. The tense is simply wrong. A slip like this survives four drafts, since every sentence is fine on its own. You find it by reading aloud and by the search pass in "Try it yourself" below. Silent reading rarely catches it.

A quick test tells design from drift. If you can't state your tense rule in one sentence, you have drift. Present tense for Sorcha's chapters, past tense for the 1998 sections, headed with the year is a rule. Mostly present is not.

In 2026, at the time of writing, tense is tied to two kinds of book, and both links will shift. In commercial young adult fiction, present tense became close to a house style after The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press, 2008) and Divergent (Katherine Tegen Books, 2011), both in first person present. The link is so strong that for some readers the tense alone signals the genre, whatever the book actually does. Baker's essay in The Horn Book Magazine is mostly an attempt to explain that link. Her answer is that the tense fits a mind that has only the present, which is useful to know whether or not you write for teenagers. Young adult covers the genre.

Literary fiction has its own cluster. The Booker quarrel grew out of a real bunch of present-tense novels, and prize lists have carried many present-tense novels for many years.

Some readers simply dislike present tense. Take this as a description of readers. It isn't a rule. Certain readers dislike present narration outright and will tell you so. Pullman's piece drew a large, sympathetic response from readers who felt the same way. Hensher's agent thought about posting a public notice. Baker opens her essay by admitting that she resists present-tense novels without meaning to. Nobody knows how big that group is, and it shouldn't settle anything for you. Still, present tense isn't neutral the way past tense is. Some readers notice it, and a few put the book down. Weigh that against what the tense gives this particular book. Check what sells in your own subgenre instead of trusting any list, including this one.

Never pick a tense because a category seems to demand it. Reader promise covers the expectations a book has to meet, and tense isn't one of them. Nobody has ever asked for a refund because a thriller was in past tense.

Switching tense late costs far more than it looks. The typical case is 60,000 words in present tense, plus a nagging unease, a beta reader who stopped reading, or a question from an editor. A conversion goes deeper than find-and-replace. The structure shifts, and the verbs are only the part you can see. Here are six things to know before you start.

The perfect system flips. Every had turns into has or drops out. The past perfect, which is the second rung in a present-tense book, becomes the first rung in a past-tense one. Every layered passage needs its ladder rebuilt.

The flashback layer collapses. Turn present into past, and your flashbacks, written in simple past, are now in the same tense as the main line. Each of those passages needs a new way in, or a break.

The time markers move. Now, today, tonight, tomorrow, last week and this morning become words like that day, that night, the next day, the week before and that morning. Miss a few and the prose reads like a badly dubbed present-tense book.

The future words change. Every will becomes would, and some of those turn into sentences nobody would otherwise write, since they now carry knowledge the narrator suddenly has.

New powers show up, and leaving them unused shows too. Past narration can foreshadow, compress and judge. A draft written without those powers looks bare. The sentences sound fine, but a voice speaking from later that never once looks back seems to have nothing to say. So a conversion means rewriting the narration. Swapping verbs is only the first step.

Some things don't change at all. Dialogue stays as it is. So does direct thought in italics, if you use it, and so do quoted documents. Leave them alone.

Test the change on one whole chapter before you commit. A single page won't tell you enough. Pick the chapter that has both a flashback and a time jump, since that's where the cost lives. The method is in "Try it yourself" below. Revision covers handling a change this large across a whole manuscript while keeping the original draft safe.

Real-world examples

David Copperfield (1849 to 1850): four chapters that stand still

Charles Dickens published David Copperfield in nineteen monthly installments, from May 1849 to November 1850, and as a single book in 1850. David narrates in first person past, writing from a long way after the events. He's a model looking-back narrator, with every power that position brings.

Four times, Dickens shifts into present tense. Chapter 18 is titled "A Retrospect". Chapters 43 and 53 are each titled "Another Retrospect". Chapter 64 is "A Last Retrospect". All four are in present tense, and each one closes a monthly part. The result is that a novel with no formal parts or books falls into four sections: childhood, young manhood, marriage, and loss with its long aftermath. Noah Jensen, writing in the UPEI arts review Tinge, argues that these chapters do the work that section divisions do in other books. Readers feel the seam even though nothing announces it.

The first lesson is that tense here marks structure. Mood has little to do with it. The shifts come at the seams, to signal that a phase of life is closing and the narration has stopped to look at it. Nothing is announced. The grammar does all the work.

The second lesson is that rarity makes meaning. Four chapters across nineteen installments meets the condition Pullman set in 2010, that a device works through contrast, and it explains why he names Dickens with approval. In a novel written entirely in present, the Retrospect chapters couldn't exist.

The third lesson is that present tense here is the opposite of urgent. These are some of the quietest chapters in the book. Present tense creates stillness: a narrator standing inside a remembered moment instead of reporting it from beyond. Present tense means now, and a given now can be frantic or frozen.

The fourth lesson is that the past-tense surroundings are what make the shift readable. The baseline is past, so a present-tense chapter feels like the narrator coming closer. A novel written all in present has no closer place to go. The whole trade-off is on display inside one book.

Bleak House, serialized from March 1852 to September 1853, pushed the idea further. A third-person narrator tells part of the story in present tense, and Esther Summerson tells the rest in first person past, across the whole novel. Both Dickens novels are in the public domain and free to read. Together they show that mixed tense can be a deliberate design. Setting looks at Bleak House from another angle.

Rabbit, Run (1960): a novel pictured as a movie

John Updike's Rabbit, Run (Knopf, 1960) is in present tense from the first page to the last. What makes it useful is that Updike said why.

His reason came from the movies. He pictured the book as Rabbit, Run: A Movie, and he said so in several places. He told the journalist Jane Howard, as reported in the study of his work by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton. He said it again to Charles Thomas Samuels in The Paris Review ("The Art of Fiction No. 43", issue 45, Winter 1968). His reasoning went like this. Novels come down from chronicles of events long past. A film happens to the viewer now, in the seat, while they watch. He wanted that second effect. He also said he liked the tense because it let him move among minds, thoughts, objects and events more easily than past tense did.

The first lesson is that Updike had a reason. He wasn't working from a mood. He never calls present tense more vivid. He wanted a specific relationship between the reader and the events, and he found the grammar that delivers it. Your own choice should clear the same bar.

The second lesson is about the date. Rabbit, Run came out in 1960. The Hunger Games came out in 2008. The Spark and Bradbury novels that Hensher places in the era of rare, deliberate present tense came out in 1970 and 1975. So the quickest answer to anyone who calls present tense a creative writing course habit is Updike, who got there from film and never from a workshop.

The third lesson is a twist. The case that justified the tense then is now used against it. Hensher calls film treatments the most common influence on present-tense novels today, with novelists eager to meet Hollywood halfway. Updike said much the same, and he meant it as praise. The technique hasn't changed. How often writers use it has.

The 2010 Booker shortlist: a craft argument in the national papers

From September 7 to October 12, 2010, a craft argument ran in national newspapers for five weeks, which makes it unusually easy to study.

The Man Booker shortlist was announced on September 7, 2010. It held Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, Emma Donoghue's Room, Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, Andrea Levy's The Long Song and Tom McCarthy's C. On September 9, Hensher counted three present-tense titles on the shortlist and a majority on the longlist, and urged the judges to act. Next came a Daily Telegraph news story headlined "Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher criticise Booker prize for including present-tense novels". In The Guardian on September 18, Pullman said that headline was stronger than anything he had actually said, since he hadn't read any of the books. The prize went to Jacobson on October 12.

The useful lessons don't depend on who won. There are three.

First, each critic named examples he admired. Hensher chose Wolf Hall. Pullman chose Jane Eyre and Bleak House. Three of the best novels in English fiction use the tense, so the case was against the default, and the device itself came through untouched. Read the original articles rather than summaries of them. Pullman's is listed below. This point is the first thing to vanish in a paraphrase.

Second, the shortlist shows the range of the mode. Galgut's In a Strange Room tells one man as both he and I, sometimes inside a single sentence. The I turns up more as the book goes on, so the grammar itself reports how close the person remembering has come to the person remembered. Tense and person are separate dials, and you can turn both.

Third, frequency is a market question. The complaint was about how often the tense turns up. It says nothing about whether your book should use it. What it does show is that experienced readers were already sensitive to present tense by 2010, and that sensitivity hasn't gone away.

The Flatshare (2019): two narrators in one tense

Beth O'Leary's The Flatshare (2019) has two narrators, Tiffy and Leon. Both tell their chapters in first person present, and they take turns. The book is valuable because it sticks to one tense and shows how much is still possible inside it. Before you add a second tense, ask what you could still do with one.

Tiffy is chatty and rambling, with long sentences. Leon writes in clipped shorthand. He drops pronouns and articles, and his dialogue is laid out almost like a play script. Same tense, same book, and two lines in, you know whose chapter you're reading.

The first lesson is that present tense comes in more than one texture. The usual complaint about present tense is monotony. This commercial romance shows that sameness comes from voice, and the tense isn't the cause. If your present-tense draft feels flat, look at character voice and narrative voice before you blame the tense.

The second lesson is that present tense suits a story built on not knowing. Tiffy and Leon share a bed in alternating shifts and don't meet for a long time. Neither can describe the other, because neither knows the other. Present tense puts that ignorance into the structure, so it never feels coy. A past-tense version would give you two narrators who had already met, knew how it turned out, and were carefully holding it back. That would be a different book, and a more brittle one.

Orbital (2023): one day and sixteen sunrises

Samantha Harvey's Orbital came out from Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom on November 2, 2023, and from Grove Atlantic in the United States on December 5, 2023. It won the Booker Prize in 2024. The book is short, about 140 pages, and in present tense throughout. Its opening describes six people circling the earth, "so together, and so alone", and even their thoughts run together.

The book is the clearest recent case of present tense being the right call, because it strips out everything past tense does best. It covers a single day on the International Space Station: sixteen orbits of ninety minutes each, sixteen sunrises, six astronauts and cosmonauts. There's hardly any plot. James Wood, reviewing it admiringly in The New Yorker, observed that it barely tells plotted human stories. The thin plot is the design, and the tense isn't covering for a weakness. When one day repeats sixteen times, nobody needs compression or three years later. Nobody needs a narrator looking back from an endpoint either, since there isn't one.

The first lesson is that a single-day frame is the best guide to when present tense is safe. The second is about the narration, which is third person and floating. It settles on one crew member, then another, and never gets locked into one head. Present third person can roam like this, which a camera strapped inside a single head can't do. The third is practical. The book is recent, easy to find and prizewinning, and it proves the mode is alive well beyond a young adult habit. Keep it in mind the next time someone tells you otherwise.

An everyday scenario: Enid's stalled middle

Here's a made-up case. Enid Verrall is writing a mystery, 74,000 words in first person present. Her scenes work. What doesn't work is four chapters covering the eighteen months between the first inquest and the second. She wrote for a year and a half nothing happens, followed by three pages of summary. She has rewritten those pages five times and still doesn't like them. One beta reader said the middle "felt like a list". Two others said nothing.

She's about to convert the whole book to past tense, which would take six weeks. She shouldn't, at least not yet.

Instead she picks a test: chapter nineteen, the worst of the four. It holds summary and a flashback to the first inquest. She rewrites it in first person past, and she rewrites rather than converts, using the sentences past tense allows. The three pages of summary shrink to two paragraphs, because past tense has a form for repetition: the file came back twice that spring, both times with the same paragraph removed. The section break around the flashback is no longer needed, since the past perfect gives her a doorway. She also finds herself writing two knowing asides she couldn't have written before, and she likes them.

Then she rereads chapter four, where the body is found, in both versions. The past-tense version is calm and a little dull. The present-tense version is frightening.

The lesson is a common one. The tense that helps summary isn't the tense that helps scenes. Enid now has a decision backed by evidence, and three options. She can convert and live with cooler scenes. She can stay in present and fix the middle through structure, with section breaks, a dateline, a document, or a time jump in place of the summary. Or she can build a blend and write down its rule.

She picks the third. The investigation stays in present. The four chapters covering the eighteen months go into past, with date headings. She writes the rule as one sentence at the top of her project notes, where it works as a checkpoint.

Try it yourself

All you need is your draft or outline, a page of project notes, and the search box in your word processor.

  1. Write down when your narrator is. In one sentence, say what the narrator knows. That means when they are, not who they are. Katya is telling this as it happens and does not know how it ends. Or: Katya is telling this from eleven years later and knows exactly how it ends. If you can't write that sentence, you haven't made the choice yet, whatever tense your verbs are in. Every step after this one gets checked against it.
  2. Draft one real scene in both tenses. Make it a complete scene with action, more than a single paragraph, and write it once in each tense. Read both versions aloud, ideally a day apart. Here's a common sign: the version that lets you cut a dull paragraph tends to be the past one, and the version that frightens you tends to be the present one. Note which is which, and don't decide yet.
  3. Do the same with your weakest summary. Pick the passage that has to cover weeks or months and write it in both tenses. The biggest difference shows up here, and present-tense drafts fail here most, so this result tells you more than step 2. Few writers ever try it.
  4. Run the three-sentence test. Write three sentences like these, using your own book and characters: She did not know it then, but that was the last time she saw him sober. The next two years went by without much happening. He would be dead within the year. Past tense allows all three. Present tense allows none of them, or turns them into statements a narrator living in the moment has no right to make. Ask whether your book needs any of them. If it needs all three, past tense is talking to you. If it needs none, present tense costs you nothing.
  5. Map your time layers. List every place the story leaves the main line: memories, flashbacks, background, even a two-sentence mention of a fire. For each one, note how the reader learns they've left and how they learn they're back. In a present-tense book, if any answer is "the tense changes and nothing else", add support: physical present sentences on both sides, a section break, or a heading.
  6. Write your rule in one sentence. Put it in your project notes, like this: Third person present for the ship chapters, third person past for the 1974 chapters, each headed with the year. Then check the manuscript chapter by chapter against that sentence. A loose rule catches nothing. Point of view asks for the same habit with viewpoint, so do both at once. Together they make up what "consistency" really means.
  7. Hunt for slips by searching. Reading won't find them, since slips read fine one sentence at a time. In a present-tense manuscript, search for was, were, had, said and would. In a past-tense manuscript, search for is, are, says and will. Every hit is one of four things: a deliberate flashback layer, dialogue, a quoted document, or a bug. Your job is to say which. Then search either kind of manuscript for now, today, tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, this morning and last week, which give away a half-converted draft. Last, search for had. Look hard at any paragraph with three or more in five sentences, since that's a room built from a doorway. Rewrite it so one had gets the reader in and simple past does the rest.
  8. Thinking of converting? Convert one chapter properly. Pick the chapter that has both a flashback and a time jump. You want the costly chapter here, and the easy one won't tell you anything. Rewrite it instead of just converting it: use the sentences the new tense allows, and drop the supports the old tense needed. Keep both versions and set them aside for a week. Then give both to someone new to the book, without telling them which came first, and ask only which one they'd keep reading. Six weeks of conversion is a big bet. One chapter is a small test of the same question.
  9. For a new book, decide while you outline. Make the choice before you write. Don't wait until chapter thirty. The price goes up with every chapter, because the choice soaks into the narration instead of sitting on the surface. On page one it's free.

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Choosing present tense because "Present tense is more urgent." The reason is wrong, even when the choice turns out right. Urgency comes from stakes and from how the sentences move. A verb ending can't supply it, and a limp scene stays limp in any tense. The sound reason for present tense is wanting a narrator who can't see what comes next. Without that, the tense won't give you the feeling you're after.

Letting hindsight leak into present tense. I have no idea what is coming is fine. I had no idea what was coming belongs in a different book. So does little did I know, and so does any sentence that runs on the narrator having seen the end. No error in first person present is more common. It tends to show up in emotional paragraphs, since hindsight is the natural way to write about feelings.

Using the prophetic will. She will regret this for the rest of her life. In a present-tense novel, that sentence brings in a narrator who knows the future. You've made a structural decision, and the flourish is the smaller part of it. Some books do it on purpose and signal it. If yours doesn't, cut the sentence, however good it is.

Turning the past perfect into a room. When every verb on a page wears a had, nothing seems to happen, and grammatically nothing does, since every action is reported from outside itself. Use one or two had to get in, simple past inside, and a time marker to get out.

Mixing up tense and viewpoint. They're separate dials. First person present and first person past share a viewpoint. What differs is the distance from the events. The same goes for third person. Changing the tense won't fix a viewpoint problem, and changing the viewpoint won't fix a tense problem. Each one needs its own decision.

Missing slippage inside a paragraph. A slip like Sorcha's survives four drafts, because each sentence is correct on its own and only the sequence is wrong. Reading aloud and searching will catch it. Silent reading won't.

Letting a flashback run without a way back. A memory grows into a scene, the scene runs ten pages, and the novel has quietly changed tense. Once a flashback runs past a paragraph, put a section break at each end. Stop asking grammar to do a typographer's job.

Treating a tense change as find-and-replace. The verbs you can see are about a tenth of the job. The perfect system, the time markers, the flashback doorways, the will and would pairs, and the narration's whole relationship to what it knows all shift. Plan to rewrite the narration. If that isn't worth it to you, keep present tense and solve the problem another way.

Picking a tense by genre. Young adult and literary shelves hold plenty of present tense. That describes the market. It doesn't bind you. Nobody has ever put a thriller down for being in past tense. Choose for the book.

Reading "Stay consistent" as one tense for the whole novel. Consistency means the book follows a rule readers can learn. Bleak House runs two tenses across about eight hundred pages without confusing anyone, because the rule holds and the chapters stay separate. Readers can follow a blend. They can't follow drift.

Calling second person a tense. You turn the key is second person present. You turned the key is second person past. Someone who says they're writing "in second person" hasn't yet said when the telling happens, and neither have you until you decide.

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