The Once and Future Tense: Picking One for Your Story

*Morpheus voice* "What if I told you the past is the present?"

Tense was tough. Is tough?

Will it be tough if it hadn’t yet started to now be tough?

And even if you have one you like, there are genre trends to consider. Thankfully, I have opinions, data, and examples to answer one question:

What tense is best for your story?

We’ll cover this in three sections: Fiction Versus Fantasy, Pros and Cons of Past and Present, and finally…why past tense is the best tense for a present story.

Fiction Versus Fantasy

I will focus on picking a tense for fantasy in this article. There is a lot of carryover between the two — most of what I’ll discuss can be applied to fiction, but my conclusions will be most accurate for fantasy.

This distinction matters because fantasy typically needs to do the following things that pure fiction might not:

• World-build

• Navigate invented terminology

• Sustain long-form pacing

• Shift scope and perspective

Fiction might also do one or two of those things at times, but rarely will it ever need to tackle all of them; fantasy includes them by definition.

The Pros and Cons of Past and Present

There are two tenses that matter: past and present. Future has uses, you’ll see it used for a whole book in some children’s picture books, but it’s a poor (near impossible) choice for an entire fantasy novel.

That’s not to say you couldn’t, but that would likely be an artistic decision, rather than the best tool for storytelling.

Let’s look at what each can do for us, and then some examples.

Past

This list is compiled through the lens of adult fantasy. YA romance, coming-of-age, thriller often pick present tense (and we’ll cover why later).

Pros

• Traditional

• Temporal flexibility

• Narrative scope, narrator voice

• More options (mathematically)

Cons

• Less immediacy

• Less visceral

• Can risk ‘duplicitous narrator’

Present

Pros

• Immediate and close

• Intimate POV potential

• Lends itself to unreliable narrator more easily

Cons

• Restrictive; shifting time or POV is tough

• Potentially tedious; present tense prefers action

• Is more difficult

  • Maybe not for you, but according to some editors, absolutely

Analysis of the tenses