If the tense changes but the temporal framework doesn't -- so a narrative describing the lead up to a battle is in the past tense, but the battle is, for some reason, in the present tense -- I think it would pull me out of the story. I'd wonder what was going on (in terms of the telling, not what was being told), which is probably not what you want. I suspect this would happen even if I wasn't trying to be in control of my own use of tense when writing.
(
@Ursa major probably is the person to ask)
Thanks, JoZ....
Note that what was being asked about in Post#11 is very different from the temporal framework changing (such as happens with a flashback), and not only because of the temporal change. Let me try to be more clear (using an originally past-tense narrative scheme)....
First of all, let's deal with the standard: the narrative references things in the past:
<Narrative in the past tense, in which narrator/PoV character is fully engaged> <Something from the past is mentioned> <narrative returns to its timeframe>
To use an example from above (colour coded as shown in the schema above), this might be:
Jane had too many bad memories. On one occasion, a group of guards, had beaten her up, leaving her for dead. But this was no time for doubts or fears. She ran towards the soldiers, her sword flashing in the moonlight.
In the above:
- the normal narrative is in the Past tense,
- the mention of something in the narrative's past is in what I call the Pluperfect (because that's what it was called in Latin lessons and I don't recall any of my English lessons going on about the grammar of tenses**), and
- the resumption of the narrative to its present is in the Past tense.
Anyway, so far, so simple. The good news is that for very short flashbacks (which are not really, to me, flashbacks at all, given what I've written towards the end of this post), this is fine.
The problem is that the Pluperfect (aka the Past Perfect) doesn't have a simple version. In the past tense, one can write: I wrote, I was writing. In the Pluperfect, there's: I had written, I had been writing. Basically, the Pluperfect tense draws more attention to itself than the Past tense. And this is fine, because when one is slipping from the past into the more distant past, you (generally) want the reader to notice this. But it can become tiring (which only draws
more, if not always conscious, attention to itself). One way of avoiding this is to use the Pluperfect for the transitions between past and distant past, but to swap to the simpler past tense for the meat of the flashback. So:
<Narrative in the past tense, in which narrator/PoV character is engaged fully engaged> <Something from the past is mentioned, as a lead into the flashback> <The flashback> <The lead out from the flashback> <narrative returns to its normal timeframe>
In the above,
- the normal narrative is in the Past tense,
- the lead into the flashback is in the Pluperfect,
- the flashback itself is in the Past tense,
- the lead out of the flashback is in the Pluperfect, and
- the resumption of the narrative to its present is in the Past tense
In all of the above examples, a present tense narrative would have the main narrative and flashback in the Present tense, and mentions of the past, and lead ins and outs of a flashback in the Past tense. Obviously, in these cases, there's no Pluperfect with its attention-seeking extra words, but the change of tense has an extra purpose (which is also true of the previous example):
When things are usually mentioned in the narrative's past, they tend to be background information and explanations for what has happened, or is about to happen. But a flashback is different: it's meant to be as immediate as the normal narrative (which is why it's usually written in the narrative's normal tense). The reader is being dragged back to that past, to experience it with the character.
I hope this helps. (And note: I'm not an expert, so feel free to think it through for yourself.)
** -
A quick guide to English tenses.
