Don’t be afraid to switch tenses
Don’t be afraid to switch tenses
Somewhere in the recesses of my red-pencil memories is being told not to shift between past and present tense. This makes sense as a warning not to switch tenses clumsily, as in the example, “I was really hungry, so I make a sandwich.” It’s no better the other way around: “I am really hungry, so I made a sandwich.” Both actions are intended to be in the same time frame, so mixing past and present creates a jarring clash of tenses.
However, like many writing prescriptions, “Don’t shift tenses” is too simple. Writers shift tenses all the time, often using the present tense to refer to past events. This use of the present tense to narrate a story is called the historical present tense, or sometimes the dramatic present or the narrative present. The linguist Otto Jespersen, in his 1929 book An International Language, described it this way:
the present tense is used in speaking of the past … the speaker, as it were, forgets all about time, and imagines or recalls what he is recounting as vividly as if it were now present before his eyes. (19)
If you ever told a joke that begins “A man walks into a bar …,” you’ve used the dramatic present. Of course, writers often find it useful to set the clock when they use the dramatic present, as Alice Walker does in her essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”:
It is a bright summer day in 1947. My father, a fat, funny man with beautiful eyes and a subversive wit, is trying to decide which of his eight children he will take with him to the county fair.
Walker transports you to the summer of 1947.
And here is the opening of writer Victor Lodato’s New Yorker piece “My Mother, the Gambler”:
“Give me three numbers, baby.” My mother made this request often—so often, in fact, that when I try to remember her voice this is what I hear. I can see her, too. She’s in the kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table, the green wall phone behind her, the phone she’ll soon pick up to place her bet.
Lodato cues the reader to the dramatic present with the phrase “when I try to remember this is what I hear.” Then we are in his childhood, a flashback that we see as though it were the present.
The fluidity of tense is not just a feature of narrative fiction. We find it in expository prose as well. Here is philosopher James Rachels in The Elements of Moral Philosophy:
Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it’s about “how we ought to live”—and why. It would be helpful to begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is, but that turns out to be impossible.
He shifts to a future tense “will” to outline what he will do next (“First, however, we will examine some moral controversies … “) and then uses the past tense to discuss the controversies themselves:
Theresa Ann Campo Pearson, an infant known to the public as “Baby Theresa,” was born in Florida in 1992. Baby Theresa had anencephaly, one of the worst genetic disorders. Anencephalic infants are sometimes referred to as “babies without brains,” but that is not quite accurate.
Rachels shifts from past tense (“was born” and “had anencephaly”) back to the present tense (“infants are sometimes referred to” and “is not quite accurate”). He continues shifting seamlessly from past tense (discussing what people did, said, and thought) to present tense (unpacking the ethical principles involved in the discussion, such as “we are interested in more than what people happen to think. We want to know what’s true.”) He goes back to the past (“Were the parents right or wrong to volunteer their baby’s organs for transplant?”) and then to the present (“To answer this question, we have to ask what reasons, or arguments, can be given on each side.”) These are all necessary tense shifts in service of the exposition: setting out questions, narrating a case study, and identifying current issues, commentary, and conclusions.
Linguist Nessa Wolfson has studied the way that people switch into the present it in storytelling. She calls this use the conversational historical present. Here’s an example:
Well, we were getting dressed to go out one night and I was, we were just leaving, just walking out the door and the baby was in bed, and all of a sudden the doorbell rings and Larry says, ‘There’s somebody here for you’ and I walk in the living room and she’s there with both kids.
The shift in tense after “all of a sudden” breaks up the action between the leaving and the arrival of the visitor. It’s a rhetorical shift in the direction of immediacy and boldness.
So if you have been troubled by the writerly advice not to shift tenses, it might be time to reconsider that schoolroom proscription.
Look for opportunities to use shifts in tense strategically to amplify the narrative.
Featured image by Rain Bennett via Unsplash.