Perspective

First decision: the camera lens, part three

Perspective follows on nicely with narrative voice and point-of-view. It’s from what time, place, proximity, and knowledge the narrator views the story.

These three elements—voice, POV, perspective—make up the camera lens that you choose to show your story.

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash

Verb tense

A key element of a story’s time perspective is the verb tense chosen to present the story. Typically, this is either going to be past tense or present tense. There are other elements involved as well that form the time perspective from which the story is being presented, but let’s start with the basics.

We’ll skip future tense since it’s nearly impossible to tell a story that way, although I’m sure it’s been done.

Past tense

Past tense is the standard for most books. This is a natural result of how people have always told stories.

The end of the book is already written, and obviously everything that happens in the book happened before the end, so past tense generally feels the most natural.

Think back to the earliest human storyteller: Zok the Cave Man.

Sitting around the fire in the evening with the other members of the clan, Zok would tell everyone about their hunting trip that day.

We walked up the big mountain. We spotted a woolly mammoth. I threw my spear right at the heart of the beast. We brought back enough meat to eat all winter.

Zok’s whole story is told in past tense because it already happened. Yes, Zok the Cave Man spoke grammatically perfect English, of course.

Present tense

Present tense has become more popular in some genres, especially young adult fiction, in recent years.

Present tense can lend an immediacy to the story in the moment, providing the reader with the sense that things are happening “right now” as they read, not someone telling the story after the fact.

Present tense creates difficulties in foreshadowing; not even the narrator knows how it comes out because it hasn’t happened yet.

Present tense can feel awkward to some readers since it’s outside the norm of how they’ve always heard, read, and told stories.

Back to Zok, if he told his story in present tense in order to create more immediacy for his listeners (even though it had happened in the past).

We walk up the big mountain. We spot a woolly mammoth. I throw my spear right at the heart of the beast. We bring back enough meat to eat all winter.

Mixed (present and past, or past and past perfect)

If writing in standard past tense, when you need to shift to an earlier event, such as a flashback, use past perfect tense.

Here’s Zok again:

We went (past tense) up the big mountain today and killed a mammoth. Yesterday, we had gone (past perfect) down in the valley and came home empty-handed.

If writing a longer flashback scene, you can use past perfect to transition into the flashback, then shift to standard past tense for most of the scene. Then shift to past perfect again to close out the flashback. The subtle shifts in verb tense provide cues to the reader that they are dropping back in time and then returning to the “in the moment” story, without having to write an entire flashback scene in past perfect verb tense.

If you’re writing in present tense, then just shift to past tense, not past perfect, for narrating prior events or flashbacks. But stay in past tense for the whole flashback scene to avoid confusion with the main storyline that’s in present tense.

Some books can make use of both present and past tense to cover two different storylines and timeframes. The “now” or contemporary story might be in present tense; a storyline that takes place at an earlier time might be written in past tense. This provides instant cues to the reader as to which storyline they are in.

Narrative perspective

Once again, various elements overlap. Narrative perspective answers the questions: