Here’s the next series! Tenses! I’m thinking four posts in this one, at least for the main four things people generally do with tenses. Present, past, past perfect (and using those together).

This first one is going to be about present tense. There are lot of fanfiction and some novels being written in present tense. This is not something that I enjoy writing in, but I’m slowly coming to like it more and more. Here is an example of something that is present tense.

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I type on the computer, and the words flow like a small creek in the back yard. I can’t imagine any other way to make them go. They don’t rage like rapids and they don’t trickle like a dried up river bed. They are simply constant and continuous as they flow from my mind to my fingers to the computer screen in front of me. It is how I write, day in and day out, as times passes by second by second. No more can I write than I can breathe. They are both one in the same for me.

Life without words is no life at all, just like there is no life without breath.

I am a writer and a human being. The two go hand in hand for me, one non-existent without the other. I write and I think constantly, working plot lines into the narrative of my life and the narrative of my life into the plot. They are so intermingled that on occasion I cannot separate the two. I type on the computer, words forming on the screen seemingly out of nowhere. But they are not out of nowhere. They are from the imagination.

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Present tense tends to keep things more in the moment for a lot of readers and writers. People say that it brings them into the piece more clearly because they see it as it is happening.