Tag Archives: narrative time

October 12, 2026 · 6:00 am

Narrative Voice – who is telling the story and when did it happen? #writing

Today’s post is a bit involved, but bear with me, because beginning a story with the wrong narrative voice can lead to that place where we just aren’t interested in our project anymore.

Three things combine to tell the story to the reader:

Narrative point of view is the perspective, a personal or impersonal “lens” through which a story is communicated.
Narrative voice is how a story is communicated, the author’s fingerprint.
Narrative time, or what we call tense, affects our perception of character development.

In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually shown by how we use the forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation The main tenses found in most languages include the past, present, and future.

Narrative time/tense shows us the event’s location in time. The author’s choice of verb tense shapes our perception of when the story happened in relation to the protagonist’s current state. That choice tells us when an event happened relative to another time, past or present.

Narrative voice affects a reader’s perception of characters in subtle ways. It should be an undercurrent that goes unnoticed after the first few paragraphs. It shapes the reader’s view of events subliminally.

I’ve used the following sentences as an example before: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”

All are in the present tense: eat, am, and have. Yet, they are different because each conveys unique information or points of view about how the action relates to the present.

Subjunctives are small verbs of existence, but just like adverbs, they are telling words. These words fall out of our heads and into our narrative in the first draft because we are just trying to get the story down. In the second draft, they are signals telling us what needs to be reworded.

Subjunctives are hard to spot. Forms of “to be” can be found in subordinate clauses where something is mandated or required:

I demand the prisoner be fed the same as anyone else.

BUT how does this relate to the topic at hand?

What if my characters are stranded in a desert? Should I write, “They were hot and thirsty“?

A sentence like that leaves nothing to the reader’s imagination. “Were“ is a subjunctive. The reader is on the outside, looking in.

This is where our choice of narrative time/tense comes into play.

Our job is to take that experience of thirst and make it immediate. No matter what narrative point of view we’re writing in, strong verbs affect narrative time and change everything.

Which sentence feels stronger, more pressing?

They trudged on with dry, cracked lips, yearning for a drop of water.
I walk toward the oasis with dry, cracked lips and parched tongue.

Each sentence says the same thing, but we get a different story when we change the narrative tense, point of view, and verb choice.

Narrative voice, verb tense/time, and expanded imagery combine to change how we perceive the characters in that moment.

Strong verbs best describe our characters’ actions and emotions. They connect the reader to the immediate situation our characters find themselves in.

For my short story, View from the Bottom of a Lake, the narrative tense that worked best was a past tense, close third person.

Peggy Jayne smiled. Beneath the green-glittering gaze, her toothsome smile flayed her daughter, leaving Sarah breathless, panicking and longing for her lake.

Sometimes the only way you can get into a character’s head is to write them in the first-person present tense, which happened to me with Thorn Girl. I struggled with her story for nearly six months until a member of my writing group suggested changing the narrative tense and point of view.

Once I did that, the story fell out of my head the way I had envisioned but couldn’t articulate, and I wrote it in one evening.

My first instinct is to shake my head and back away.

But I don’t. Long ago, my Lady told me that in every life, a time will come when you arrive at a precipice. You must either leap the chasm or fall to your death.

I stand at that place now.

That switch made that particular short story so much easier to write. Remember, in a traditional first-person point-of-view story, the protagonist is the narrator. No one ever has complete knowledge of anything, so the first-person narrator cannot be omnipotent. Her lack of knowledge is the story.

It is crucial for authors to write short stories as well as longer pieces. They force us to tell our stories from different points of view and encourage us to experiment with using a different narrative tense than we normally gravitate to.

Every story is unique, and some work best in the past tense, while others need to be in the present. Regardless of the narrative tense, your voice is unique. Your habitual word choices are unique.

That is why only you can tell your stories.

Credits and Attributions:

Quote from View from the Bottom of a Lake, © 2020 Connie J. Jasperson. Story first appeared in the anthology Escape, published by the Northwest Independent Writers Association and edited by Lee French.

How the narrative tense shapes the point of view #writing

Every story is different and requires us to use a unique narrative time. Narrative tense conveys information about time. It relates the time of an event (when) to another time (present, past, or future). So, the narrative tense we choose when writing a particular story indicates its location in time.

In my previous post, we talked about narrative point of view. POV is the perspective, the personal or impersonal “lens” through which we communicate our stories. It is the mode we choose for conveying a particular story.

The narrative tense we gravitate to is also a component of our voice.

We shape our stories by combining narrative time with two closely related aspects:

Narrative point of view.
Our narrative voice (we’ll explore this more later).

The way that narrative tense affects a reader’s perception of the characters is subtle, an undercurrent that goes unnoticed after the first few paragraphs. It shapes the reader’s view of events on a subliminal level.

“I eat.”
“I am eating.”
“I have eaten.”
“I have been eating.”

The above sentences are all in the present tense. They contain the present-tense form of a verb: eat, am, and have.

Yet, they are different because each conveys slightly different information, a different point of view about how the act of eating pertains to the present moment.

Revisions are a mess for me because I “think aloud” when writing the first draft. Passive phrasing finds its way into the prose.

Verb Conjugation When I begin my second draft, those weak verb forms function as traffic signals. They were a form of mental shorthand that helped me write the story before I lost my train of thought. But in the rewrite, weak verbs are code words that tell me what the scene should be rewritten to show.

I’ve used these examples before. Each sentence says the same thing, but we get a different story when we change the narrative tense, point of view, and verb choice.

Henry was hot and thirsty. (Third-person omniscient, past tense, passive phrasing.)
Henry trudged forward, his lips dry and cracked, yearning for a drop of water. (Third-person omniscient, past tense, active phrasing.)
I struggle toward the oasis with dry, cracked lips and a parched tongue. (First-person present tense, Active phrasing.)
You stagger toward the oasis, dizzy with thirst. (Second-person, present tense, active phrasing.)

This is a moment in time for these thirsty characters, and the way we show it to our readers is meaningful in how they perceive the scene.

Sometimes, the only way I can get into a character’s head is to write in the first-person present tense. This is because the narrative time I am trying to convey is the now of that story. (This happens to me most often when writing short stories.)

Every story is unique; some work best in the past tense, while others must be set in the present.

WARNING: When we write a story using an unfamiliar narrative mode, watch for drifting verb tense and wandering narrative point of view.

Drifting verb tense and wandering POV are insidious. Either or both can occur if you habitually write using one mode but switch to another. For this reason, I am vigilant when I begin writing in the first-person present tense, but later discover it isn’t working for me. If I were to switch to close third person past tense, each verb must be changed to match the new narrative mode and time.

But changing an entire draft to a different narrative mode isn’t the only danger zone:

Time and modes will drift sometimes for no reason other than you were writing as quickly as you could. For this reason, when you begin revisions, it’s crucial to look at your verb forms to ensure your narrative time doesn’t inadvertently drift between past and present.

So, where does voice come into it? An author’s voice is their habit, their fingerprint, a recognizable “sound” in the way a story is communicated.

route recalculating The way we habitually phrase sentences, how we construct paragraphs, the words we choose, and the narrative mode and time we prefer to write in is our voice. It includes the themes we instinctively write into our work and the ideals we subconsciously hold dear.

So, our voice (or style) is formed by our deeply held beliefs and attitudes. We may or may not consciously intend to do it. Regardless of intent, our convictions emerge in our writing, leitmotifs that shape character and plot arcs.

As we grow in writing craft and our values and beliefs evolve, that growth is reflected in our voice. We get better at conveying what we intend to say, and our style of writing reflects it.

A fun writing exercise is to write a 100-word short story in a narrative mode that you dislike. Think of it as a little palate cleanser.

Then, rewrite it in that same mode but using a different narrative tense. You might see a wide array of possibilities that a new narrative mode and tense bring to a scene.

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August 3, 2022 · 6:00 am

Narrative Time vs. Calendar Time #amwriting

Today we’re discussing narrative time, or what we call tense. Narrative tense subtly affects a reader’s perception of characters, an undercurrent that goes unnoticed after the first few paragraphs. Narrative time shapes the reader’s view of events on a subliminal level.

In grammar, the word tense indicates information about time. Tenses are usually shown by how we use the forms of verbs. The main tenses found in most languages include the past, present, and future.

Consider the following sentences: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”

All are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence (eat, am, and have been).

Tense relates the time of an event (when) to another time (now or then). The tense you choose indicates the event’s location in time. Imagine a scene where two women meet. They know each other well but aren’t friends.

First–person, present tense: At the fish market, I find Marie holding a fish, as if she knows what to do with it. I know she doesn’t. I ask, “Did your cook finally quit?”

First-person past tense: At the fish market, I found Marie holding a fish, as if she knew what to do with it. I knew she didn’t. I asked, “Did your cook finally quit?”

Third person omniscient (past tense): At the fish market, Vivian found Marie holding a fish, as if she knew what to do with it. She knew Marie didn’t. She asked, “Did your cook finally quit?”

The above examples detail the same scene but are set in different narrative times and narrative POVs. Each change of narrative time or POV alters the feel of the story.

If we write a sentence that says a character is hot and thirsty, we leave nothing to the reader’s imagination. However, when we change the tense, we are often inspired to rephrase a thought.

They were hot and thirsty. (were is a subjunctive verb – passive).
They trudged on with dry, cracked lips, yearning for a drop of water.
We walk toward the oasis with dry, cracked lips and parched tongues.

The way we show the perception of time for these thirsty characters is the same – the narrative is in the past tense in the first two cases and the present in the third.

Subjunctives (were, was, be, etc.) are small verbs of existence, but just like adverbs that end in “ly,” they are telling words. These words fall into our narrative in the first draft because they are signals for the rewrite.

The narrative time in which the story is set (past or present tense), verb choice, and the expansion of imagery combine to change how we see the characters and events at that moment.

However, there is more to time than the grammatical narrative tense. Calendar time can get a little sloppy when we are winging it through the first draft of a manuscript.

Readers don’t notice how time passes unless it becomes unbelievable. When the passage of time is a realistic, organic part of the scenery, readers accept it and suspend their disbelief.

We try to reveal aspects of the past that are relevant to current events as the story unfolds. You can do this in two ways:

In a chronologically linear plot, you can have the backstory revealed in conversations or letters, etc., and many authors succeed at this plotting style. A calendar is helpful for this.

Other authors manipulate time. They may start with a chapter of action and commentary set in the past. The experiences shown in the prologue show the reason for present day events and actions that are yet to unfold.

Sometimes, past events require several chapters to show the root of the current-day problem and how things didn’t go well, a “Part One.” “Part Two” begins a new section set in the present time, with the characters shaped by those past events.

If you use that kind of opening, the relevance of those events must be made clear to the reader early on in the current time section. In one forthcoming novel, I’ve employed a three-part division of the book. Part one is set twenty-five years back in time and details the actions that broke my protagonist, a battle mage. It shows why even the thought of using certain elements (magic) as weapons brings on panic attacks. Overcoming his PTSD is crucial to advancing the story.

Other authors will employ mental flashbacks, moments of characters dwelling on past events. These scenes work if they are written as the events unfolded, detailing the moments as the character lived them. The past illuminates the present.

But only if we don’t dump the information in large chunks of exposition.

I’ve read some excellent narratives where the author uses the flashback to ratchet up the suspense in a danger scene. An example could be a character trapped in a small space while a killer searches for her. She remembers being a small child during the war and being hidden in a cupboard by her father when enemy soldiers arrived. Through the keyhole, she witnesses the slaughter of her family.

A flashback scene like that serves three purposes:

It reveals our hero’s severe claustrophobia to the reader and shows her as being human and having an Achilles Heel.
It ratchets up the tension. The unbidden memories and the hero’s visceral response heighten her panic.
It makes the tension feel intimate to the reader, as if they own those emotions.

Flashforwards move us in time, skipping over mundane travel and periods where the story would stagnate. A new chapter and a jump forward in time keep the story in motion—but only if it is clear that some time has passed, during which nothing out of the ordinary happened. These jumps require attention to how the transitions are handled. Mushy shifts between scenes will ruin the pacing of a story.

A calendar is crucial when you are manipulating time in your plot arc. Pacing becomes tricky when a plot calls for unusual timelines.

I enjoyed reading the Time Traveler’s Wife. The plot revolves around Henry’s genetic disorder, which causes him to time travel randomly and with no control, and Clare, his artist wife. She must understand the paradox and cope with his frequent absences.

It is written with alternating first-person POV. I feel the plot couldn’t advance as well if a different narrative mode had been used.

Narrative time and calendar time are separate entities. Point of view and narrative time work together.

Calendar time is world-building. It sets the story in a particular era and shows the passage of time.
POV and narrative time shape the atmosphere and the ambiance of a scene.

We often “think aloud” in writing the first draft. We insert many passive phrasings into the raw narrative, words that I think of as traffic signals for future revisions. These words are a shorthand that helped us get the story down when we were writing the raw story, a guide that now shows us how we intend the narrative to go.

When you choose your grammatical tense, you have chosen a narrative time, a part of world-building that encompasses the past as well as the present and looks toward the future. It shapes the mood and atmosphere in subtle but recognizable ways.

Calendar time is the physical passage of our protagonists through the days and seasons of their stories.

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August 16, 2021 · 6:00 am

Character Development: Narrative Time

Last week, we discussed how the descriptive narrative of a story is comprised of three aspects:

Narrative point of view is the perspective, a personal or impersonal “lens” through which a story is communicated.

Narrative time is the grammatical placement of the story’s time frame in the past or the present, i.e., present tense (we go) or past tense (we went).

Narrative voice is how a story is communicated. It is the author’s fingerprint.

verb-conjugation Today we’re discussing how narrative time, or what we call tense, affects a reader’s perception of character development. In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually shown by how we use the forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in most languages include the past, present, and future.

The way that narrative tense affects a reader’s perception of characters is subtle, an undercurrent that goes unnoticed after the first few paragraphs. It shapes the reader’s view of events, but on a subliminal level.

Every story is different and requires us to use a unique narrative time.

Tense conveys information about time. It relates the time of an event (when) to another time (now or then). The tense you choose indicates the event’s location in time.

Consider the following sentences: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”

All are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence (eat, am, and have).

Yet, they are different because each conveys unique information or points of view about how the action pertains to the present.

We often “think aloud” in writing the first draft. We insert many passive phrasings into the raw narrative, words that I think of as traffic signals. These words are a shorthand that helped us get the story down when we were writing the raw first draft, a guide that now shows us how we intend the narrative to go.

Subjunctives are insidious. The subjunctive (in the English language) is used to form sentences that do not describe known objective facts. In other words, subjunctives describe unknown intangible possibilities.

Maeve Maddox, in her article The Many Forms of the Verb To Be, says:

Of all Modern English verbs, to be has the most forms: am, are, is, was, were, be, being, been. In addition, the helping verb will is used to form a future tense with be (e.g. I will be with you in a minute.)

The forms are so different in appearance that they don’t seem to belong to the same verb. The fact is, they don’t. Oh, they do now, but they came from three different roots and merged in the Old English verbs beon and wesan.

William Shakespeare said it best in Hamlet: “To be or not to be… that is the question.”

Should he exist, or should he not exist—for the deeply depressed Dane, suicide or not suicide is the question. In his soliloquy, Hamlet contemplates death and suicide. He regrets the pain and unfairness of life but ultimately acknowledges that the alternative might be worse.

Subjunctives are small verbs of existence, but just like adverbs, they are telling words. These words fall into our narrative in the first draft because they are signals for the rewrite.

Be_Eight_Forms_LIRF05122019 In the rewrite, we look for the code words that tell us the direction in which we want the narrative to go.

We look at each instance and rewrite the paragraph to show the event rather than tell about it.

If we write a sentence that says a character was hot and thirsty, we leave nothing to the reader’s imagination. The reader is on the outside, looking in.

When we take that experience of thirst and make it immediate, no matter what narrative tense we are writing in, it changes everything.

Which sentence feels stronger, more pressing?

They were hot and thirsty.
They trudged on with dry, cracked lips, yearning for a drop of water.
I walk toward the oasis with dry, cracked lips and parched tongue.

The way we show the perception of time for these thirsty characters is the same – the narrative is in the past tense in the first two cases and the present in the third.

Each sentence says the same thing, but we get a different story when we change the narrative tense, point of view, and verb choice.

“Were” is a verb, but it is subjunctive and is perceived as a weak word, where “trudged” conveys power. The narrative time in which the story is set (past or present tense), verb choice, and expansion of the imagery – these combine to change how we see the characters at that moment.

No matter what narrative tense you choose for your story, using strong verbs to describe their actions and emotions will reinforce the reader’s connection to the characters.

For my short story, View from the Bottom of a Lake, the narrative tense that worked best was a past tense, close third person.

Peggy Jayne smiled. Beneath the green-glittering gaze, her toothsome smile flayed her daughter, leaving Sarah breathless, panicking and longing for her lake.

Who are you Sometimes the only way you can get into a character’s head is to write them in the first-person present tense, which happened to me with Thorn Girl. I struggled with her story for nearly six months until a member of my writing group suggested changing the narrative tense and point of view.

Once I did that, the story fell out of my head the way I had envisioned but couldn’t articulate, and I wrote it in one evening.

My first instinct is to shake my head and back away.

But I don’t. Long ago, my Lady told me that in every life, a time will come when you arrive at a precipice. You must either leap the chasm or fall to your death.

I stand at that place now.

In traditional first-person POV, the protagonist is the narrator. We must keep in mind that no one ever has complete knowledge of anything, so the first-person narrator cannot be omnipotent.

powerwordsWordCloudLIRF06192021 Every story is unique, and some work best in the past tense, while others need to be in the present. When we begin writing a story using a narrative time that is unfamiliar to us, we may have trouble with drifting tense and wandering narrative points of view.