Oh, I totally do this. Normally it's because I'm coming out of a past tense patch back into a present tense story (a flashback or thought about the past, not a section - I don't mix tenses in my stories by sections, normally), or sometimes I just switch while I'm writing, and a paragraph or two later I'll put something in present tense and realize that it doesn't work with the rest of the sentence, and then I have to backtrack and see how long I've tense flipped and fix it. I have no idea what causes it, and I don't think I used to do this (or maybe I just didn't notice?). I do it now, though, and I still catch it sometimes after my betas miss it and I've had something posted for months.
I do know that when I take back up a story after having set it down (even just a day - when I start writing the next day) that I have to reread to make sure I start out in the same tense. In general, while I agree with busaikko that sometimes the variety of places and times and ways of writing means that the tense can get disjointed, I seem to just generally switch tenses randomly with no rhyme or reason, too. *shrug*
And yeah, I beta for people and this is one of those things that I catch a lot (I usually catch my own while I'm writing, or sometimes in my first self-edit after writing). It used to drive me crazy (which makes me think that I didn't used to tense flip before) because I didn't understand how people could *do* that. Now it drives me crazy because it's something that I think most people should fix themselves before sending to beta. There are a lot of things like that for me, but I'm getting crankier in my old age, I think. :)
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15/5/11 19:31 (UTC)I do know that when I take back up a story after having set it down (even just a day - when I start writing the next day) that I have to reread to make sure I start out in the same tense. In general, while I agree with
And yeah, I beta for people and this is one of those things that I catch a lot (I usually catch my own while I'm writing, or sometimes in my first self-edit after writing). It used to drive me crazy (which makes me think that I didn't used to tense flip before) because I didn't understand how people could *do* that. Now it drives me crazy because it's something that I think most people should fix themselves before sending to beta. There are a lot of things like that for me, but I'm getting crankier in my old age, I think. :)