Feeling Tense; Not Feeling The Tenses

[taste_is_sweet]

I've been reading fanfiction for over fifteen years now, and this is something I have never been able to understand. Why do so many stories flit between verb tenses from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence?

I can completely understand how easy it would be to make these kind of mistakes if you change a story from present to past tense or past to present, but all stories can't have been edited like that, right? So what gives?

I know my grammar has been far from perfect and I occasionally have a thing for repetitive sentences and histrionics (among other problems), but I can say with complete confidence that this is a mistake I've never made unless I was changing the tense of a story while editing it. I'm not trying to single anyone out and I'm definitely not thinking of anyone in particular. It's just that I've been wondering about this for years.

So, can anyone out there enlighten me? How is it possible to get your tenses wrong when you're just straight-up writing a story? Have any of you guys done it?

Comments

[sholio]

The place where I tend to run into trouble is when I'm trying to write more than one tense in the same story - for example, a story that's largely in present tense, but also references things that happened to the characters in the past. It's not so much a problem of forgetting what tense I'm supposed to be in; I get confused about what tense is grammatically correct in the border areas.

But I think I've seen what you're talking about - stories that randomly shift between past and present from sentence to sentence. And yeah, I have no idea about that one. I'm pretty sure I don't do that. Actually, it's hard for me to imagine doing that; the tense is part of the flow of the story for me ... it would be like randomly changing a character's name.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly! I mean, I've read stuff like this:

"Don't you touch him!" Steve shouted. Kolya just laughs.

And I'm like you--I have such trouble not keeping tenses consistent that I even had problems writing that example.

I do agree that some tenses are just difficult, though, like the more-than-perfect past tense (he'd had his appendex removed before he'd gone to Atlantis. Or something?). Those are a bitch.

Thank you for commenting! :D