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

[kisahawklin]

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. :)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, I agree--I always feel deeply embarrassed if I ever send anything to beta and then find all kinds of typo errors that I should've seen and fixed beforehand.

Maybe it's reading so many hundreds of stories with differing tenses that has made you start to do it too? Though I will say I don't remember this ever being an issue for me when I was reading one of your stories. So even if it is a problem, you do an excellent job of fixing it. :D

[kisahawklin]

<3

It's not the only thing. I find myself messing up homonyms these days a surprising amount. I never used to do that, and it used to actively piss me off. I don't read stories that contain errors like this (except in beta, and honestly, I don't do that much beta work for beginners), so I can't even say it's exposure or anything. I have no idea, but I find it immensely frustrating. It's why I self-edit two or three times before I send anything to beta.

I think we all have our issues, and it's a matter of what you can fix and what your beta can catch and a willingness to learn. I'm easier on people these days. I still don't read fic with those sorts of issues, but I'm not so mean about those stories anymore. I figure I'll give the author another shot in a year or so, when they have a little more writing under their belt.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I think it's just getting older. :) I noticed a few homonym mistakes in what I was writing yesterday myself. It's like my fingers automatically type a word without any real input from my brain.

I'm also nicer than I used to be when I find these issues, though I still can't get through stories that have a lot of them because I keep getting bounced out of the narrative. Mellowing with age, i guess. :)