Being unable to avoid reality from falling apart and so losing everyone and everything I love to the unfeeling void of nothingness as my consciousness lingers on for eternity alone and shapeless until the memory of my loves and life is nothing but a distant faded echo in a language I no longer comprehend. Also evil sockpuppets.
Deep down, that is her actual fear. Becoming an abstract entity with a consciousness floating around in nothing, losing everything as it slowly fades from her over aeons.
I wonder what tense you've all chosen to write in and why.
I know past tense is likely the most common, but I have experimented with both and decided that present tense offers more direct immersion for my purposes.
This also ties into who the narrator is. In my WIP, it is a person in the room invisibly tagging along with the MC.
How did you decide, and is it reflected in the identity of the narrator?
Oh, that is a good insight. I suppose it does inch a bit closer to screenplay writing than past tense.
I didn't know romance was so present-tense heavy. Perhaps that makes sense. It might be an easy way to emphasize some emersion.
Ah, a personal preference doesn't make you a grumpy old woman. That would be more the case if you started telling everyone they have to write in past tense.
Absolutely. Not here to judge but honestly curious about how it is perceived and why.
Isn't past tense a little odd in romance sometimes? Unless it is narrated as a recount from one of the characters it always makes me a little confused about the narrator in case of intimate details and such.
That is precisely what got me pondering on this. I remembered an old professor telling me that past tense was the only valid tense to write in.
Of course, this is nonsense, but when I considered it, I wondered how many authors may have been imprinted with that idea and would have written more interesting work if they had considered present tense an option.
Oh, that is interesting. What made it feel like such a rookie mistake? Was it not a conscious choice?
It would be interesting to rewrite a random chapter from one tense to the other. It seems like a good way to make sure it's what fits the story the most.
I've been there. I had an obsession with utterly obscure words in my narration, which made the writing incredibly hard to read. It was a mix of a genuine fondness for obscure words and trying to seem clever.
I was urged to sprinkle in complicated words because of how susceptible academia is to such tricks.
So now I simply have a character who is fond of odd words. This makes it much more manageable, and I can have some SC ask what in the world she's talking about.