6.22.2007
Ok, I'm working on a flash back and am unsure if I can mix past tense with past perfect (I think its past perfect). Like "he embraced" vs "he had embraced". If I can't, which one is better to use. I like the latter, but then if I only use that tense it feels repetitive to put 'had' in front of each verb. HELP.
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3 comments:
are you writing in past or present tense for the rest of the story? i think it said that if you're in past tense use the past perfect a couple of times and then switch to past, if you're in present keep it with past perfect? or the other way around. i think it's in chapter 6. another thing is using -ing and/or contractions, like "he had kissed her before leaving, and then he'd spent the rest of the day..." i think that works, anyway?
There IS a place in the book where it explains shifting to flashback, and I believe it's in the chapter we read this week on fictional time.
The past perfect ("had walked") only needs to be used to transition to the flashback (so you use this tense for, say, one sentence). After you use it once, you can just use simple past ("walked") and your readers will be able to catch on. There's never any reason to write a whole passage all in past perfect; it gets unwieldy, all those "hads."
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