Looking Backward II, or Some Tenses and How to Use Them

The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what’s called the “historic present,” meaning that the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than He sleeps in the library all afternoon).

This confuses a lot of people, so let me just repeat that: in most stories and novels, “He slept in the library all afternoon” is an action that is taking place in the present of the story, even though it is written in past tense. If you’re following this convention, you only use present tense in dialog: “He sleeps in the library all afternoon, every afternoon,” she said. “I’m sure you can find him there if you look.”  

You can tell a story in present tense (and there are considerably more of them told that way now than there used to be), but right now I’m talking about the most common convention.

When the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense, you need to use another tense to let the reader know that something happened earlier, in the story’s past. The convention for this is to use the past perfect tense:  He had slept in the library all afternoon. So By the time dinner rolled around, he felt exhausted is happening in story-present, but even though he had slept in the library all afternoon is story-past.

When you have a really short amount of story-past information to put in, you can usually just use past-perfect for all of it: By the time dinner rolled around, he felt exhausted, even though he had slept in the library all afternoon. Griselda had woken him as the sun was setting, and he’d barely managed to get in a cup of coffee before coming down. One look at the dinner guests made him glad he’d had coffee; if he was going to be matching wits with Simon tonight, he needed to be alert. The nap in the library, the shower, and the coffee all happen in story-past, and are presented as a mini-flashback – the protagonist is currently coming down to dinner while remembering what he did this afternoon.

The trouble is that long stretches of past-perfect tense start reading very awkwardly, very quickly. The way most writers avoid this is by moving the “present” of the story backward in time using a sentence or two of past-perfect tense, then shifting to simple past tense for the rest of the scene until it’s time to bring the “now” of the story back up to the point where the flashback started. This is a lot harder to explain than it is to do.

By the time dinner rolled around, he felt exhausted, even though he had slept in the library all afternoon. Griselda had woken him as the sun was setting.

“You missed tea,” she told him. “Do you want to miss dinner, too?”

He sat up and blinked at her. […insert rest of scene…] “Coffee,” he said. “I need coffee, now.”

Griselda had complained, but she’d gotten him a cup. He had gulped it down, heedless of the burn, and when he walked through the dining room door and saw Simon’s grin, he was glad he’d taken the time. He needed to be alert to match wits with Simon.

Using the change in tense to move backward and then forward in time integrates the flashback a little more smoothly into the narrative than using space breaks (as I did in the previous post). The writer still has to be clear about Who is the flashback viewpoint, Where it is happening (since flashbacks frequently are not happening in the same place as current story action), and When it is happening (at least enough that the reader can tell which bits are story-present and which are story-past). In general, the longer the flashback is, the more transition you probably need between “now” and “then” and back to “now.”

Oh, and notice that in the previous post, when I used the space-break to delineate the flashback scene, I did not change to past-perfect tense anywhere. When you use the space-break, the break itself is the signal that story-now is moving backward in time; you almost never need to also use past-perfect tense.