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It's also something that beginning writers fall into... I run a creative writing site that is for groups of authors to write collective branching fiction togeth
by tunesmith 6y ago
It's also something that beginning writers fall into... I run a creative writing site that is for groups of authors to write collective branching fiction together. It's like choose-your-own-adventure but with a slightly more literary focus, where choices are about character and plot choices, rather than just like dungeon exploration. As part of that we encourage third-person past tense, but it's interesting how frequent it is that a new author will come in write their first couple of chapters in present tense - even if the chapters they are following up on are in past tense.
- LeftHandPath 6y agoIt was something that I got preoccupied with when I was writing a lot back in middle/high school. I tended towards past-tense, but I noticed that a lot of young adult novels were first-person present, e.g. Hunger Games.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt’s one of the things my college professors pointed out to me, my mixing of tenses. I don’t (didn’t) know enough to remedy it. Any resources?
- klodolph 6y agoGet an editor? Nothing short of feedback is going to fix problems like this, in my experience. There are grammar analysis tools but they are only so good.
- phoe-krk 6y agoWhat is the site? What kind of software do you use for that?
- tunesmith 6y agoIt's called storysprawl, the site is private now and has been off-and-on dormant and active for the last 25 years. More active now because of COVID. We've got around 1000 chapters written across 20-30 stories. It started out perl/gdbm, then php/mysql. More recently it has a smattering of react thrown in (particularly for graphically mapping the stories) and I'm rewriting the backend in scala/play. The tech has generally tracked my career I guess. :)
- notahacker 6y agoBut surely in CYA-type narrative, present tense is as much of an orthodoxy your guidelines are challenging as past tense in regular fiction? Would be interested to see the site if you're happy to share though.