Oblomov Boblomov wrote:A question on writing in tenses, as I realise I might have been doing this without noticing.
Here is a brief extract:
The sound of the door shutting behind her released a breath that Daria realised she had been holding onto. Straightening herself up and regaining her confident stride, she resolved to focus on getting on with what needed to be done.
Should I be writing 'As she straightened herself up and regained her confident stride...' there, instead of using present verbs? I think I used them to give a more active, fluid style to the writing, but am I risking arrest if the Grammar Police show up?!
"-ing" doesn't always indicate present tense, it can sometimes indicate a progressive action taking place contemporaneously with the rest of the sentence. "Straightening herself up, she resolved to focus..." is all past tense -- it's not in mixed tense. The technique is called a "participle clause" if you want to search for it and check I'm not talking nonsense.
As for which is better, I think it's really about what reads better to you. I think your second example might be a bit verbose if this is a tense (ha) scene, but try it and see.
When it comes to actually mixing tenses -- it isn't always bad, but it should be logically consistent. If your narrative voice is relaying events that happened in their past, then they shouldn't drift to present tense. But if they're reporting a fact which is still true in their present, it may be appropriate to have them speak in the present tense for a sentence, or whatever. I'm far (very very far!) from being a confident writer, but for what it's worth, it strikes me as the kind of thing you might keep an eye on when editing but not worry about too much when drafting.