: Re: Is it a good idea to stay away from past progressive in fiction? I never noticed this in my writing until one of my readers pointed it out: We were driving down the highway in Tom's

@Shanna875

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Back in writing school, an author advised his students to write in the first-person present.

The objective is to place as few intermediaries as possible between the reader and the action of the story.

Even writing in the simple past tense adds a degree of separation between reader and action because it amplifies the presence of an intermediary, namely the storyteller or narrator that all fiction has.

The maximum degree of remove happens in epistolary fiction where someone gets a letter from someone else who describes in the letter what happened to yet another person. That unnecessarily complicated chain of storytelling makes novels like Les Liaisons Dangereuses terribly tedious to read. A young writer ambitious enough to rewrite the whole thing in first-person present, and maybe recast it into a promiscuous 21st century, could possibly make a fortune.

Tom drives his Toyota 4Runnerdown the highway. Dim streetlights strobe
by, and the night city scene fades behind us.

Seems more immediate to me.

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