: Re: Use of past vs. present tense in works of fiction I have recently picked up several works of fiction and begun to read them. I have found that some are written using past tense while others

@XinRu607

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Here's what I'm familiar with: a lot of people see present-tense as a description of something happening right now, while past-tense is a narration of events that have already concluded. So:

Some readers find present-tense more immediate and, well, tense.
Some readers take issue with past-tense narration, seeing it as an unjustified device: If somebody's telling us this story, who is it? Why is he telling us the story? If the narration is first-person, that means the narrator must have made it through the story pretty OK, no?
Most readers accept above issues as unimportant side-effects of convention. E.g. if a narrator dies at the end of the story, they won't shout "wait, so who just wrote the whole thing?" - they don't see the narration as being part of the established facts of the story.

I think a lot of people find past-tense more natural because present-tense storytelling is not something you encounter in day to day life. In real life, people tell you things that have happened; it's rare to be subjected to a real-time report. Think of the exceptions - e.g. sports commentaries and on-the-spot new reports; they can be very exciting, but they're rarely personal or possessing narrative structure. And those kind of reports would probably be exhausting to listen to for too long of a stretch.

Fiction presents things happening "now" in a medium used primarily to describe things already over. That's where the issue comes from. But in most cases, I think that readers prefer the comfort of more familiar phrasing over the increased accuracy of using a more appropriate tense. The familiarity makes the inaccuracies accepted and invisible.

As Kate said, current convention favors past-tense writing, so all other considerations aside - anything else may feel somewhat jarring or unusual to many readers. And both are popular, familiar and accepted enough that you can really pick whichever feels most comfortable and appropriate for you, as long as you remain consistent within a single piece.

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