: Is it confusing for English speakers to see mixed tenses in narration? I translate fanfiction stories from Russian into English as a hobby and I'm a bit confused about tenses. In Russian, it's

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While I whole-heartedly agree with @Double U, I'd like to add that on the few occasions where it's ok to mix tenses, there are very specific reasons behind it.

I looked at her in shock. I don't mean I was horrified, but I was definitely unsettled.

In this example, the use of present in 'I don't mean' makes it feal as an aside of the narrator as if they're really speaking directly to the reader, explaining the situation. It also separates the time of the events (past) and the time of the narration or reading (present).

I opened the supposed mystic box carefully since everyone knows opening mystic boxes can unleash disaster, even if I don't really believe in such things.

In this example, the present in 'everyone knows' and 'I don't really believe' underlines that those facts are true. 'Everyone knew' might mean people think differently now, and 'I didn't really believe' may mean I changed my mind in the course of the story.

However, the mix must be used sparingly or it simply loses its contrastive power.

As for fanfiction... I am an avid fanfic reader and, based on my experience, I can tell you that where it comes to writing skill (independently of the worth of the plot and character building abilities) some fanfic writers are ok, a lot are bad, some are terrible, and a few are very good. Therefore, don't look at (most) fanfic writers as an example of what is good.

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I felt something wet on my cheek. Can it be that I’m… crying? As I
caught myself thinking of it, I ran my hand over the cheek.

A monolingual English writer will probably write:

I felt something wet on my cheek. Could it be that I was crying? As
I caught myself thinking of it, I ran my hand over the cheek.

It's just common practice to write everything in a single tense in the English language. When you write in a certain language, you have to follow the writing conventions of that language. The stuff that you apply to Russian writings cannot be applied to English writings. It's one of the big issues that many translators have to deal with. Sometimes, translators have to re-arrange whole chapters of the source-language work in order to convey the same level of emotion in the reader in the target-language work, simply because a literary device doesn't work in the target language.

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