: Re: Historical Present in English? As a historian, I at times get my fingers on Latin texts. Latin has a rather peculiar use of past and present tenses: Usually, texts are written in Imperfect,

What Dickens does is very clever. He starts off in the irrealis, which needs a past perfect, then he goes through all the recollected sensations, ending with the smells.

As everybody (including Proust) knows, smell is the most evocative sense; one single whiff of floor-cleaning compound is enough to instantly bring back 8 years of grade school existence in most Americans, for instance.

So the remembrance of the smells drags him into the present tense, for his present remembrance of things past. And then he's cataloging things, and events, and relations, and not just impressions. In the present tense, where he's dragged the reader.

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: Re: Historical Present in English? As a historian, I at times get my fingers on Latin texts. Latin has a rather peculiar use of past and present tenses: Usually, texts are written in Imperfect,

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: How can I radically time-jump for my epilogue well? I'm working on a branching narrative kind of story, and the entire story focuses on the reader uncovering a mystery in the house that they're

: Write a story based on characters from an old novel I am considering writing a "history" of the Morlocks (based on the characters in the H. G. Wells novel). Question: Is this allowed, or do

: Should fiction mention song names and iPods? In my novel, the protagonist is depressed. In the story which is in my mind... The autumn leaves were falling as I was sitting alone and

: Can I use spoken English at some places over 'technically accurate English' in a general fiction? I have written my novel as a 'first person singular' and in past tense. There are lot of times

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