: Re: Shifting tenses in the middle of narration I am writing a short story where the narrator is recording a message to his daughter about some tragic event and in between the narration, the narrator

@Nickens642

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We use tenses to establish a temporal order between statements and from there derive chronology and causality between facts. If you mess that up, no one will be able to follow the stream of events in your writings.

That does not mean that it is forbidden to switch tenses. In fact in a stream of consciousness narration it is perfectly acceptable to switch tenses between paragraphs, and even within the same paragraph; it would still be acceptable in a more restrained type of narration, provided that, in both circumstances:

events happening in close temporal proximity to each other are presented with the same tense, e.g. what I saw then... what I did then... what I see now... what I do now...
statements about absolute truths are told in present tense, e.g. life is great
conditional sentences are correctly constructed, e.g. If I were, I would
consecutio temporum is respected, e.g. I say that there are things we can't understand

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