: 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

@Debbie451

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Yes, you're totally fine. If your tense shift happens between paragraphs — that is, the new tense starts a new paragraph — it should be clear what's happening. If this is a first-person narrative and you as the writer have shown that this is the narrator addressing someone, there's no reason you can't shift. People do this in reality in their speech.

What you can't do is have the entire story randomly shift tenses without cause. Third-person narration, or even first-person which is addressing the reader and not another character, has to stay in one tense unless there's an explicit reason (like a flashback or a dream) to change.

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