This tense comes in handy when you’re telling a story, but, in order for the story to make sense in the correct order, you need to provide background information and refer to something that occurred before the main events of the story you’re telling. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.Īs you can see when you read this passage, the sun had baked and burned the land, and the house had been painted, at some point in time before the sun blistered the paint and before the rains washed it away. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. ![]() Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. Here’s another snapshot for context, also from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with the past perfect verb phrases highlighted. ![]() One easy way to recognize past perfect tense, though? Look for the word “had.” Generally, past perfect tense is used to talk about past events or an action that occurred even before the main event of the plot. Past perfect tense is a little more complex than past simple tense. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. These sentences are from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Here’s an example of how past simple tense looks in fiction, with the past simple verbs highlighted. A story that’s set in past tense overall will use past simple tense to describe most actions within the plot. You’ll find this tense used broadly in most fiction and spoken accounts. These verbs are used to talk about and describe past events that were fully completed at some point in the past. This is the simplest narrative tense there is. ![]() While many modern authors play with future and present tenses in their novels or short stories (especially present tense in the young adult story space), “narrative tenses” technically only refers to past tenses. The term “narrative tenses” is specifically used to tell stories that happened in the past. You probably learned about other verb tenses in school, like future or present, but narrative tenses aren’t just any old verb tenses. ![]() There are four primary narrative tenses: past simple, past continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous. Here’s what you need to know about narrative tenses as a writer. The wrong verbs and related words can make a sentence clunky and distracting, pulling your reader out of your story. Using the right verb tense as you describe events in your book or build any sort of narrative is crucial to creating immersive stories. There are four narrative tenses: past simple, past continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous. Different tenses can communicate different things about how and when these actions were taken. Narrative tenses are verb tenses that are used to talk about things that happened in the past.
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