Using past or present tense for your writing

[cloudypie]

Hello! As someone who's not a native English speaker and who works on a research field I have to constantly use past tense and future tense for my writing, so when it comes to VN I tend to be stuck in a dilemma and a never ending flood of corrections.
What kind of writing do you recommend for VN? Are you more comfortable with writing them in present or past tense?

[trooper6]

Either one works. It is just a matter of personal preference. Just like 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person is personal preference.

[Silken Sail]

This is an interesting question for visual novels. In most mediums, there is generally a "default" tense - past for novels, present for scripts, etc. In VNs, I think both can work, but it depends on the perspective you're writing in. If you're writing in third person, I think past tense reads a lot better, and I think examples from the literary world showcase that. However, if you're writing in first person, I think present tense can work really well.

VN's don't need nearly the amount of descriptive text that a literary novel does. The character/BG art paint a lot of that picture already. As a result, prose can be used to highlight a character's personality and thoughts, and I think a combination of first person and present tense can make for great "train of thought" style writing that accomplishes that very well.

That said, there are people who loathe present tense in any public facing fiction writing, so past tense is definitely the "safer" bet.

[Kuiper]

Past tense tends to be the standard for third person. First person narration can use past or present tense; past has historically been more common, but recently present tense has been trending for YA novels (The Hunger Games is probably the most prominent example). And it's also been my experience that a lot of (first person) visual novels use present tense as well.

Also, second person stories tend to almost uniformly be present tense, although I'm sure that you can find some weird experimental literary pieces that tell a second person story with past tense narration.

Incidentally, The Buzz podcast (of which I am a host) did an episode on viewpoint and tense awhile back (discussion of tense starts at around 72 minutes in and delves into different types of past tense narration).

[greenjelly]

Outside of grammatical concerns, present tense also conveys a stronger sense of immediacy (something is happening right now vs. something happened already), so using present tense can make action scenes seem more aggressive and by extension, choices seem more consequential. Past tense is sometimes more reminiscent of fairy tales and archetypal plots, the kind of "all this has happened before and will happen again" classical story structures.

[Krel]

Present tense is the most common tense used in visual novels.

If you're writing in first person, looking at the characters on screen is like looking through the main character's eyes. In this case, I would recommend present tense, because it adds to the sense that events are happening 'now'.

[JeremyBenson]

Asking which tense to use is the wrong question. Tense is a writing based on time. You use the tense that suits the moment. It depends on the tense of the writing.

If you are talking about something that happened it's past, if you're talking about something that's going to happen it's future, and then there is present. You will use them all in your VN. Present is the most common for text, because the conversations are happening at the moment.

Jane - "Hey, you look good."

That's present, she is saying the character looks good now...

In the same VN you could use narration that is past tense if there is a flashback, or if the main story is a narrated story that happened some time ago..

Jane - "Hey, you look good." (Present)
Hero - "Thanks." (Present)
image: Hero walking towards the door and opening the door. (Present tense image showing)
Narrator: He opened the door and walked inside. (Past tense narration, since narrator is telling a story that took place.)

On the other hand if the entire story is happening in the present time, the narrator would say something in present tense as well.

Narrator: He opens the door and walks inside. (Present tense narration.)

It really depends on tense of what you're writing....

Also, don't forget basic tense for speach. Even in a present tense game, characters will talk past tense talk to get a passed point across.

Jane - "She looked at me weird." (Speaking in the present tense, but talking about something passed that happened.)

[Zelan]

This is an interesting question for visual novels. In most mediums, there is generally a "default" tense - past for novels, present for scripts, etc. In VNs, I think both can work, but it depends on the perspective you're writing in. If you're writing in third person, I think past tense reads a lot better, and I think examples from the literary world showcase that. However, if you're writing in first person, I think present tense can work really well.

VN's don't need nearly the amount of descriptive text that a literary novel does. The character/BG art paint a lot of that picture already. As a result, prose can be used to highlight a character's personality and thoughts, and I think a combination of first person and present tense can make for great "train of thought" style writing that accomplishes that very well.

That said, there are people who loathe present tense in any public facing fiction writing, so past tense is definitely the "safer" bet.

I agree with pretty much everything said here.

In the end, it's really your choice. Think about your writing style, the story that you're trying to tell, and your personal preference and make your decision.

The one very important thing that no one has said yet is: make sure it's consistent. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard, but something that I've noticed in my own writing is that I tend to slip between tenses without realizing it and have to go back and correct huge portions of text to make sure the tense is uniform.

[Kuiper]

Asking which tense to use is the wrong question. Tense is a writing based on time. You use the tense that suits the moment. It depends on the tense of the writing.

I think this post may misunderstand the question that the OP is asking, but it does raise some points which I think are worth addressing.

Specifically, there is often a question of "past-tense or present-tense narration: which do I use?" And as a rule, that should be consistent throughout the book, and if you're going to break this rule, you should be aware that you're doing it, and you should be doing it for a very specific reason. For example, in Elizabeth Moon's novel "The Speed of Dark," we have viewpoint characters that are either autistic or neurotypical (non-autistic). The neurotypical characters have past-tense narration, and the autistic characters have present-tense narration, which makes them feel very different--this is intentional on the author's part, as it helps support the notion that the way that the autistic characters and neurotypical characters think and experience the world around them is fundamentally different. The transition is jarring--and that's a deliberate choice on the author's part.

Barring odd examples like this, you should stick to one tense for your book's narration. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that 99% of the time, you should choose one tense and stick to it from start to finish.

Now, picking a single tense for your narration does not mean that you change the tense of every verb in the book. For example, anything that's dialog doesn't change. Anything that's between the quotation marks is a representation of how the characters in your story talk, and your characters shouldn't start talking differently just because of a choice you've made regarding the narrative tense. Plus, there are very few "rules" regarding dialog on a mechanical level. Dialog is allowed to contain grammar "errors," it's allowed to contain misinformation and lies, and it's allowed to contain made-up words or sentence fragments. For example, it's totally acceptable for a character to say "I never learned how to read good." This is a grammatically incorrect sentence, but the phrase inside the quotation marks, meaning that it's a representation of how the character talks. Of course no one (apart from ignoramuses) is going to slam the author for writing grammatically incorrect things just because their characters talk a certain way. (By the same token, it's totally acceptable for a character to say, "Abraham Lincoln was the first president of the United States," if my intention was to show that this character is mis-informed. The thing that they said is "wrong," but that wrongness is part of their character and part of the story.)

Also, choosing present-tense narration doesn't mean that you change the tense of things that actually took place in the past. The narration is about the story's current action. So if I'm writing a story in present tense about a character who gives us a bit of backstory about his past, he wouldn't say, "My dad is killed twenty years ago in a car crash." That would be absurd. He's talking about the past. So he says, "My dad was killed twenty years ago in a car crash." But then we move to the story's current action, and the text on the page reads, "I walk out the front door and get in my car." All present-tense, because now we're narrating events of the story. (It's important to note that a character saying to the reader, "My dad was killed 20 years in a car crash" is NOT part of the present action that is being narrated. That means that we are still being consistent with tense, even though we used a past-tense verb. We can even link the two, e.g. "I walk out the front door and get in my car. On the drive to the store, I briefly remember my late father, who was killed twenty years ago in a car crash." Furthermore, it's okay for a character to declare "I will go to the store" (future tense), because in the context of a present-tense or past-tense narrated story, that part is not narration; it is an announcement of intent regarding something that hasn't happened yet (basically, the character is providing their plans/predictions for the future, which may not actually come to fruition).

For an example of how mixing past and present tense verbs would be incorrect, we can just look at any example where both verbs are being used in the current action. For example, "I walked out the front door and get into my car, then drive to the store." That's an example of mixing tenses, and it's wrong. Furthermore, it's wrong in a way that isn't really justifiable in the same manner as, say, the "Speed of Dark" example that I mentioned earlier. It's a actual error with the narration. (Note that while "The Speed of Dark" does in a way "break the rules" by having both present tense and past tense narration in the same book, it still maintains internal consistency by ensuring that the autistic characters ALWAYS have present-tense narration, and the neurotypical characters ALWAYS have past-tense narration.) Switching between tenses in the middle of a paragraph, or in the middle of a sentence, is just plain wrong. (Perhaps there is some corner case where you could mix the tenses to show that the viewpoint character is going insane after gazing upon some Lovecraftian Eldritch horror or something to that effect, which is why we always like to say "tools, not rules" and say "this applies 99% of the time," but my advice to any new writer is to learn how to follow the rules before you break them.)