"You Can't HANDLE the Tense!"

POV and Tense; another in my series: An Editor's Tips for Writers

Apr 17, 2026

First off, a reminder that I am performing in tomorrow’s Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! prose/story slam tomorrow on Zoom. If you are interested in attending the slam, you can go ahead and jump to the bottom of this post for info or just read on to the end.

Tense is just one of the many factors that come into play when deciding what Point of View (POV) to choose for writing your novel: You get to choose between first person (I/me), second (you/your) or third person (he/her, they/them), and also pick between past tense or present tense. I used “novel” rather than book, because almost all memoirs are written in first person, past tense, though occasionally they may veer into first person, present tense; most other nonfiction is written in third person past tense (or in third person, present tense).

Okay, you may be saying, so what’s the big deal? I pick a tense—past or present—and I stick to it. What is so hard about that? In theory, nothing. In practice, plenty.

Of course, there are the typical improper tense shifts, which many readers and any editor should be able to spot. These are places where the author has fallen into the wrong tense while writing, and managed to not spot it in the rewriting and self-editing (reading it aloud is the only surefire way to be sure to catch these sorts of errors!). If the manuscript is written in first person past tense, like this: “I went into the bedroom and looked through the chest of drawers for the gun. Then I heard a sound…” but then the text continues, “I turn around and there he is.” No, he isn’t. The line should be “I turned around and there he was.”

As I said, those obvious past tense to present tense shifts are pretty easy to spot and simple to correct. They seldom happen the other way around, but of course they can. Most of the time, these are the result of parts of the book being written at different times, for different reasons, or they may be because small sections were cut and pasted from a later chapter into an earlier chapter, or vice versa, perhaps due to the input of an editor like myself: “Move the action earlier, save the expository for later!” runs one of my oft written notes to a first-time novelist.

The sort of minor but bothersome or potentially problematic things that derive from tense issues are harder to notice in a manuscript, because they are much less obvious. One is the prevalence of words like “had” and “was,” when we are writing in past tense—and the overuse of words like “is” and “have” in present tense writing (I won’t go into the overuse of “I” in first person writing, no matter what tense you are in!).

Part of the issue with “had” is that it is such a helpful word—it alerts readers to something being in the past, and it can work well in both tenses. You can be writing in present tense and then want to mention something that happened in the past, so you add “had.” Perhaps it is something simple, like: “That was the way she had always done things.” What you don’t want is another “had” in there to confuse things, like: “She had to feed the cats before she went out walking, because that was the way she had always done things.” Maybe instead: “She would feed the cats before going out walking, because that was the way she had always done things.”

Occasionally, writers go further, into the realm of the dreaded “had had.” Like, “She had written the letter in pencil first, then she had had to rewrite it in ink.” I would rewrite this as: “She’d written the letter in pencil, and had to rewrite it in ink.” No one is going to be confused about whether the rewriting happened in the past. (If it didn’t actually happen in the past, you could write: “She’d written the letter in pencil, and had yet to rewrite it in ink.”)

Why, you might be asking, do I sometimes turn “she had” into “she’d”? I usually do it if the “had” is not important, or if I can’t avoid using it, but I want it to be less obvious for purposes of rhythm or to improve the flow of a sentence. If an author writes: “She had to do it today, there was no other option she had been able to come up with.” I would edit the second “she had” to “she’d” because the first one is necessary to understanding the sentence, and the second one is purely a tool. Of course, I’d probably suggest: “She had to do it today, there was no other option.”

One of the reasons I’m glad to be alive and writing in the 21st century is the ability to easily search for words like “was” and “had” in a manuscript, rather than having to search for them and mark them for removal manually, as we did in “the old days” when I started out. I’ve written before about cutting “thought verbs” (knew, wanted, needed, realized) and “filter words” (saw, heard, felt) in your manuscript to make it more visual and active. See my post Five Tips For Writers, From an Editor. The tedious process of searching for overused words is instantaneous now, though the replacing, and the expanding it often entails, takes quite a bit of time and careful thought.

So when you are choosing a tense, or perhaps realizing that you need to rewrite your novel in a different tense—yes, I have completely rewritten a manuscript from past to present tense or vice-versa, and I’ve even recommended the process to an author-client or two over the years—you need to be aware of the changes that will be made beyond simply changing “I do” to “I did.” Everything that happens needs to be changed to the new tense, which creates ripples that might affect everything else in the manuscript. That means it isn’t just a simple “search and replace” task.

Of course, sometimes the change that needs to be made is the POV itself—from first person to third or vice-versa, and that makes for a much more challenging rewrite. A first person POV means that everything in a book’s plot needs to be revealed to the protagonist or narrator visually or told to them in dialogue, unless it is something they already know. You don’t get to drop in the third person omniscient narrator and have them list facts like “Chicago can be bitterly cold in spring,” unless the protagonist or narrator knows that themselves. Writers have to adapt by using lines like “I figured that Chicago might still be cold, since it was only the first week of April, so I packed my coat,” which works fine, but that begins to feel awkward if it’s overused.

Speaking of present tense—Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! is happening tomorrow, Saturday, April 18, at 2pm PT on Zoom. WBTYS is an online feminist story slam created and hosted by Nan Tepper of The Next Write Thing. The theme for this month’s slam is Death & Taxes.

Our “doors” open at 4:45pm, and the show will start promptly on the hour, 2pm PST (5pm EST). You’ll have to do the time-zone math as it applies to your locale.

I’ll be reading in the company of ten very talented women. Come listen!