Tense -- Jennie

My first book was the typical, never-gonna-get-published work. It was a solid first effort at a new hobby for me. After never have taken a creative writing class, I learned a lot while drafting this YA novel, particularly about about character and dialogue. Needless to say, the plot was severely linear. And the whole manuscript was written in one verb tense: the present.

For my second work, the characters were slightly more developed. Dialogue was a bit more important. And I expanded the present-tense plot by integrating some flashbacks, sprinkling "-ed" endings throughout.

I'm still learning.

This new piece I'm scrawling probes the consequences of human suffering. I'm keeping the motivation of my main character at the center of plot this time. I'm trying to return often to her thoughts, feelings, and reactions. I'm reminding myself to have her talk to the other characters with the same vernacular and tone in which she narrates to the reader. And in addition to using present- and past-tenses, I'm throwing in glimpses of the future.

Now, I'm wondering if I could have better polished my craft if I had just stuck with one tense all along. It's difficult to focus on character and dialogue when you're straddling three kinds of verbs. The whole thing makes me, well, tense.

The way I see it, though, is that for the next novel, I'll have to move on to character and dialogue. Because I've run out of verb tenses, right?

Maybe, unlike my fictional first character, I'll take a cyclic journey, winding up, where I started, only deeper, and in only one tense.