Tense. Tenses make me tense. Made me tense? Good grief, tell me there is/was/will be a simple trick to keeping it all straight. Thanks!—lisa
Funny you should mention this, Lisa. Tense makes lots of people tense. Tense makes me tense.
Lucky for you, there IS a simple trick to keeping it all straight.
Write the whole thing in the simple past tense.
Lisa wrote her whole novel in the simple past tense. She did a great job, too.
As you write your novel, try to flag backstory, including not only chapters but any paragraphs, single sentences, or parts of sentences that refer to something happening before whatever’s happening to your characters at that very moment. Take notes. (Or, alternately, ignore them and highlight them later in a single read-through that you do solely for this purpose.)
Then when you go into revision, think long and hard about each and every instance. Must it absolutely be cast as backstory? Is there no way on earth for it to be cast in the moment? (A lot of the time, backstory gets thrown into the first draft because you don’t realize something has to have happened in order for the thing that’s happening right now to happen. The easy solution is to pick that darn thing up later and drop it into the story where it chronologically belongs.)
Put every instance that absolutely must be cast as backstory into the pluperfect. Everything that “was” “had been.”
Minimize the pluperfect as much as humanly possible. In cases where the backstory just has to take a lot of space—like an entire chapter—set the hook in the pluperfect and the rest of it in the simple past. If you can get away with it, set just the first verb in the pluperfect and the rest in the simple past.
Remember that your goal is for your story to transfer itself magically, with actually almost no contact with the words, from the page straight into your reader’s brain. I mean, honestly. If it’s hard on the writer to keep those tenses straight, imagine how hard it is for your reader.
(This is covered with examples under ‘Tensing Up—Past, Present, & Future’ in Chapter 20 “Techniques” of The Art & Craft of Fiction.)