How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Too Tense

Did you know you can't run through a campground? You can only ran through one, because it's past tents. 

Ha ha! Get it?

...sorry. 

I have a nit to pick with this one, so bear with me. Also, tense goes hand in hand with the previous chapter, so if you haven't read it yet go back and do that.

I'll wait.

Ok, now that you're caught up, let's talk about rounding out your point of view, hereafter referred to as POV, with your narrator's place in time. Where voice and perspective tell you whose story you're following, POV tells you what direction they're facing.

There are three positions relative to the events of your story that you can choose from: past, present, and future.

Future tense POV is like a second person narrative: worth mentioning once, then throwing into the trash bin never to dredge it up again. It's speculative writing, hard to write and hard to follow. For example,

          At ten o'clock, Giuseppe will get into his Mustang and drive to work, where he'll spend eight hours hunting for mistakes in client spreadsheets to exploit for his own profit.

A complete mess, right? It works for sections of a story, specific instances where you want to create a sense of uncertainty and imbalance because everything is only planned, nothing actually happens. Even writing in the second person, where the reader is the protagonist, can be sold easier than this. Let me put it this way: if you have the talent to write an entire book like this without making your readers nauseous, you don't belong on Wattpad, and you certainly don't need to read my how-to book.

With that nonsense behind us, let's look at more useful tools, past and present tense.

In the previous chapter (that you read, right?) I talked about voice as a separate issue, but the two go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or marshmallow and chocolate if you don't like peanuts, or Brad and Angela if you don't have a sweet tooth, except that didn't work out so well did it?

I digress. You understand my point.

When you choose a voice, you also need to select the tense, because it further determines what a reader can know and when they can know it. Most books are written in past tense because it gives you more options.

          Giuseppe got into his Mustang and drove to work, where he spent eight hours hunting for ways to exploit his clients' financial documents for personal profit. He hated his job but loved the money, so he returned every day without complaint to the dim, rented office of a CPA.

It's used most often because it is by far the most versatile. With this voice, I can maneuver through time as it benefits the story since it's looking backward at events that already happened. You have time to explore the protagonist's thoughts and motivations, it's far easier to foreshadow or introduce plot mechanics, and since we are creatures who process rational thought from working memory, it's easier for us to digest.

I'm less of a fan of present tense, but it's valid if you can pull it off without tense switching. It's not natural to write this way, and even less natural to read, so you have to be careful to stay with the voice and POV throughout to avoid confusion and disconnects.

          Giuseppe gets into his Mustang and drives to work, where he will spend eight hours hunting for ways to exploit his client's financial documents. He hates his job but loves the money so he returns every day without complaint to the dim, rented office of a CPA.

You might notice that this paragraph isn't a lot different from the one previous other than a couple of verb changes. That makes this style look easy to emulate, but in practice, it does the opposite. Since you're inside Giuseppe's head, experiencing things in real-time, you have to reproduce a stream-of-consciousness connection. Any wandering from the action implies stray thoughts, and too much of these will disrupt the flow of time, creating bumps and disconnects in your narrative.

          Giuseppe throws the first punch and Mario ducks out of the way, countering with a vicious uppercut to Giuseppe's chin. He barely has time to register the impact before he feels the bones in his jaw crack, sending needles of pain into his mind. Mario is a much stronger opponent than he anticipated, and he feels regret over filing the stout man's taxes the year before. Giuseppe's head connects with the parking garage's concrete floor and the world goes black.

The above isn't a terrible paragraph, but you have to pause Mario's experience to explain what he's feeling and you lose the immediacy of your tense choice. It's not a mistake to write this way, but it's more difficult and more demanding on you as a writer. 

I'm bringing this up because it's a current trend in WP, and it fails far more often than it succeeds. It takes more thought and effort, so to all the lazy writers out there, stop jumping on this bandwagon.

Whatever you pick, you absolutely must commit to it, at least within the context of a scene. When you shift tense, you break the experience for the reader, and if you're not doing it deliberately, it makes them question your choices, which means they're no longer paying attention to your story, and that's something you want to avoid at all costs.