Can You Write a Story in Future Tense?
Quick answer: Can you write a story in future tense? Yes: narration of what will happen suits prophecy, plans and dread, and works best in short forms and mixed structures.
Yes, you can write a story in future tense, narrating events that have not yet happened: 'You will meet her on a Thursday. It will be raining.' It is the rarest tense in fiction, which is precisely its power and its warning. Future tense reads as prophecy, plan, promise or sentence being passed, and those flavours suit particular stories intensely while exhausting general-purpose narration quickly.
In practice, future tense thrives in short forms and in mixed structures, a future-tense thread inside a story anchored elsewhere, more often than across whole novels. Used with intent, nothing else on the tense shelf produces its particular blend of tenderness and dread.
What future tense actually does to a story
Every tense implies a situation of telling. Past implies survival and memory; present implies simultaneous experience. Future implies foreknowledge: someone knows what is coming and is telling it before it arrives. That casts the narrator as prophet, planner, sentencing judge or grieving time-traveller, and casts events as fate. A sentence like 'He will not notice the ice until the wheels are already light' carries built-in dread no past tense equivalent can match.
The second effect is inevitability. Future tense removes the pretence that events might go otherwise, so stories about fate, determinism, or the ache of knowing better suit it naturally. The cost is suspense of the ordinary kind; the compensation is a deeper suspense, watching characters walk toward what the grammar has already promised.
Where it has worked
Ted Chiang's celebrated novella 'Story of Your Life' threads future tense through a linguist's address to her daughter, telling the child what will happen in a life the narrator perceives all at once; the tense is not decoration but the story's entire philosophical argument about time. Carlos Fuentes' 'Aura' (1962) drives its second person narration toward future tense as fate closes around the protagonist, the grammar itself tightening like a hand.
The mode also lives in fiction's plans and promises: characters narrating what they will do, con artists rehearsing the job, lovers scripting a future the reader suspects will never arrive. A future tense passage inside a past tense story reads as vow or verdict, and some of the technique's best modern uses are exactly these embedded threads rather than wall-to-wall future.
Flash fiction anthologies quietly harbour more future tense than novels ever will, precisely because the form's brevity suits the tense's intensity: a page of prophecy lands like a spell, and the piece ends before the grammar can tire. Wedding-toast stories, fortune-teller monologues, letters to unborn children, plans for revenge narrated the night before: the tense has natural habitats, and most of them are small rooms. If the mode tempts you, start at flash length and let the piece teach you how long the spell can hold.
How to write in it without wearing readers out
Keep it short or keep it woven. Future tense sustains beautifully across flash fiction, a chapter, a recurring thread; across four hundred continuous pages the drumbeat of 'will' grows heavy. If you want a whole piece in future, compress: the form's fatigue point arrives early, and a tight two-thousand-word piece can end before it does. Blind-judged contests actually flatter this kind of formal experiment at short length, where a rubric rewards a design that finishes before it tires.
Vary the modality to manage the drumbeat: alongside plain 'will' sit 'going to', imperatives ('you will want to look away; don't'), and conditional shadings, each loosening the rhythm. Decide who knows the future and why, prophecy, plan, pattern or hindsight disguised, because that source sets the emotional key. And give the foreknowledge friction: the most affecting future tense stories are narrated by someone who cannot or will not change what they foresee.
Traps and misconceptions
The first trap is novelty for its own sake: future tense chosen to be noticed rather than to mean. Readers detect the difference with unnerving speed; if your story would work identically in past tense, it wants past tense. The second is monotony, page after page of will-will-will, which mixed modality and short length prevent.
A misconception worth clearing: future tense does not require science fiction or prophecy plots. A mother narrating what her son will do after she is gone, a planner scripting a heist, a bureaucrat drafting the arrest that will happen at dawn: all are realistic settings where the grammar is native. Finally, do not confuse future tense narration with stories set in the future; most science fiction about next century is written in plain past tense, and the two choices are entirely independent.
What poets can take from this
- Reserve future tense for stories where inevitability is the meaning.
- Keep whole-piece future tense under a few thousand words.
- Blend in imperatives and conditionals to break the 'will' drumbeat.
- Anchor the foreknowledge in a source: prophecy, plan, pattern or grief.
- Try a future tense final page on a past tense story; the gearshift can be electric.
- Start any future tense experiment at flash length and learn how long the spell holds.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story in future tense: a grandmother, sharp-eyed and unsentimental, narrates the first year of her granddaughter's life abroad, none of which she will live to see. Let one prediction be wrong on purpose.
Questions
Why is future tense so rare in fiction?
Because it forecloses the reader's basic question, what happens next, and replaces it with a heavier one, how will it feel when the promised thing arrives. That trade suits few stories, and sustaining the grammar over length is genuinely taxing.
Does future tense require second person?
No, though they often travel together because both address and prophecy suit an intimate 'you'. First person future ('I will leave on the morning train') and third person future work perfectly well.
Is a story set in the future written in future tense?
Almost never. Setting and tense are independent choices; most futuristic fiction narrates in ordinary past tense. Future tense is about the narrator's relationship to events, not the calendar date of the world.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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