Should You Write in Past or Present Tense?
Quick answer: Should you write in past or present tense? Past is the flexible, invisible default; present buys immediacy at a cost. How to choose the right tense for your story.
Write in past tense unless your story has a specific reason to want present. Past is fiction's default: invisible to readers, flexible with time, and equipped with a full range of tools for flashback, summary and hindsight. Present tense buys a particular effect, the feeling that events are unfolding now, unshaped and unsurvived, and charges for it in flexibility. Neither is superior; one is the all-rounder and the other a specialist.
The decision deserves five deliberate minutes before drafting, because retrofitting tense is among the most tedious revisions in fiction. Choose for the story in front of you, not for fashion in either direction.
What past tense gives you
Past tense is the tense of told stories, so deeply conventional that readers stop seeing it, and invisibility is a real asset: nothing between the reader and the events. It handles time like an acrobat: 'Three winters passed' is a legal sentence, flashbacks slot in via past perfect, and a narrator can compress a decade or dilate a second without strain.
Past also implies a teller who survived to tell, which quietly enables hindsight, foreshadowing and the double-self ironies of retrospective narration: 'It was the last time I saw her' is a sentence present tense simply cannot say. The world's shelf of fiction, from Austen to this month's bestsellers, defaults to past for these reasons, and no agent or judge will ever blink at it.
What present tense gives you, and takes
Present tense narrates events as they occur: 'I open the door. The hall is dark.' Its gift is immediacy without guarantee; nobody demonstrably survives a present tense story, which is why Suzanne Collins chose it for 'The Hunger Games', where every arena scene must feel unsurvived. Hilary Mantel used it in 'Wolf Hall' for a different effect: history stripped of hindsight, Thomas Cromwell moving through events that have not hardened into the past.
The costs are real. Present handles time clumsily; big jumps and summaries strain against the tense's rolling now. Long books in present can fatigue readers, an effect sometimes described as everything feeling equally urgent and therefore equally flat. And the tense is visible; some readers register it as a literary gesture before they register the story. You are spending attention on the clock; be sure the story earns it back.
A decision method that works
Draft your opening page both ways; the exercise costs twenty minutes and settles most cases by ear. As you compare, ask three questions. Does the story cover weeks or years? Past manages spans painlessly. Does the effect depend on not knowing anyone survives, or on a consciousness experiencing without perspective? Present earns its keep. Will the narration need to reflect, judge or remember at a distance? That is past tense machinery.
Consider genre gravity too, not as law but as reader expectation: literary fiction and young adult accept present readily; epic fantasy and historical sagas leaning on scope sit more naturally in past. In contest-length fiction either tense reads fine to judges; what a blind-scored rubric punishes is not the choice but wobbling between the choices.
Recent shelves show both instruments at full power. Anthony Doerr's 'All the Light We Cannot See' runs its wartime chapters in present tense, giving history the trembling immediacy of nowness; Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch' unspools in classical retrospective past, all hindsight and consequence. Both won the same major prize within a few years of each other, which settles the playground argument nicely: the market and the critics have no tense preference. They have a competence preference, and each book demonstrates total commitment to its choice.
Mistakes around the choice
The commonest error is not the wrong tense but the accidental one: drafting in past, sliding into present during exciting scenes because the writer's inner narration went there, and never noticing. Tense drift is among the most frequent line-edit notes in slush reading. Fix it with a dedicated pass reading only the verbs.
The second error is choosing present for prestige, on the theory that it reads as more literary. It reads as more noticeable, which is not the same thing. The third is assuming tense equals pace: past tense thrillers move like trains, and present tense reflection can dawdle. Pace lives in scene construction and sentence rhythm; tense only colours it.
What poets can take from this
- Draft your first page in both tenses and let your ear vote.
- Match tense to time span: years want past, hours forgive present.
- Do one revision pass reading only verbs to catch drift.
- Do not switch tense mid-scene without a structural reason and a clean break.
- If the story needs 'It was the last time I saw her', the decision is made.
- Commit totally to whichever tense you choose; competence, not tense, is what readers reward.
Try it yourself
Write the same 250-word scene, a driver realising the brakes have failed, once in past tense and once in present. Note which version frightens you more and which version handles the aftermath better, then write one more paragraph in the winner.
Questions
Do agents and editors dislike present tense?
No serious gatekeeper rejects present tense on principle; recent prize winners and bestsellers use it. What they reject is unmanaged tense, drift, inconsistency, or present chosen for effect the story never cashes.
Which tense is better for a short story?
Both thrive at short length; present tense fatigue barely applies under a few thousand words. Choose by effect: hindsight and shape favour past, breathlessness and not-knowing favour present.
Can I write flashbacks in a present tense story?
Yes: shift to past tense for the flashback and return, or keep memory in present with clear signalling. The first is cleaner; the second suits narrators for whom the past feels perpetually current.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.