Find your tense, and rock it.

This is probably self-explanatory, but when you’re writing a story or a book, you should be comfortable with the tense you’re writing in. For early drafts of A Cook’s Guide to Supernatural Philadelphia, I had a go at First Person, Present Tense. Full transparency, I just wanted to try something different. In the end I still wrote a good manuscript (as far as early drafts go), good enough to attract the interest of my current agent, Tricia Skinner.

But once we got deep into the editing phase, a few things were apparent right off the bat. For one thing: this was writing WAY outside of my comfort zone. Really, the majority of books I read are either: First Person, Past Tense, or told 3rd Person from a particular character’s perspective and mind. When I tried to flip that around, I hit a lot of issues (that I didn’t realize at the time):

Tense slips: there were points throughout where my brain was desperate to go back to what I was comfortable doing, and I slipped into past tense (at one point it happened twice in the same chapter!

This also resulted in a LOT of passive-voice instances that just sounded rough when you re-read the book. After some amazing back and forth feedback sessions with Trish, I came to an obvious conclusion: I needed to restructure the WHOLE book to be First Person, Past Tense. That took a few weeks. But it also made it easy to spot those awful passive-voice pieces and write them in proper active voice (again, I’m just more comfortable writing this way. It’s good to challenge ourselves, but sometimes, you gotta stick with what works for your brain).

It was a crazy month for me on the personal front. Some health issues with my Dad, and then our three daughters are home from school for the summer. Somehow I still managed to re-write and patch up my entire book over the course of about 2.5 weeks. I probably put in almost 80 hours of editing work in the last week of June alone.

I just sent the latest edits off to Trish, and I’m excited for her feedback. When we spoke on the phone, Trish asked me flat out: Do you handle deadlines well? Do they make you more productive? I said they did, and they do. “You know what you need to do based on that feedback. Get it done by the end of the month.” I sent the edits in this past Sunday, June 28th. Just like in my day job, I tend to be prompt, and try to deliver ahead of schedule.

Anyway, as the title says: Know your tense. If you’re going to color outside the lines of what you’re used to tense-wise, you should probably read a LOT MORE books from that perspective than I did 😉

Keep writing, writers!