Young Writers Society

I working on editing a novel and I've come across a potential issues with tenses. I want things in past tense because that's the way most books are and I feel they read better that way.

So right to the point...

Example passage:
"My phone let out a loud buzz and I nearly jumped out of my desk chair. It’s a Friday night and I’m trying to kill time and pretend that I have a life by surfing the internet."

Here I kind of have a mix, right? Am I technically supposed to say "...I nearly jumped out of my desk chair. It was a Friday night and I was trying to kill time..."

The way I have it feels right to me but I think I'm getting it wrong...

What's technically right here? Does every verb have to be in past tense or are there exceptions?
Thanks much!

To stay in past tense you need to put "It was Friday night". If you feel that part of it needs to be in present tense (because it feels right like you say), then maybe you should try mixing up the sentence structure/order of events while keeping it all in past tense.

Try something like:
"I was trying to kill time on a Friday night; pretending I had a life by surfing on the internet. I nearly jumped out of my chair when my phone let out a loud buzz."

Or

"I nearly jumped out of my seat after my phone let out a loud buzz. I was just try to kill time and pretend that I had a life by surfing the internet. Same as every other Friday."

It's hard to say what you should do without seeing the context, but I'm pretty sure you can't just switch between past to present tense. My advice would be to mess around with it more in past tense until you get something that fits for you.

Depending on how complex your sentences are, you can have multiple tenses in a single sentence: one main, and possibly several additional tenses. However, you have to be able to keep track of when things are happening; that's what tenses are for.

Since you're telling the story in past tense, that means the events in the story have already happened. This means that having the main tense as anything other than past does not make sense.

My phone let out a loud buzz and I nearly jumped out of my desk chair. It’s a Friday night and I’m trying to kill time and pretend that I have a life by surfing the internet.

The first sentence is in past tense, which fits with the whole "these events happened in the past". The second sentence, however, is in the present, which reads as "these events are happening now", which leaves your reader wondering why we're suddenly talking about events that are happening right now when the events in the story already happened.

If you're not sure about a tense, try asking yourself "When is this happening?" If it's happening in the past, be sure to use past tense; if it's happening in the present, use present; etc.

You're writing in first person. If you're coming at it from the narrative style of a "stream of consciousness" you are alright flicking from past to present as you've done so. You'll find writers like Ian McEwan doing it all the time. Ky's right though, it does make things messy to most readers.

I believe you're approaching this from someone telling or recounting a tale method, as that's what your first sentence indicates. In this case, I'd make sure to stick to past tense to avoid confusion and very tenses in more complex structures when you become more confident with grammar awareness.