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Need help with changing tenses during a story


mamalbh
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My daughter always changes the tense of her story mid-way.  At first I told her that she should always use the same tense, but sometimes its as though her story starts in the middle of the action & she uses the first few paragraphs as back story, then starts telling it as its happening.  Writing is *my* weakest subject in terms of teaching & she has always greatly struggled with it.  I am thrilled that she's really finding her voice, but now I need help on how to teach the whole tense thing.  She just turned 13, this was *supposed* to be an assignment on describing a setting, but we'll deal with that later lol - Here is what she wrote yesterday.... 

 

I was walking down the dark ally hoping I could find him.  He took my phone and it was almost midnight, I needed that phone.  It had instructions on how to get to the X-Mansion.  I had to get there, it is the only place I can stay.  I just saw a glint, it must be my phone.  It is! So I reach to grab it, oh no! I'm surrounded by the Brotherhood.  (They are a team of bad guys who are mutants) "Hey, why don't you join us instead of the X-Men, I mean they have rules and we don't!" Toad says.  I'm a mutant myself and I wasn't falling for the act.  "No way you guys steel, and are bad. X-Men are good and stop people like you guys." "Sute yourself, but were keeping the phone." Sadly this was a public place, and people could show up any minute. Evan though I'm a girl I can really kick peoples' butts with my powers, but I'm showing off here.  I'm just heading toward X-Mansion without a fight.

 

Obviously there are some spelling issues, separating paragraphs, etc.  Those are things I can explain rules for.  The whole tense thing is a little trickier (for me) to explain. 

 

Thanks for your help :)

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Does she recognize what tense a sentence uses?

Does she realize that she switches tenses?

 

If she knows that she is switching tenses and wants to keep those tenses,

can you have her look at some real literature and see how the pros use consistant tense?

 

If she doesn't realize that she is switching tense, can you

have her go through the sentences one at a time and label the tense?

 

It gets tricky with the dialog because sometimes dialog isn't in the

same tense as the surrounding text.

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I think I know why she's doing it. I don't know that I am correct, but this feels very, very visual to me. I do the same thing when I'm working on a character and I suddenly need to move right into a character memory and get a story out of it. Of course, what happens in a character notebook stays in a character notebook. Basically, if you took sentence one, stuck it in a panel, the rest of the story easily happens in action format as if it were a graphic novel.

 

If that is the case, it might be helpful to have her do two things when she writes. First of all, I'd ban first person. No more I. Third person limited only. That may help with the tense issues, because when you tell a story about your friend, it seems to be much harder to mess up a tense. I don't know why, but it is.

The second thing I would have her do is to script out all that dialog like a screenwriter. Each character gets a name, and they get their dialogue written down next to them on a card. That should help her be able to keep the dialogue in present tense, while having the rest of the story flow in past.

 

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