I’ve written a story in the present tense, and now decided to rewrite it in the past tense. (How fraught is the editing process in this venture!  )

In the present tense version I’m talking about what we did the night before and what we will do tonight:

"Last night it had been my turn to choose the game and I’d decided…..
Tonight he will probably choose……"


Turning it into the past tense I’ve changed it to

The night before it had been my turn to choose the game…


And now I’m stuck. Any suggestions as to how I should use tonight in the past tense. As ever, the more I think about this the less sense my ideas make.

Sandra

"Tonight's game was to be his choice".

See if that works. I think it should be ok, even if she is an old lady telling a story from years ago. But every story is different, so who knows!

Possibly:

'As anticipated, the following night he chose ...'

???
Sandra

"Tonight's game was to be his choice".

Sounds fine to me.

The night before it had been my turn to choose the game…

...but this time, he did.

I should have probably given a longer quote from the piece to give a better understanding of the query. Although the story is now being narrated in the past tense, it won't actually get past, or even up to the point where he'll choose the game for tonight because other events intervene. Sorry for the lack of sufficient information.

I think Bunbry's suggestion will work best under the circumstances.

Thanks to all for giving it some thought. Your efforts are much appreciated.

Sandra

Sounds like you've got it worked out, Sandra.

IT's an awwkard one, isn't it. - I've been doing some conversions like that, and I always get stuck on that kind of thing - when in a past tense narrative can you say "today".

I think it depends on how much the narrative is being influenced by the thoughts and coloured by the voice of the character - it's about psychic distance, in other words - but of course there are always ambiguous areas...

You never stop learning as a writer, do you? Until I saw the responses from SandraD and Gaius I didn't realise what the crux of the problem was.

It was the fact that the story never moved beyond 'tonight' that made their suggestions inappropriate. If it had, they would have been fine. I'm sure there's a technical terminology for this, but I've no idea what it is.

But that's what makes all this so interesting, isn't it? Thanks for responding Emma.

Sandra

You're welcome, Sandra.

You never do stop learning, do you - at least you never do if you keep moving from project to project.

It's a good example, too, of how what looks as if it's an individual problem of a couple of sentences always turns out to be part of a much wider business of how the piece is working as a whole.

It's why writers who think of "editing" as a final stage are wrong: if you're paying micro-attention properly, it always leads you to re-consider the big questions of structure and so on.

Emma

For what it's worth now, I might have gone with:

"The previous night... but the coming night it would be..."

But I concur that this kind of thing can be a minefield. What seems so clear, or even natural, to the writer can sound confusing to the reader.

(Russians have it so much easier. In that language, you always use the tense that you would have been using/thinking at the time of the event you're narrating. That rule is built into the grammar so deeply that the English use of past tenses for relating experiences and thoughts confuses them enormously. They don't have a conditional perfect, or a pluperfect.)

I once got some stick in a French class when we were learning about the word "la veille" which means "the day before". Someone asked, "Why don't they just say 'yesterday'" and I was trying to explain that you might be talking about a past event such that "yesterday" didn't convey the right meaning. Even the teacher got confused at my - admittedly rather clumsy - explanation.

That's a good point, Alex - I think you're right. I've sometimes watched a film with subtitles, and in memory "heard" the actors speaking English.

We'll see. Ella is currently talking to everyone in sight in order to learn French...

What about

"The day before, Alex had chosen the game, but tonight it was my turn."

Even when you're telling a story in past tense, you're in a moment, aren't you?

Deb

<Added>

in *the* moment, I meant to write