Question

[pendrecarc]

When reading or writing flashbacks, which tense do you prefer? If it's a good-sized scene, should it switch to past tense after establishing chronology via the past perfect, or should the whole thing be in past perfect, never mind the aesthetic  issue of hads all over the place?

Based on observation, this seems to be a rare case where switching

Comments

[rachelindeed]

Personally, I prefer a switch to regular past tense after using past perfect to establish the flashback element. That's a totally uneducated opinion, it's just my preference as a reader, because the past perfect is so clunky. And if you want something important to be happening emotionally in the flashback scene, it's annoying to be constantly pulled out of it and reminded that you are looking back on it from the perspective of the framing story. *shrugs* That's my two cents, anyway.

Another possible way to handle it is to use a section break to signal a flashback:

The first time they'd met, she'd kept quiet.

***

The library shelf was only half-stocked; half a face caught her eye through the gap.

Etcetera.

[pendrecarc]

the past perfect is so clunky

Agreed. You just can't sustain it for long without feeling ridiculous. One of the scenes that got me wondering is mostly dialogue with very few tags, and there I'm finding it useful to use the past perfect every so often when I do drop in a tag, because that way it's not so cluttered. But if we're talking about full paragraphs of narration, it just gets overwhelming.

[pendrecarc]

Agreed on all counts, especially that of the front-loading sentence. I tend to be dubious of the present tense. It's always so self-conscious. But that can actually make it quite useful for things like flashbacks, I think--it's a very direct signal that this part is meant to be taken differently.