I love this app. If you have a Mac, iOS, or Android device, it is worth checking out iA Writer. It is one of those "distraction free" writing apps for the Mac and iOS (and they have a version on Google Play for Android), but with one incredible difference.
You can auto-highlight verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions.
You type, and all those pesky verbs are highlighted, and you can check things as you go against your little black book of rules. Now, I love Scrivener for its organizational magic, but when I am in the down and dirty of editing and ironing out verb tense, nothing else comes close to this app.
Nothing.
I narrate in two main styles, a present tense style which I call careful tense, and the standard novel-style past tense. My characters speak in all tenses, so they are free to speak as they wish. There is one overriding rule for careful tense narration, it is that all statements in regards to verbs and times must be true. I can thus narrate like this:
I walk down the street and enjoy the warm weather. Yesterday, I walked down this same street in the rain and got soaked. I will be walking down this street when he leaves tomorrow. I arrive at the bus stop.Mixed tenses all in the same paragraph with a default present tense-narration, but all statements true in regards to the time they were stated. Some of the statements are in past or future tense, but they relate to facts the narrator is relating to that happened in the past or are expected to happen in the future. If you are doing past-tense narration, you would write the following:
I walked down the street and enjoyed the warm weather. The day before, I walked down this same street in the rain and got soaked. I would be walking down this street when he leaves tomorrow. I arrived at the bus stop.Present tense assumed the narrator is speaking now, where past tense assumes the narrator is relating events which happened in the past. There is a good reason novel writers use past tense, because switching tense in your narration can be a tricky thing. It is easier to stick to the past tense throughout, and ignore the present tense unless a character is using it in dialog.
I am using traditional past-tense narration for my CLS Romance Project since it is a traditional fairy-tale type story, so I need iA Writer to double-check my verb tense. It helps a great deal, since I can zero in on my verbs and check each one to make sure it is using the correct form of past-tense, and ensure I don't fall into those "had been" and "have been" issues when I am supposed to be speaking in the past tense.
I love writing in the present tense though, or at least my careful tense style. I love the books written in present tense and how they feel, like 50 Shades and the Hunger Games, there is just this immediate and gripping style when a character-as-narrator says:
He grabs me and kisses me.You are right there, and it is happening now.
Now I will say if you do any amount of mixed writing, where some of your books are narrated in the past tense and others are narrated in the present, you are setting yourself up for disaster. It is always the best to stick to the style you love and get used to that, because once you start switching narration modes, you will find yourself slipping past tense verbs into your present tense narration, and the other way around.
But if you are learning this stuff, trying to develop a past or present tense style, or find yourself constantly tripping over verb tense, get a Mac, iOS, or Android device (sorry Windows), and check out this app. If you need it for proofreading, cleaning up excessive adverbs, or just a double-check of your inner editor's sanity, check out this app.
Highly recommended.
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