This week: A Grammarian's Panegyric Part 3 Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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Verbs are an author’s friend. They bring our characters to life. Verbs put them in motion, imbue them with traits, and describe their adventures. In particular, verbs inform us about actions, states, or occurrences. After all, every character has interesting attributes. My cat sleeps. My cat is asleep. My cat falls asleep.
Well, okay, some attributes are more interesting than others.
The tense of a verb informs us when the action, state, or occurrence took place. There are three basic tenses: past, present, and future. My cat slept. My cat sleeps. My cat will sleep. These are familiar and don’t need explanation.
Each of these tenses has a perfect form to indicate a more remote time for the action, state, or occurrence. Because the time in question is “more remote,” there’s an implicit or explicit reference time.
For example, for present perfect we might write I have just the cleaned floor when my cat knocks flour all over the place. The reference time is the present—when the cat makes the mess—and the cleaning happened right before this event, so we use present perfect. You form the present perfect tense by combining have or has with the primary past participle of the verb.
Past perfect is similar, except instead of have or has, it always combines had with the verb’s past participle. So, for example, I had just cleaned the floor when my cat dumped flour all over the place. My action—cleaning--is in the past, but it occurred right before the cat’s action—making a mess. Isn’t that way it always works with cats?
Similarly, future perfect denotes a time in the future but before some other future time. For example, By the time I’ve owned my cat a year, I will have cleaned up cat vomit over three hundred times. The point of time in the future is one year after I’ve acquired a cat, and the action involved is cleaning up vomit. Ah, the joys of owning those little balls of fur. Maybe I should have used this example instead: By the time I’ve owned my cat a year, he will have cuddled on my lap over a thousand times. There. The joys and sorrows of cat ownership in one paragraph.
Perfect tenses are especially relevant to fiction authors, who necessarily pay attention to the fictional present, the fictional past, and the fictional future.
When we write about the here-and-now for our characters, we almost always use past tense. Our earliest examples of stories, epics like Gilgamesh and The Iliad and The Odyssey, use the past tense to describe what happens to the characters. Later examples, from The Aeneid to the Poetic Edda, to Beowulf continue to use past tense to describe the here-and-now of the heroic protagonists. This tradition largely continues to this day, although masterpieces like Bleak House and Rabbit Run break with that tradition.
Most of the time, however, we write our fiction using the past tense to describe the here-and-now of our characters. In other words, the fictional present is the here-and-now of the characters, usually depicted using past tense relative to the readers. That means we must use past perfect to describe things that happened in the fictional past and future perfect to describe what will happen in the fictional future. For this reason, authors must master the grammatical nuances of the perfect tenses.
So far, we’ve considered six verb tenses: the three basic ones and the perfect versions of each. But each of these six have another version to reflect the difference between things completed and things ongoing. There’s a difference, for example, between I clean the floor and I am cleaning the floor. The first describes a point-in-time, while the second describes an ongoing action.
That gives us six new tenses, one for each of the six earlier tenses, for a total of twelve in all. These new tenses, which describe ongoing activities, are sometimes called continuous, progressive, or—just to be confusing—imperfect. Paragraph 1.35 of The Chicago Manual of Style calls them progressive, but admits that continuous is sometimes used. Continuous seems more descriptive to me, but take your pick.
To get the continuous tenses, use the appropriate form of be—past, present or future—with the present participle of the main verb. So, for example,
(-a-) present continuous (he is cleaning the floor);
(-b-) present-perfect continuous (he has been cleaning the floor);
(-c-) past continuous (he was cleaning the floor);
(-d-) past-perfect continuous (he had been cleaning the floor);
(-e-) future continuous (he will be cleaning the floor); and
(-f-) future-perfect continuous (he will have been cleaning the floor)
Again, the various perfect continuous tenses are important for the fictional author who is using (notice the continuous present tense) the past tense for the character’s here-and-now.
That’s it. Twelve tenses. Add these to the moods of a verb as we discussed last time, and you can see verbs are complex little fiends. Er, I mean, friends.
I think this will be my last excursion into grammar unless popular demand wants more. Like that’s going to happen. See you all next month with something new.
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For Authors: February 08, 2023 Issue [#11793]
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