One thing I forgot to put in my 'Little Things That Bother Me' part is tenses in writing. I thought about it while eating a snack after I published it, but tenses aren't really a little thing if we're talking about a whole story.
Sometime in the beginning of my 7th grade year, one of my friends told me we should write a story together.
I had never considered writing with anyone else before that, so I told her I'd do it.
Wow, what a cringey mess that turned out to be.
We wrote this story about a boy and a girl that met each other the night the girls dad and the boys mom died in the same car crash. Both the girls dad and the boys mom have extreme withdrawal at the fact of losing the person they love, so the kids are on their own in a sense.
Being high school kids, you wouldn't think there would be so much drama that would escalate after the two main characters became a pair.
There was the fact that the mom of the guy died, the dad of the girl was arrested, the boy was diagnosed with Lukemia and he almost died.
Anyways, it was written in both the boy and the girls point of view, but that wasn't my problem.
The problem was that one of us wrote in past tense and the other wrote in present tense. The perspectives switched every chapter, so you can see how that went.
After we wrote the story, the friend that I wrote the story with wanted to share it with our ELA teacher.
I'm guessing she never shared it because she was waiting for me, and I never shared it either.
Reading back on it, I know why I didn't now.
It all goes back to tenses. Our ELA teacher catches everything wrong with writing and every chapter switched tenses.
I have no problem with stories that switch from first person to third person or third person to second person or whatnot, but if you switch tenses it drives me nuts.
I get it if you want to give a summary of something or do a major timeskip in a story, but other than that it makes no sense to me.
The problem I have is, do I change her chapters to present tense or do I change mine to past tense?
That's really all I had to say on that.
Enjoy.
