Sure @mammamaia. I don't see it often at all, but one example is Angela Carter's story The Erl-King, which moves between past, present, and future tenses. The end portion, which has bits of all three before concluding in future tense, reads as follows: "When I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm. Although the bow hangs beside the old fiddle on the wall, all the strings are broken so you cannot play it. I don't know what kind of tunes you might play on it, if it were strung again; lullabies for foolish virgins, perhaps, and now I know the birds don't sing, they only cry because they can't find their way out of the wood, have lost their flesh when they were dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages. Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet. His hair falls down over my knees. Silence like a dream in front of the spitting fire while he lies at my feet and I comb the dead leaves out of his languorous hair. The robin has built his nest in the thatch again, this year; he perches on an unburnt log, cleans his beak, ruffles his plumage. There is a plaintive sweetness in his song and a certain melancholy, because the year is over--the robin, the friend of man, in spite of the wound in his breast from which Erl-King tore out his heart. Lay your head on my knee so that I can't see the greenish inward-turning suns of your eyes any more. My hands shake. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them. Then she will open all the cages and let the birds free; they will change back into young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats. She will carve off his great mane with the knife he uses to skin the rabbits; she will string the old fiddle with five single strings of ash-brown hair. Then it will play discordant music without a hand touching it. The bow will dance over the new strings of its own accord and they will cry out: 'Mother, mother, you have murdered me!'"
... I can't imagine why that future part is there, but I guess she had a reason... thanks for the example... I don't see the parts before 'my hands shake' having 'all three' though... just having a 'might' or 'would' included in a normal past tense sentence does not = 'writing in future tense' to me. in my capacity as a writer, or an editor...
No the parts before that aren't future tense. I just included an extra portion to show the transition. I like the story, and indeed the entire compilation. But Carter did things that run contrary to what you often hear as rules for writers. She nevertheless won awards and was picked by The Times (London) among its top ten of the 50 best British authors since World War II. But she didn't write commercial fiction, and if that's what you're writing there is probably less experimentation you want to do as a whole. If I'm reading Angela Carter, I'm perfectly happy to go along with this sort of thing. If I were reading the latest Michael Connolly novel it would probably seem out of place.
So I may have found a sentence with mixed narratives. It just sounds wrong to me. "She really has given up on me. I rise from my bed feeling the ache of the depression that was settling over me. It happened every time I was sent to a new place."
I would write in any tense you like/find easiest, but would NOT advise writing in random tenses and changing it later. I've done that before and it made my life very complicated, so try and keep your focus. It's well worth it. Also, does anyone here like the polyphony style of writing?
Oh! I see. I don't think I've ever seen that, but it sounds interesting. So each POV-character appears only once, or do they rotate?
