OK, it's kind of an embarrassing question but I've got to ask because I'm writing this longass fic and I'm freaking out. As a native English reader, do you guys really notice all the different tenses? For instance, if there's a place where there should have been Past Perfect ("had went") but instead I wrote Past Simple ("walked"), is that a horrible mistake? Would it make the story unreadable? Are some mistakes worse than others? I'm never 100% sure when to use each tense and it drives me crazy.
No, I don’t think that’s a problem, not down to fine details like that. As long as you don’t switch between present and past all the time, most readers won’t notice the difference between past perfect and past simple.
Technically if you’re writing in past simple and you switch to a flashback, the flashback should be all in past perfect. But I find it really annoying to write or read “had” before all the verbs constantly, so when I write a flashback, after a few lines of past perfect I switch to past simple. Then at the end of the flashback I transition to past perfect again to signal that the flashback is ending, and then back to past simple for the “present” time in the story.
I hope that made sense.
Anyway, don’t stress too much about tenses. I’ve read lots of your stories and I’ve never noticed if you made a tense mistake.
