Looking Back In The Beginning

Past perfect problems

One advantage of knowing grammar is that you can sum up a rule as "Use of the past perfect in the beginning is a sign of danger."

With grammar teaching not being what it could be, I will brush up on it first. The past perfect is when you use a sentence with "had" to indicate that something happened before the (past) action in a sentence. So

Jane came downstairs with the sword Excalibur glinting in her hand, which she had retrieved from its box where they had put it.

Ernest had painted the shed black, but it had been so long ago it had faded into a dingy beige.

Sophonisba kept her gaze on the magic shop. She had searched for so long, had promised Seraphina so often and so seriously, and now it was almost in sight. She had heard the talk about how only this cup would suffice to restore their lands, and had dashed so many frauds who tried to pass off another one. Some even had offered cups that were not magical.

All these sentences are grammatically sound. Their problem lies in their narrative purpose.

If they are in the beginning of the story, possibly the first line -- either these stories are starting too late, or the characters are giving their backstory much too early. In the middle of the story, they are telling events out of sequence, which is less than ideal, and in the end, they are also distracting the readers from the drama of the climatic moment, but in the beginning, where you still have to hook the reader, establish what is going on, and limit confusion, they are a serious problem.

Avoiding the tense does not avoid the problem as such, since history can be festooned about a sentence with different structures.

At their centuries-old castle, the once-prominent noble family gathered to hear the will of the ancient patriarch, a general granted the ducal title by the king, dead long after his wife and many of his children.

So how do you wiggle out of it?

Sometimes the fix is simple. Downplay the past for the present. This may require putting all your stylistic tricks to use¹, but it may be that all that is necessary:

The once-black shed was now a dingy beige.

Then careful judgment must be brought to bear, as to whether the omitted past must be introduced later. It may prove superfluous.

Sometimes, it can be brought forward in time by making it part of the present troubles, because the characters are thinking of it.

The shed was dingy beige.

"Hard to leave that the last time we saw this shed, it was black," said Ernest.

"Here's to hoping," said Eglantine, "that the next time it will be bleached white. We're not staying long enough for you to paint it again."

Jane came downstairs with the sword Excalibur glinting in her hand. "We keep it in a box upstairs."

This is a tricky business. Even if the dialog is in character and moves the action forward, readers may twig to its purpose, and if it lacks either, it will stick out. Especially in an opening.

On the other hand, this may call for a quick fix: jump back to the time indicated in the past perfect. Start there.

Jane opened the cardboard box. Excalibur glinted. She lifted it up and bore it downstairs.

It can be a surprise that you began minutes after the action, but the heat of composition can produce some surprising things.

It gets more difficult as the past is more and more distant, as it contains fewer characters from the main story, and worst of all, when it's dragged out over time, such as a character drudging at a job or at school work.

Indeed, sometimes the wisest thing to do is to dip into the epistolary viewpoint. "We devise and bestow this duchy on. . . on the condition that. . . " and then, in the first scene in a more regular viewpoint, let the gathering heirs grouse that the dead man did not let any of them know who was the lucky ducky to fulfill the condition.

The problem with Sophonisba, however, may be that it does not fit the story. If it's about her quest for the cup, it has to start with her starting the quest. If it's about her using the cup, it probably should start with her having the cup in hand, with any backstory festooned in the reactions of Seraphina and other characters to her having it.

If, finally, it's about what happens to Sophonisba in the shop -- then you might want to start earlier, perhaps talking with Seraphina and having some conflict there to give them an excuse to talk about the past, and carefully extracting some past information, to divide into that which has to be fed in more carefully while she approaches the shop, that which can wait and be learned later as she haggles for the cup or bears it away, and that which can be excised.

It's often a difficult problem, but the past perfect will at least alter you to the danger.

1. Tips here