I personally think it comes down to the author's choice. As long as you're consistent with it and not hopping from present to past and back again, you'll be fine ❤️

Present tense CAN feel a bit more intimate. The action is happening around us! First person and 3rd person limited present tenses generally let me get furthest into character’s heads.

Present tense can make action scenes more intense, but also seems to make them harder for people to write. You have more control of the speed and timing, but that makes things weird and clunky if you don’t fully understand how to control flow and pacing yet. I’d suggest past tense if you’re writing a lot of action and aren’t confident in that skill

Present tense often works better for viewpoint characters with limited knowledge, mistaken beliefs, or extreme emotional growth, I find. The change in the character’s voice over the length of the story feels more organic. But past tense works better if you want to hint at future changes to mindset - maybe a character who no longer connects with their past decisions, or is distressed they missed certain clues.

Present tense makes it a lot easier to write ADHD characters, or anyone else with memory issues. Viewpoint characters who struggle to remember stuff don’t feel very natural in the past tense!

I also find it works better for certain types of intellectual characters. If characters spend too much time in their heads, analyzing possibilities, then switching to present tense for ‘reality’ can keep things clearer. On the other hand, characters really detached from their emotions can sound more natural in past tense.

Past tense is really good for ongoing stuff, or stuff that doesn’t have clearly defined starts/stops. Summaries, montages, the narrator saying things like “at some point”, “over time”, “eventually” - all of these flow a bit smoother in past tense, I feel.

Stories with time skips tend to feel less jarring in past tense. Or with a lot of variability over how long specific scenes take. I find it a lot easier to read scenes that take course over a whole day in the past tense. In present tense, I sometimes get confused about how three lines could possibly last 2 hours. (Probably because I’m further in the character’s head, and assume I should be seeing all their thoughts.)

Past tense can feel like someone telling us a story, which can be really effective for certain plots! It matches how a lot of people talk to each other, and so can be easier to write for some people, as well.

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I tend to find that past tense is less noticeable, but I don’t think there’s a consensus with that. Present tense works best for me if it’s there for a purpose, while I prefer past as the default. But I’ve heard lots of people with different perspectives!

I do have a few caveats to the video though:

- Past and present tense are only grammatical tenses, not necessarily markers of where the narrator is at in time, meaning you can have things like retrospective present tense where someone is telling a story that happened in the past (with all the knowledge that entails) using present tense. We do this a lot in real life actually, often with a framing device. How many times have you told/heard someone tell a story like this: "So last week I took my dog to the park, right? We walk up and there's another puppy right around his age, so I crouch down and let it sniff my hand, but then ..." <- Retrospective present tense with a framing device!

FEFTS (Fire Emblem Fates Text Simulator; formerly known as FEITS/Fire Emblem If Text Simulator) by SciresM, which lets you create custom Fates conversations and portraits

And Fire Emblem Conversation Editor by SecretiveCactus, which lets you do that and more (I think its main purpose is creating/editing script files to mod the game, but I've never used it unlike FEITS)

And while we're at it, it doesn't do Fates like the above two, but there's also FE15-Text-Simulator by Fudgenuggets/ngarces, which was used to make this beautiful work of art:

me: i didn't even watch that show, but yeah

brain: yeah

me: why'd you remind me of it