Had Is Not Your Enemy

I've seen it countless times. Some seminar lecturer or junior college teacher says, "The past perfect tense is a sign of bad writing."

Then they go on to examples, pointing out blocks of text in past perfect. "Search for "had", as in "had been", "had done", or the dreaded "she'd", and every time you'll find bad writing." As though it were a truism, a rule up there with "Adverbs are bad!" and "Never use passive voice."

Adverbs are not always bad, and the passive voice has its place, but those myths can be debunked in another blog post. This one's about past perfect, and why it's not only good but required — except when it's not.

The one writing guideline that trumps all others is this: Follow the rules of grammar. There's nothing that jars a reader so badly as improper usage, whether of a word, a comma, a tense, or any of our other tools. Written dialog, like spoken, has its own distinctive patterns, and some highly skilled authors play around with narrative voice. Aside from those specific instances, always employ correct usage.

This includes the past perfect tense.

When you're using the past tense telling a story (another time I'll rant about why you should avoid present and above all future tense), anything that had happened before the action needs to be written in past perfect. Like "had happened". Period. No exceptions.

Mind you, if you've got this big block with "had" every third word, it's likely to be exposition. Some amount of that is unavoidable, especially in flash fiction, but massive run-on paragraphs of narrative description tend to be unreadable. This is the reason for another guideline: Tell the story; don't describe it.

So, to recap:

- Always use the past perfect tense when it's appropriate.

- If you're using it a lot, you're probably over-expositioning.

Got it? Good.

Now, go write a story that uses the past perfect tense appropriately.