"The one charm of the past is that it is the past." ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Recently on Facebook a friend corrected someone's post to the proper form of past tense. My friend continued the lecture by calling the form Past Perfect Progressive. Nightmares of old English classes came back to haunt me like a gallows. Grammar was the least interesting noose anyone had managed to knot around my young neck. And as I read Facebook I knew that knowing the past tense was important.
The night my critique group first reviewed my pages they marked tense problems all over. Over time I improved, but most of the story takes place in the blessed present tense. Future scenes in my ms will be explanations of past events. Now the past is not the past. It's the present. The charm is gone. Armed with the weight of relearning English that had been covered thirty years ago, I began to research. (I should admit that now there is a need for knowing Past Tense it's not nearly as awful as it was in grade school.)
Here is a quick list of 9 forms of Past Tense:
1. Simple Past
2. Past Progressive
3. Past Perfect
4. Past Perfect Progressive
5. Past Habitual
6. Time-Specific Past Habitual
7. Past Intensive
8. Future In The Past
9. Past-Perfect Subjunctive
