Email your queries to Diana (please include hometown details) at: diana@dianacambridge.co.uk or send them to: Helpline, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications plc, 5th Floor, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds LS1 5JD. She will answer as many letters as she can on the page, but regrets that she cannot enter into individual correspondence. Publication of answers may take several months. Helpline cannot personally answer queries such as where to offer work, or comment on manuscripts, which you are asked not to send.
Q I’ve been scratching my head over the issue of tense. I am writing in the simple past, and am struggling to know which tense to use for things that continue to be true, eg Should it be ‘He offered me coffee. I hate coffee.’ or ‘He offered me coffee. I hated coffee.’? I am also struggling to figure out when to use the simple past tense, versus the past continuous. When should it be ‘I sat’ and when should it be ‘I was sitting’. I think I learned that the past continuous tense is used for things that are still happening, but, in my novel, the story is unfolding for the narrator at the same time that it unfolds for the reader and so, to this extent, the entire novel is ‘still happening’. I suppose that suggests I should use present continuous, or indeed the present tense, but both of these make it less readable to me. What, then, would you recommend?