Present, Past, and Future Tenses | Different Ways of Telling The Story

When crafting your song, try telling it in each of these tenses, present, past, and future. Just by changing the tense, you could seriously affect a change that turns your song from 'good' to 'great.'

Here's an example:

Present - "She's looking my way on this sunny day and I've got something to say."

Past - "She looked my way on that sunny day and I had something to say."

Future - "She'll look my way on a sunny day and I'll have something to say."

You can even experiment with mixing you're tenses. If your story has a timeline, you could change the tense of the chorus to reflect the previous verse.

Comments

  1. AnnetteAugust 27, 2019 at 7:58 AM

    Good points. Tense can be fluid within a single song but it's got to make sense.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeff BayazitJanuary 13, 2020 at 1:51 AM

    Mixing tenses is an interesting idea too! Like:

    Verse 1 ...will look my way...

    Verse 2 ...is looking my way...

    Verse 3 ...looked my way...

    So it moves from looking toward the future to experiencing the present then looking back to the past.

    Thanks for the tip

    ReplyDelete
  3. Boston StrongJuly 10, 2023 at 2:27 PM

    I happen to have a song about Boston's past, present and it's future

    ReplyDelete

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