First-Timer

Clumsy Tense Shift

Your shift from a narrator's omniscient past tense to a forced dramatic present tense is clumsy and destroys the flow of the story. From that point on, the story is forced and contrived and no longer works. It would be much better continuing in the same tense, and almost all stories work better in that past tense narrative form, even if being told in the first person. Sometimes the present tense can be used effectively in first person point of view, and it has to be used in that fashion from the beginning or it will sound just as forced and contrived. Make the narrative images create your dramatic tension, not a cheap technical trick. Or, maybe you started out trying to write the story in the present tense from the beginning and could see it wasn't working. A rewrite of just the first few paragraphs into immediate past tense and leaving the tense shift never improves a story, just makes it worse.

All readers of stories are voyeurs, and the immediate past provides just the right distance to allow the reader's voyeuristic imagination to take hold and bring him/her into the story. (Also, the immediate past tense is more realistic. Everything we observe from a watcher's position is viewed in the immediate past tense. Unless we are an actual participant in the action and sensually experiencing the action as it unfolds, we cannot live in the real presence of the action. We are voyeurs, and everything we see happening has just happened.) If the story is well written, the reader's mind will supply the necessary personal insertion into the story--the merger of the reader with the fictional reality in voyeuristic intimacy--that no artifice can ever supply. This is especially true in erotic storytelling where the reader's imagined intimacy is everything. If the reader can smell and taste and feel as the character(s) of the story portray, then the story will be a success. And, the only way this intimacy of written fiction can be achieved is by making the writing itself disappear, leaving only the unfolding story to enchant the reader's mind. Sudden tense shifts and other literary artifices only jolt the reader out of the story back to the actual writing, at which time the fictional magic is destroyed revealing everything to be a fictional artifice, and the reader is lost. At that point, the effectiveness of the story is forever lost even if the reader continues to the end of the work. Trust in the writer is effectively destroyed, and the reader is always waiting for another cheap trick to crop up.

This is what editors are for.

First person, third person... present tense, past tense... the idea had promise but all these switches of perspective made it difficult to stay involved.

write it how you feel it

Whilst it is not grammatically correct to change temse IMO it worked here. In changing from past to present tense the author succeeded in giving her tale an impetus.The sex act gained an immediacy that drew this reader in.

I actually thought the story was great, I mean I could easily visualize what was going on. And though I did see a few grammatical errors, I could easily ignore them and continue with the story itself.

luckysod