Narrative Technique

Hello, readers!!!
It's been a while now-- I've been traveling all over. The best part is, I had quite a bunch of books to read.
At the moment, I'm re-reading the whole Eragon series just for personal enjoyment, and I found one thing that helps us in writing that I never really done on  my blog before....
Yeah... if you read the title this whole introduction was useless. Oh well. Today we are doing one specific narrative technique I found in book 1 of Eragon.
Mind, Eragon has a TON of narrative techniques. Today I'm zooming in onto this:

 

Now, or In the Past?The choice of tense also impacts the effect of a story. In fact, I wanted to bring this up, although past tense is very common, it's good to realize what it really does. Traditionally, narratives are told in the past tense. You most likely noticed this already. In fact, Eragon is an example.  The present tense is often employed by short story writers, and the wanted effect of present tense is that the reader experiences the events of the story as they are happening, making the story convey a sense of immediacy. It's in my opinion difficult to write in present tense if you're used to writing in past tense because when you write, your story might start shifting between the tenses unintentionally- that's not so good. The tense employed by the writer also enables time shifts, or flashbacks, which is a narrative technique that allows the writer to tell the story and build tension through foreshadowing or memory. You  find this a lot in Eragon, where he has weird dreams and he recalls them during his adventures quite the much. I find that it makes the story more suspenseful because you had already felt and now you keep going. The story is far from being slow at pace.  This affects the plot because it's about an adventure, so if the story is slow, it would be boring in a sense. 

Thanks my lovelies.

xoxo

BR101