An interesting setup, but harpooned by a consistent grammatical flaw.
What I gleaned about the book: A young man encounters two very strange people during a lecture. But were they real, or was he dreaming?
Find the book on Amazon.
Analysis: When writing in the past tense and then describing an event that took place even earlier, you have to switch into past perfect. It isn’t optional. You don’t have to stay there if the flashback is long, but you have to at least go there for a sentence or two, to establish that you are talking about a different point in time, further back. Without it, the reader comes unstuck in time. Unfortunately, this problem crept up repeatedly for me, and jarred me out of the story each time. It’s exactly the kind of thing a good copy editor would catch.
And it was doubly vexing because the present tense stuff was actually interesting and well written.
Thanks for this. I’m going to have to go back and look at it because I don’t remember even having anything resembling a flashback within the first 9(ish) minutes of reading. I might need to look up the definition of past perfect as well because I’m scratching my head here. :)
Thanks again. I appreciate the compliment on the present tense stuff.
When I said “flashback,” I didn’t mean a full flashback episode. I was referring to places where you refer back to events that took place earlier than the events being narrated in the “present.”
The examples are relatively subtle, but here’s one that I was able to find quickly: They’d been friends ever since Janice hooked up with his older brother Mark. That relationship didn’t last very long…
From the perspective of Troy’s bad morning, Mark and Janice’s relationship has already failed, so that last statement is a references to a deeper past. It should read: That relationship hadn’t lasted very long…
There is something about past perfect that always throws me too. Fortunately, two of the people in my writing group catch when I do it as does my editor. I hope.