When we write a companion in the present tense, we are doing something grammatical and quietly radical at once. Is keeps. Was archives. For a book a household will read aloud long after the dog or cat in question has left the room, the tense decides whether the page becomes a remembering or a goodbye.
What "present tense" means in editorial practice
Tense is a structural choice that the reader feels before noticing it. In journalism, the past tense is conventional and correct: an event occurred, the file is closed, the dispatch reports what happened. In fiction, tense is a register decision that shapes the reader's distance from the action. In memoir, the past tense is dominant. The writer is looking back, ordering experience that has cooled. Each form has a settled answer.
Pet writing, as a form, has inherited journalism's tense by default. The pet card at the shelter says was rescued from. The obituary in the local paper says was a beloved companion to. The eulogy at the home funeral says was the best dog I ever had. All of these are correct for what they are: small acts of closing the file.
The editorial keepsake belongs to a different category. It is the book made to be read again, by a household that lives with the book. The file it opens stays open.
| Form | Conventional tense | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Journalism | Past | Event occurred; dispatch reports it; file closes |
| Memoir | Past | Writer orders experience that has cooled |
| Fiction | Mixed | Tense is a register choice for narrative distance |
| Obituary | Past | Encloses a life inside a date range |
| Editorial keepsake | Present | Book is read aloud again; relationship continues |
The last row is the editorial position this Journal takes. The case for it is the rest of this essay.
What past tense forecloses
Past tense does precise work. It separates the speaker from the event, sets the event in completed time, and asks the reader to receive it as something that has already happened to someone else. This is the right tense for a news report. For a book a child reads at bedtime, three years from now, in a house that has changed, past tense becomes the wrong instrument.
When a memorial book uses was (in a line like Daisy was the kindest dog you would ever meet), the sentence does two things at once. It speaks truthfully about a relationship that includes an ending, and it closes the door on the relationship that the reader is still living. The reader, after all, kept knowing Daisy after Daisy left the room. The reader continues to know her. The book the reader is holding right now is one of the ways the knowing continues.
A book that is read aloud is, by its grammar, a present-tense event. The dog the reader reads about is, in the moment of reading, present in the room. Past tense fights that.
There is a real linguistic name for the way present tense gives vividness to narrative: the historical present. The sociolinguist William Labov, in his 1972 work on narrative analysis, documented it in oral storytelling. Speakers reach for the present tense at the climax of a story because the past tense pushes the listener away from the action, and the present tense pulls them in. Labov found, in transcripts of hundreds of oral narratives, that roughly 22% of clauses at the high-tension peak of a told story used the historical present, even when the surrounding narrative was firmly in the past. The instinct is older than literary memoir. It is older than print.
The keepsake book takes that instinct out of the moment and makes it the structural register.
The case for present tense in keepsake editorial
The test, for any editorial choice, is what happens when the book is read aloud in a household that has changed.
A keepsake book at Pets & Pages is built for that household. The cover is sturdy because hands will hold it. The paper is heavy because pages will be turned, more than once. The text is set in a quiet typeface because eyes will read it slowly, sometimes through tears, sometimes laughing at a sentence about a stolen sock. The household reads the book aloud, the way households have always read books aloud, for the pleasure of being read to and the comfort of being together.
The dog in the book is read about today. The tense of the page is the tense of the reading.
Is keeps. Was archives.
This is the editorial logic of the choice. The relationship stays open, and the grammar of the page stays open with it. The household still says the dog's name, still pauses at the kitchen door where he used to wait, still tells the story of him in the present tense without thinking about it. The book uses the same tense the household uses when the household is at its best.
Side by side: the same paragraph in two tenses
Editorial arguments stand or fall on the example. Here are the same five sentences in past tense and in present tense. They describe the same dog. They make a different book.
Past tense:
Mabel was a small gray terrier who loved the sound of the post arriving. She knew the postman by the squeak of the gate. She would wait by the door from a quarter past nine, ears forward. When the envelopes dropped through the slot, she would carry the longest one back to the kitchen and put it down at your feet. She did this every morning for eleven years.
Present tense:
Mabel is a small gray terrier who loves the sound of the post arriving. She knows the postman by the squeak of the gate. She waits by the door from a quarter past nine, ears forward. When the envelopes drop through the slot, she carries the longest one back to the kitchen and puts it down at your feet. She did this every morning for eleven years.
The two paragraphs share the same facts. They make a different book.
The past-tense paragraph reads like a report on a dog who is over. It is precise and respectful and faintly bureaucratic, the language of services held privately, donations to the rescue. The present-tense paragraph reads like the household at its kitchen table, telling a friend about Mabel. The friend has never met Mabel. The friend leaves the kitchen feeling she has.
The final sentence is the same in both versions. The "eleven years" is a fact with edges. It began. It ended. It belongs in past tense. The discipline is to hold the character in present and let the closed facts go to past. The voice is the present-tense voice; the dates and durations are past-tense objects within the present-tense voice.
This is the working rule.
Where present tense fails
A craft principle that admits no exceptions is dogma. Present tense fails in three places, and the editorial discipline is knowing them.
The first place: events that occurred and are over. The day at the lake, the first car ride, the time the cat got out and was missing for six hours. These are episodes with beginnings and ends, and they ask for past tense. He swam farther than we thought he would, written as he swims farther than we thought he will, becomes grammatical nonsense and editorial fog.
The second place: comparisons across life stages. Daisy as a puppy was nervous of the stairs. The puppy stage is a past-tense object inside the present-tense voice of the narrator. She was nervous of the stairs as a puppy; she is patient with them now. The two clauses together do honest work.
The third place: when the household wants the past closed. There are readers for whom a present-tense memorial book is too tender, too immediate, too soon. The right book for them is a past-tense book. Present tense is the right default for the book that wants to be read again. Some readers, on some days, need the other kind.
The discipline, then, is mixed tense inside a present-tense frame. Character in the present. Events that ended in the past. The narrator in whatever tense the narrator is in. The book makes the frame; the household reads what they can read.
A short style guide for writing companions in present tense
For writers and editors working on keepsake books, the rules that have settled at the Journal:
- Character is present tense. He is the dog who waits at the door.
- Events with edges are past tense. The morning we brought him home, the snow was still falling. This event has a beginning and an end. Use past.
- Verbs of being, knowing, loving stay present. She knows the sound of your car. He loves the second piece of toast. These describe a continuing relationship, the way a household talks about a dog around the kitchen table.
- Watch for the conditional past. He would always wait at the door is a sentence that quietly says he no longer does. Reach for it on purpose, or change would to waits.
- The pet's name is always present. The name is what the household still says aloud. Names live outside tense.
- Read the page aloud, three years from now. Imagine the household that will read this book when the book is no longer new. If the page sounds like a card from a stranger, change it. If it sounds like the household still knows the dog, leave it.
- Your subject is the reader's continued relationship with the page. Everything the reader is carrying belongs to the reader. The page is what the writer can shape.
The seventh rule is the load-bearing one. The book is an act of company.
A note on practice
This Journal is, in part, a working notebook for the editorial choices made at Pets & Pages. Tense is one of the older arguments in writing about pets, and the present-tense position has been the convention in certain registers of literary memoir for decades. The historical present is older than any of us. What is new is the application: the household keepsake book, made to be read again, sometimes by people who were not in the room when the book was written.
The grammatical choice is small. The reading life of the book is long. Is keeps. Was archives. The Journal will keep writing pets in the tense that lets a household keep them.
