Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- postscript

I was just rereading something I wrote and realized there's one tip I didn't give you. I've used it, and it will help with your word count.

Avoid pluperfect tense. 

Oral narratives are straight-forward. They tell the tale from beginning to end. They do not have retrospectives. They have what I call sidebars, inset narratives. The Judah-Tamar story in Genesis is a sidebar in the Joseph saga; it gives us our second look at sexual behavior and sets us up for the hat trick in Egypt.

Immediately after it ends, there's a line telling us that Joseph has ended up in Egypt. In Biblical Hebrew, it uses a hufal perfect aspect, which indicates a completed action without a named agent. In Septuagint, it uses an "aorist" which, in my Greek thread, I call an imperfective, and again, it has no named agent. It is not a "pluperfect". The Vulgate uses ductus est which is a perfect passive; there is no separate pluperfect passive. So English translations that have a pluperfect in Genesis 39:1 don't have support for it in the usual source documents.

Biblical Hebrew narratives use perfective verbs to open and close episodes, as in Genesis 39:1 and the creation story, and to express one-time resultative actions. The idea of X happening before Y, once Y already starts happening, comes elsewhere in the context, not in the verb. Inside the story, BH uses what Dr. Cook calls a narrative past, which is really vav plus an imperfective verb. It ain't over until it's over, and the episode can end with a perfective verb or something like "and it is there to this very day", etc.

Fairy tales and other oral narratives treat the action, while it goes on, as not yet completed, the opposite of what a perfect verb means. All the more so, they are not going to use a pluperfect. Check out Grimm's tales (in German of course, see Internet Archive). 

Remember, you don't have to explain how things happen or how things happen to show up just in time for your action to take place. That may be one excuse for pluperfects in written literature, especially mysteries and thrillers, but you don't do that if you're writing it like a fairy tale. The other excuse for a pluperfect in a mystery is, of course, that once somebody commits the crime, you have to have retrospective discussions as you figure out who, why, and so on. 

In other fiction, that would be telling the story back to front. It's confusing.

Also, I suggest that you never have somebody use a pluperfect in speech. Just use a plain past tense. Not "I had already done that" but "I already did that." 

I rewrote a chapter in a fanfic novel a dozen times to get rid of the pluperfects in the first draft. The main character in that chapter was completely illiterate. The pluperfect is, if anything, a tense of written literature. If he couldn't write it, he couldn't use it. Rethink your uneducated or undereducated people and how they communicate. 

In another work I wrote "Nobody can possibly act out a pluperfect tense, acting is all about the present moment." After what I said about film as oral literature, it should be obvious to you that your Regency novel will not translate to film unless you rewrite it to get rid of pluperfect tenses.

While you think about this, brush up on your grammar so that you know the difference between the pluperfect ("I had gone to Birmingham that day") and the conditional ("Had I bought a ticket for Birmingham"). Remember, context is king.

Try not to use pluperfect tense. Edit to get rid of it, and watch your prose become less confusing and more immediate as your word count drops.