Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am writing about a woman who has found an anonymous parcel on her desk, and she is talking to her colleague to find out who might have sent it...
The novel is written in past tense, and I am not fully convinced as to whether I should use "might be" or "might have been" in the following sentence:
She suggested it might be a surprise from Harry
She suggested it might have been a surprise from Harry
Obviously, it refers to the parcel in question
I will reward good answers
Thank you
It's a matter of using simple or perfect past tense.
She suggested it might be a surprise from Harry
This is simple past tense. It conveys "now" in the past tense, the current flow of events in your story. At this point, it implies they don't know what the parcel contains, or who it's from.
She had suggested it might have been a surprise from Harry
This is the past perfect. It conveys something that happened before the "now" of the simple past tense. This implies (but does not guarantee) they know what was in the parcel, and potentially who sent it.
