This is a bit difficult if you don't remind yourself to think about it when you are writing. Many writers who don't have this drilled into their minds miss it quite often.

Sometimes I'll be reading something in the past tense and then it'll switch to present tense and then back again for no discernible reason. Sometimes I'll be reading something in the present tense, and the author happens to have let a few past tense verbs slip into their writing.

I used to do that all the time. In the seventh grade, there was an intern taking over our English class and she had us work on essays, and she kept sending mine back because it wasn't all in the present-tense. I thought it made sense the way I was writing it, because some of the things I wrote about in said essay were things that happened in the past. In an essay, it doesn't seem to matter.

After that experience, it was drilled into my mind that you only use one tense, with the exception of dialogue and flashbacks and characters' thoughts. Granted, that isn't quite relevant, since no one on Wattpad writes and publishes essays for fun (I hope), but the point I'm making here is that it's easier not to change tenses accidentally when you think a mean English teacher is breathing down your neck.

Sometimes if you're used to writing in the past-tense for one story and you decide to use the present tense for a different story, it takes a bit to shift over and get used to the new tense. It happens. Used to happen to me quite often, until after that teacher.

Now when I write, the only time I ever catch a tense mistake is if it's a typo or I've switched to a different tense for a different story.

This is the only problem I see frequently with the tenses, but I do want to note (now, this doesn't really matter that much) that sometimes different tenses can be better suited for different stories.

Like if your character is telling the story as you are writing it (like in the movies Tangled or The Princess Bride- or even Shrek, I think, though I haven't watched that in a while). You can write the story in the past tense and have little breaks in between where the character that is "telling the story" speaks in present tense.

None of that in the last paragraph is like, writing law, of course. It was merely an example of tenses that could be better suited for a story.

There isn't much less I want to say on this subject for now, so I leave you at that.

Have a good day/night!<3

-L