Hey Anon! It’s really impossible to say without knowing more about the story and what you’re aiming to do with it. Basically, tense is a tool in the writer’s toolbox, and past and present each give and take certain benefits.

Past:

– Past tense, especially third person, is one of the clearest and most versatile points of view. It allows you to head-hop easily, it allows you to establish a versatile psychic distance ( “how close are we to the character” as in, are we seeing them from the outside or are we deep inside their heads, or are we somewhere in between?) and temporal distance (when is this story being told from?). 

However, it can slow the pace and tension, setting the audience slightly removed from the action.

Present:

– Present tense is immediate and action packed. It can make for really tense prose in an action adventure setting because anything could jump out from around the corner. There isn’t a narrative sense of this story already being finished as it’s told, we’re living it as it happens, so it’s anyone’s guess who lives and who dies at any given moment. I often find myself accidentally slipping into present tense when writing action-packed stories in a modern setting, because I want to capture that immediacy and threat, but I find it hard to sustain so sometimes I’ll end up going back later and switching those scenes back to past tense because it’s easier for storytelling. Action scenes, but also sex scenes can be well-written in present tense, bringing us that immediacy though in the latter perhaps not adding the sense of possible death 😛 I mean, unless you’re into that.

The downside of present tense however is that it can create a muddled, dreamy quality to the mental image your story imparts on the reader, sort of like a shaky-camera in a film. And like the shaky camera it certainly ups tension and excitement in a film, but sometimes we just want the clear steady storytelling that past can give.

To illustrate, there’s one rather famous story that plays with past and present tense in a way that may illustrate my point. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is mostly told in past tense, except in one scene, when the clock is striking, where we slip hauntingly into present to illustrate the dreamlike quality and strangeness of the flow of time:

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these –the dreams –writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away –they have endured but an instant –and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart.