The moment you set out for creating a story with fictional characters on it, you immediately signed a contract wherein you would agree to use the Past Tense of the verbs. It’s an automatic compromise authors make whenever starting a story, particularly if we talk about fairy tales that happened “Once upon a time…”
Needless to say, the simple past tense, the past continuous and the past perfect are your best friends in this endeavor. However, knowing where specifically you want to use them is critical for your success, as using the Simple Past Tense when the events you wanted to describe took place in a progressive manner in the past would confuse and tire the reader. For this reason, try to use the following guidelines:

 

Simple Past: the key point to understanding simple past tense is that it describes reality, customs, habits and routines that started and finished at a determined point in the past. It doesn’t focus on a specific point in the past necessarily; rather it focuses on describing the action itself. In English, past verbs split between irregular and regular, with the regular verbs being easy to remember (they finish in –ed, -d or –ied) and the irregular verbs being a little tough to memorize early on because of their variety and the change in their roots (example: break (base form), broke (past form)).

 

Past Continuous: a verbal time that focuses on an action that was in progress in a specific moment in time. Normally, Past Continuous is the one we use when we describe what was happening in X moment, when Y happened. Example: “He was walking out the dog when the accident happened”.

 

Past Perfect: a verbal time that helps you create a sequence of events, and describe an event that happened before another. Example: “When I saw the movie, I found out that the Director had been involved in scientific research for it”

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