writing past tense within past tense?

Question

So I am not a very experienced writer but I am currently writing a short story fiction for a class and it's in past tense first person point of view (ie. "I said... I saw)

So my charecter is talking to another charecter about a topic and suddenly she starts thinking to herself sort of like this...
"I remembered it almost word for word. He had come home from the library and ran into the house yelling out my name."

Now, if I want to start a dialogue would I say "He had said" or "he said" ?

English is my second language, so I've never been very good. Thanks!

Answer 1

You would say, "he said," because the action takes place after he enters the house. (Note that I'm now using the present tense, because it is usual to describe written work in the present, even if the action took place in the past!). In other words, the first of two past actions is a compound tense and the second is a simple tense. Congratulations on your interest in learning to do well in a second language.

Answer 2

The only comment I have to make is regarding fiction. Good fictional dialogue sounds like conversation; and conversation is frequently idiomatic and colloquial, but not grammatically correct. In fact, this is something about which you should ask your professor--

It gives you more leeway--at least in the portion of text actually spoken by the characters.

Here's a good resource for past perfect usage.

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html

Answer 3

We cant give you an answer to that. It depends on what you want to say.
Look at the dialog that you wrote. You perfectly used the past tense and the past perfect.
I can give you a simple rule: Use the simple past if the event happened at a certain point in time and finished: "He said. She ate. We ran."
Use the past perfect if two past events happened together but you want to show which one happened first:
"He had eaten the sandwich when she screamed."