If you've swallowed a writing "how to" book lately, you may have run across the idea that we should purge being verbs from our writing whenever possible. The reason is that being is not active, it is not energetic, and it can lead to slow, boring writing. Using alternatives to being energizes and moves stories forward. It's not the same as active vs. passive voice (a topic for another time) but it is true that overusing being verbs can create a passive feeling to a story. That is, it can create a feeling of stillness.

Here are two paragraphs, one with a lot of being verbs and one with all those being verbs replaced with more active verbs:

“Mark is a thirty-seven-year-old man who is currently working for the FBI. For the past month, he has been staking out a house where a suspected terrorist lives. The suspect is living in his mom’s basement. He has been looking up how to make bombs on the internet.”

“Thirty-seven-year-old Mark works for the FBI as a field agent staking out suspected terrorists. His current assignment lives in his mother’s basement and spends his time looking up information on making bombs on the internet.”

I hope you can see how overusing the being verb can lead to dull, unmoving passages. Even in description, you can often use verbs that add interest and variety to help make the description more interesting.

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The trouble with all that I've said about being verbs is that some writers, after reading this advice, and indeed some authors who give this advice, take it to an extreme. Death to existence! Kill all forms of being! Stamp that out of your writing and life will be better, nay, life will be perfect!

What a load of (fill in preferred noun). Read a book by one of your favorite authors and look at their use of being, if you like. They all, to a greater or lesser extent, incorporate this fundamental building block of our language into their writing.

Somethings things just are. When they are, trying to form a sentence that eliminates the sense of being will sound convoluted and wrong.

"The couch is blue."

"The couch exudes bluness."

YUCK! Granted, you could probably combine this sentence with another to remove the being..."The blue couch sits in the den." but maybe that's not what you're trying to say. Maybe you're trying to piont out someone's fasination with blue.

"Bill loves the color blue so much that it overwhelms the decor in his house. His carpet is blue, his walls are blue, his couch is blue."

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So, where's the compromise? How much being is the right amount? That is largely up to the author.

I went through a stage where I tried to eliminate all being verbs from my writing. It lasted for nearly a year before a friend of mine got honest with me and told me, "I love the way you write through e-mail and in your posts, it sounds so natural, but your stories sound forced and stilted. I think you're trying too hard."

It was a lightbulb moment for me. I eased up on being, adverbs, and aejectives and truly found my voice.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that it is probably a good exercise for writers to try to eliminate being from their writing for a while. Not because total elimination of these words is always right or good, but because it helps them to practice finding other ways, stronger ways or writing. Then, when you've had enough practice, ease up a bit. You'll probably find you don't use being as much as you did because you've found some new tools to help strengthen your writing, but there will still be existence in your work.

I'm glad I'm done with my being stage for a lot of reasons. I realized after the fact that I had stopped enjoying reading nearly as much because of my hypersensitivity to this word that everyone uses. I would notice it in works by my favorite authors and in works I was critiquing. Everywhere I went -- there it was.

Now that I'm past that stage, I notice being when it's annoying, when it's really overdone, or when the story feels slow. Usually, though, I notice the slowness first and then think, "Hey, I bet using more active verbs would help."

re: annoying...

"He was running."
"He was jumping."
"He was smiling."

There is almost never a reason to use this phrasing. "He ran." "He jumped" and "He smield." almost lways work out better.

quote:

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He was running."
"He was jumping."
"He was smiling."

There is almost never a reason to use this phrasing. "He ran." "He jumped" and "He smield." almost lways work out better.

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I think that all writing advice boils down to eliminating all those annoying things that people only ever do in written communications because they aren't fully comfortable with it. To become a really good writer, you must achieve fluency, the ability to create literate text without straining your mastery of vocabulary or grammar.

Most of us outgrow the totally illiterate stage--where spelling, syntax, and semantics are totally idiosyncratic--in the process of learning to actually confine our writing to the recognized letters of the alphabet. By the time we get to the middle of grade school, we can write comprehensible sentances. But writing is still difficult, so children of that age tend to circumscribe their writing. Sentences are composed with an eye to reducing the total letter count and the number of unfamiliar spellings. Of course, I went through the opposite pattern, since I knew how to read/spell many more words than I could correctly pronounce or identify in conversational use. But the same principle applies. As written communication becomes a required assignment for schoolwork, we all start learning many different tactics to overcome this basic deficiency. Many of them revolve around inflating the word count of a sentence which could be expressed in simpler terms. Some of them rely on making it so difficult to extract the actual meaning that several other sentences are needed to clarify what has been said. Almost none of them are concerned with increasing the actual information content of what is being written.

A lot of advice for novice writers focuses on forbidding the use of these tactics. I had to go through the same thing, a couple of years when I was forbidden to use "filler" words and phrases in conversation. You know; "um", "well", "like", "you know"

Once a writer is restricted from using words and syntax as a means of obfuscating the basic lack of complex meaning, the struggle to actually express those complex ideas (as opposed to apparently expressing something complex) can begin. The problem is that it isn't useful to try and get a writer to say anything complex until after achieving significant mastery of written vocabulary and syntax. For most humans, mastery of written language lags well behind mastery of somatic (particularly verbal) language. So most writers must go through the stage when they are using written language as a formal exercise rather than a primary means of communication. And that means that a lot of your training in written language is invested in playing the game of looking like you're saying more than you're actually saying.

The good news is that, whatever your motivations for learning more written vocabulary and syntax, once you've learned enough you're ready to start using them to express the full range of meaning and nuance you express through spoken communication. All that is really necessary is elimination of the tendency to obfuscate your meaning and inflate your wordcount.

I've done some informal analysis and discovered that for me, if the story word count consists of less than 1% of the word 'was,' they are pretty much invisible. When they get over about 1.2% the word begins to call attention to itself. Get over 1.5% and the word begins screaming passivity.

This is in any context. I don't mean passive voice, I mean that the whole story starts to feel passive. I'm as guilty as the next person. My story in IGMS has about 1.8% and in retrospect, feels very passive. The latest one I finished uses about 0.25%.

quote:

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What was she thinking when she volunteered for this?
- Thrice Around the Earth and then Home, James

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There really isn't a better way to say that in the context of the story.

quote:

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The woman was struggling to keep her children from complaining about the cold.
- The Adjoa Gambit

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On the other hand, this sentence could easily be reworded.

It's a matter of style, but it's also a matter of thinking. Anymore, when I type the word 'was,' I stop and ask myself whether I really want to do it? Sometimes the answer is yes, many times, it's no. You can get away with it more in dialog than in prose, I think.