P2P: My War Against Had and Was

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Arguably one of the easiest ways to tighten up prose and bring a punch to your settings or action is to strike out most mentions of 'had' and 'was.' These words crop up to indicate complex past tense states that are, on the whole, unnecessary for clear prose.


Past Perfect Tense

• He had faltered up the steps.
• She had sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all had left a mess of the balcony.

The past perfect tense indicates a time period before a time in the past. It frequently crops up in past-tense fiction when referencing something that has already occurred. Since the story is written in past, the past perfect tense offers a double past indicator.

In almost every instance, had is unnecessary for the understanding of the sentence, slows down the scene, and takes the punch out of the verb that follows it. Also in almost every instance, all you have to do is remove it.

• He faltered up the steps.
• She sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all left a mess of the balcony.

Tighter, stronger. The reader doesn't need a double past indicator to understand when something is happening before something else. Context within the story provides that information as does simply placing the earlier event earlier in the draft of the story where it would have happened.


Future-In-the-Past

• They were going to visit his Aunt.
• He was planning on skipping stones on the lake.
• She was going to cut vegetables for the stew.

Was/were is a little trickier as it's used for two different past tenses. The future-in-the-past tense indicates a plan for the future from a point of view in the past. There is an implied 'but something happened' in a future-in-the-past tense. 'She was going to cut vegetables for the stew, but traffic made her late.'

This tense format is useful in fiction, especially for close points of view. But 'was' tends to be a habit of unplanned prose as it's the context of the scene or a previous scene that tells the reader what the characters plan on doing. The writer shouldn't need to specify directly, it takes all the showing out of your story and places the sentence firmly in the telling category. 

The fix is not simple, unfortunately. If you've spent chapter one establishing that Boy's mother wants him to run the basket of apples to his Aunt in the woods, it's unnecessary to open chapter two with 'They were going to visit his Aunt.' But usually a rejigging of the paragraph is needed if the information isn't already obvious to the reader. 

Cutting vegetables, for instance: Sally slumped against the window of her bus seat. She couldn't drum up a smile for the little boy waving at her in the car next door. Traffic snarled in every direction and she checked her watch for the third time. Seven oh six. Mother came home to unchopped vegetables. 

Past Progressive and Gerunds

• She was skipping with us.
• He was throwing the ball.
• They were cutting, taping, and gluing their craft projects.

 Past progressive tense indicates a thing that started in the past and continued for a while (either specified or vague). Again, there's an implied clause that something occurs to interrupt  the event that was happening. 'She was skipping with us until she fell down the hole.' 'He was throwing the ball until he hit a window.'

In conjunction with 'was' the following verb is forced into a gerund format, a verb that acts like a noun. They're easy to spot with 'ing' at the end of them. All verbs in the sentence that follow a 'was' or 'were' need to adopt this gerund status to maintain the correct subject/verb agreement.

But a verb that's forced into a noun isn't a strong verb at all. The easiest way to change this is simply remove 'was' and convert the gerund back into a verb in the simple past tense.

• She skipped with us.
• He threw the ball.
• They cut, taped, and glued their craft projects. 

Notice that the sentences still work if the event in question is interrupted. 'She skipped with us until she fell down the hole.'


More Past Tenses

If you want to look into even more varieties of past tense, I recommend this post from Daily Writing Tips. They give good examples and decent explanations of each tense (though no cool visual timelines).

As always, editing guidelines are 1) subjective and 2) not set in stone. Great writers break rules all the time, but you should always know what the rule is for so you can break it deliberately.