P2P: My War Against Had and Was

Photo by Anonymous

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.

P2P: Edit Yourself Backwards

Editing your own work is hard for several reasons. You know what's going on, so the picture in your head is complete. When you're reading your own work you don't really know what a brand new reader is seeing with your words. How complete is their picture? You also know the intent of the dialogue, and our brains- being awesome- fill in minor missing words without our eyes ever noticing. Sometimes, when we're really involved in a project, faults of logic can even slip past, causing huge pileups of edits later on.

So if editing yourself is so hard, is there anything you can do?


Edit Yourself Backwards
Have you ever tried reading a sentence backwards? Start at the end of your manuscript and work your way right to left. You'll notice right away that things go a lot slower like this. Making sense of a backward sentence takes a bit of doing- a lot like learning a new language where the nouns and adjectives are swapped. This enforced slower pace will make awkward sentences jump out right away. Missing words and strange tenses will become very obvious.

Edit Yourself Upside Down
This won't work on a tablet or your desktop computer, but print out a few text pages and try it. Flip your work upside down. Like the backwards technique, upside down forces your brain to work harder to translate into right-side-up words. You'll have the sentences in a logical order this way, so pacing, voice, and characters are easier to see.

Edit Yourself In The Mirror
Not going to lie, this one might be more trouble than it's worth. But for those avid readers who swallow doorstoppers in a day, it may come to this. Grab your laptop, get comfortable on the bathroom counter (or in front of a floor-length mirror if you want to be slightly more normal) and read your story in the reflection. With every letter flipped around b's and d's will get confused very quickly. Be methodical. Read word for word. Misspellings, missed punctuation, and all sorts of small weirdnesses will pop out at you, but it will take a long time.

Edit Yourself Out Loud
Every reader has a mental voice or two that carries them along through a text. Many readers, once they get into the story, start seeing it like a movie or hearing it, rather than reading the page. Hide in the farthest corner of the house in a quiet room to yourself, and read your story out loud. With you mouth, not your mental voice. Give the words weight and emphasis. Feel them. Pacing with scream at you this way, but so will awkward sentences and funny homonyms.
Even with all of the above, you won't catch everything. It's the nature of the beast. You will, at some point, need a beta reader or editor (request a quote!) to go over your work and critique or proofread before publication. That's ok! An outside look at things can give you some perspective. Still, in order to produce the cleanest copy you can, try combining all four of the above techniques at once. That'll slow your inner reader down.

Let's Get It Started

Original Photo by Brenda

Happy New Year and Welcome!

My name is Tami, I'm an author, editor, and artist with a degree in Creative Writing and an emphasis in fiction. I've been published through small presses, self published, and like most budding writers, I got my start in fanfiction. You can check out what I've done on the about page. Now I'm available to authors for evaluations and developmental edits of your short stories, flash fiction, serial fiction, novellas, and novels. For editing services and a list of genres I read, visit this page.

Throughout the next year I'll be posting common writing errors: both how to identify them and how to fix them. Topics range from keeping your character's voices consistent to what exactly does 'show, don't tell' mean and when do you apply it?

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And when you have a story ready for editing, don't hesitate to request a quote.