An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Sixteen -- I was using 'was' too much, wasn't I?

How's it going? It's July here, and the UK has decided that it's had quite enough of this summer nonsense and rain is drizzling down outside, so it's quite pleasant to be sitting in the warm, sipping a cup of tea, writing this.

This chapter is about forms of the verb 'to be'. The ways that we normally see this verb are as 'was' in past tense, and in present as 'is'. In the first paragraph of this chapter, I wrote 'is' four times, although most of them are hidden in contractions. (Note that the second 'it's' is a contraction for 'it has', not 'it is', so doesn't count.) We're going to talk about whether those are actually uses of 'to be', whether using them too much is a good thing or not, and what little line edits you can make to clean it up.

On this journey, we're going to go in deep into some grammar, deeper than we've ever done before, so put your literary scuba gear on and let's dive into the sea of words.

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So why do we want to get rid of 'was'? The first is our old friend, echoing. 'Was' is a word like any other, and although your tolerance for it is much higher than other more words, it's not infinite. When the 'was' really stacks up they can be intrusive. Echoing of 'was' is caused by a lot of things, and one of them is the tense you write in. Here's an example.

Jose was afraid. Very afraid. He was sure that the thing was looking for him, was hunting for him through the narrow corridors of the ship: that it was worming its slimy bulk through the access ducts. It was coming for him, and he was afraid.

So, I don't know about you, but I don't notice the repetition of 'was' so much as the repetition of 'was afraid' at the end. But it's definitely there. And the echoing makes the language feel clunky, not silky.

The reason that we see lots of 'was' here is that I'm writing in a tense called the past continuous. Here, 'was' isn't actually a use of 'to be' in this tense, it's a modifier on another verb which shifts it into the past. And you can't get away from 'was' in past continuous. It's how you bolt the words together.

We don't see this tense very often in fiction. Normally we use past simple ('the thing looked for him') or, often when we're in first person, present simple ('the thing looks for him'). The reason I'm using past continuous here is because I'm reporting what Jose thought about in the past. You can tell because of the filter verb 'sure'.

So if you want to reduce your echoing 'was' then this tense is one to avoid. But that's OK! There's a simple fix for that, and it's one we've seen before. Get closer into the character's head!

Jose shivered in fear. The thing's looking for me, hunting me through the narrow corridors of the ship, he thought. Right now it's worming its slimy bulk through the access ducts. It's coming for me.

There, much nicer. Less 'was', more intimate. I deleted the last echo, and pushed the rest into reported present continuous. And, fascinatingly contractions solve some of my echo problem: I have a similar number of 'is' to 'was' but 'is' is much more sociable, and wants to be friends with words around it and contracts into stuff like 'thing's' and 'it's' and provides more variety. I have theories about that, but we don't have space in the margins, so let's keep going! So. Past continuous, makes your 'was' very echoey, maybe you should use reported thought?

I also fixed a second use of 'was', which was a completely different problem.

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