This isn't intuitive: like an ammonite eating a croissant isn't.
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Cute, huh?
Well anyway, let me explain my thoughts about "was."
"Was" isn't necessarily a villain, but if you let it go unchecked, it will become one. "Was" is the most intuitive way to connect ideas, but it's rather matter-of-fact. As a writer, you want to be creative and beautiful as well. So, in spite of its ubiquitousness, your writing will be better if you cut down on "was" and try some different verbs.
At the very least, every time you write "was," stop and say hi to it. You'll soon know if you're saying hello too often!
Here's an example of how eliminating "was" helped in a passage I wrote long ago, in a now-defunct story called "The Temperature of Frost." It remains a good example!
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BEFORE: I sat in a cave, with my butt in wet sand. Behind me there was a tunnel rising, to my sides muddy brown walls, and ahead of me was dark blue water lapping. There were torches burning in braziers, which was how I was able to see.
AFTER: I sat in a cave, my butt in wet sand. I felt dizzy, too, after the fall, but I didn't have the luxury to nurse myself before assessing my surroundings. There and there. My eyes darted between the exits. Behind me rose a tunnel, whose end I could not see, and before me lay a lake, whose lowness to the earth seemed strange. This 'lake', you see, passed under an arch of rock, as if it had once been a tunnel to a deeper compound, and golden minerals crusted its edges like the barnacles on a treasure chest. If I stood in a better state I would have dove in and seen where fortune carried me, but at the moment I had a hard enough time climbing off my ass. Joker had certainly done it this time.
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Look at those lazy "was"! They didn't prompt me to create any new structures. The new version uses many more interesting structures, and the lack of "was" makes me describe the setting with action verbs like "dart", "nurse", "pass", "crust", "dive", and "climb".
It's not that you should never use "was". It's that you shouldn't rely on it, and you should notice how often you use it. There are other ways to express things than the most common verb in the world.
