Writing Tip: Keep an eye on your “was”
Want a quick, powerful way to tighten up your writing? Open up your story. Ctrl+f the word “was.” Now see if you can cut that number down by half by rephrasing those sentences to have more active, dynamic verbs and more robust descriptions.
She was wearing a white dress that offset the tan of her skin, and her hair was coiffed into tight ringlet curls.
The dress hugged her figure, the white fabric a bright contrast against her late-summer tan. Her hair, coiled into tight ringlets, bounced around her shoulders.
Here’s the deal with “was.” It, along with its fellow “being” verbs am, is, are, to be, been, being, describes a state of…well…being. Other verbs describe actions: run! jump! laugh! cough! fight! kiss! things that you do, in other words. But the being verbs don’t really do much of anything.
Sometimes, “was” is used to create a sentence in passive voice. In fact, that last sentence is in passive voice! (sneaky, right?) What’s passive voice? It’s a nifty linguistic trick that lets you hide the subject of a sentence.
The body was dragged for miles. (what dragged it?)
A bullet was found lodged in the wall. (who found it?)
The book was placed on the bookshelf. (who put it there?)
Sometimes, this is pretty useful. It’s useful if you’re a journalist who needs to report an event but you’re missing some of the facts. You can’t make a guess as to who did something, so you’ve got to just quietly skirt around that part. Cool.
But sometimes, you’ll see bizarre passive sentence constructions like:
The bullet was found by police lodged in the wall. (what were the police doing in the wall, that sounds uncomfortable)
The bullet was found lodged in the wall by police (wait so the police put it there?)
The bullet lodged into the wall was found by police (k but that seems a little wordy doesn’t it).
Those sound weird, right? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just say:
Police found the bullet lodged into the wall
That’s way better, right? Clear, concise meaning, no wasted words.
So that’s Problem #1 with “Was” - it’s often used in passive sentence construction, and passive sentences can be vague, unnecessarily long or confusingly worded. If you change your passive voice sentences to active voice, you’ll get more punch in your writing.
Problem #2 with “Was” is it’s a good sign that you’re telling instead of showing in your story. When you say “something was X,” you are stating a fact. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with stating facts or telling sometimes in your writing, but if you do it too much, you’re going to create narrative distance between the reader and your story. We’re not going to feel like we’re “there.”
So don’t tell us, “Billy was sad.” Show us the quiver of his lip, the gleam of tears in his eye, the hitch in his chest as he fights back a sob.
Problem #3 with “Was” is it allows you to write static descriptions without any action. You can spend whole paragraphs telling me what something looked like, and thanks to our pal the “being” verb, nothing has to happen in those paragraphs! Yay! Now guess what? Your reader is going to be bored as shit. Those are the paragraphs of description that the reader is going to skim over because nothing is happening.
…Wait a minute. The red dog what. What is the red dog doing?
If you cut “was” out of the equation, all of a sudden all of your sentences are going to require action verbs. Stuff will have to happen. And that can only be good for your writing.
So look. Here’s the thing. “Was” isn’t evil. You can use it. Sometimes, you want to use it for a specific effect. But it’s a good idea to go back through your manuscript and read all of your “was” sentences and decide whether you really want them to be that way – if you’re doing something specific – or if you just fell back on it out of habit.
Hope this was helpful, and good luck!
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