Verbs of Being: To Was, or Not to Was, that Was the Question.

With the exception of dialogue, I strive to minimize “verbs of being” in my writing. You may remember these forms of “to be” from a long-forgotten English class: am, are, is, was, were, been, being, and, of course, be. These slippery verbs express a vague state of being rather than a concrete action. My first awareness of the unfortunate proliferation of these mushy verbs in my writing occurred when a friend (recently graduated with a degree in English composition from a prestigious college in the Pacific Northwest, he knew of such things) pointed out that I had used quite a few of them in the second draft of Toil Under the Sun. He suggested that I explore ways to substitute a few action verbs to increase the “punch” of my writing. At first I scoffed—after he had left the room—but that night I performed a search for the word “was,” and after finding a few thousand of these imprecise little words only half-way through the novel I slumped pathetically in my swivel chair with an expression of horrification spreading across my face. I hastily determined that a search for other verbs of being could prove fatal, and decided instead to rationalized my predicament.  I began by reminding myself that some of the more memorable lines in the great literature of the world rely heavily on verbs of being. Consider the following:

• To be, or not to be, that is the question…. (Shakespeare)
• I think therefore I am. (Descartes)
• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….. (Dickens)
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Austin)
• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (Orwell)
• I am that I am. (God)

Unfortunately, this exercise did not lessen my misery, so I tromped up the stairs to the wall of bookshelves stretched along the top landing and selected a few novels to explore the use of verbs of being by other authors. Within minutes, I easily found these examples:

• Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. (Tom Sawyer, Chapter 2)
• Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man.  (Moby Dick, Chapter 27)
• The weather was unusually warm for the last day of October. We didn’t even need jackets. The wind was growing stronger, and Jem said it might be raining before we got home. There was no moon. (To Kill A Mockingbird, Chapter 28)
• In the morning it was bright, and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. (The Sun Also Rises, Chapter 10)
• But there were men who were impressed by the simple fact that Roark had built a place which made money for owners who didn’t want to make money; this was more convincing than abstract artistic discussions. And there was the one-tenth who understood.  (The Fountainhead, Part IV, Chapter 1)

Alas,  convincing proof that five celebrated authors had also used verbs of being excessively did nothing to diminish my mounting self-doubt. A day passed, and then another, and on the third day from the initial discovery (maybe it was the fourth…I can’t be sure now), I ended all attempts at rationalization and dedicated myself to work through the entire novel from the first word of the prologue to the last word of the epilogue and to replace every single verb of being with a “punchy” action verb. I began later that night, and, with a song in my heart and music issuing from my lips (see above), got hopelessly stuck on the second word of the first sentence of the novel: I am an old man now, and yet I still think of the dreams that haunted my youth many years ago. I stared at the little “am” until my eyes blurred, then recollected that this particular verb of being was functioning as a linking verb (I = old man), and might prove difficult to replace. After much thought, I decided to let this one stay. After all, look at all of those verbs of being in the sentences above. I successfully revised the following two or three, then when I replaced the next “was” with an action verb the sentence was rendered graceless. I revised the sentence back to its original form and moved on. And so it went. By the time I reached the end of the novel (133,000 words later), I realized that verbs of being were not to be loathed if used sparingly and thoughtfully. This was the lesson then: Prefer action verbs to verbs of being, but not at the expense of clarity and grace. Oh, did I mention that it was a dark and stormy night?