I know, I know. We've talked about this before. Heck, I've probably brought it up before myself, but once again we have a new group of hatrackers who may benefit from a discussion about being...or not being.If you've swallowed a writing "how to" book lately, you may have run across the idea that we should purge being verbs from our writing whenever possible. The reason is that being is not active, it is not energetic, and it can lead to slow, boring writing. Using alternatives to being energizes and moves stories forward. It's not the same as active vs. passive voice (a topic for another time) but it is true that overusing being verbs can create a passive feeling to a story. That is, it can create a feeling of stillness.
Here are two paragraphs, one with a lot of being verbs and one with all those being verbs replaced with more active verbs:
“Mark is a thirty-seven-year-old man who is currently working for the FBI. For the past month, he has been staking out a house where a suspected terrorist lives. The suspect is living in his mom’s basement. He has been looking up how to make bombs on the internet.”
“Thirty-seven-year-old Mark works for the FBI as a field agent staking out suspected terrorists. His current assignment lives in his mother’s basement and spends his time looking up information on making bombs on the internet.”
I hope you can see how overusing the being verb can lead to dull, unmoving passages. Even in description, you can often use verbs that add interest and variety to help make the description more interesting.
***********************
The trouble with all that I've said about being verbs is that some writers, after reading this advice, and indeed some authors who give this advice, take it to an extreme. Death to existence! Kill all forms of being! Stamp that out of your writing and life will be better, nay, life will be perfect!
What a load of (fill in preferred noun). Read a book by one of your favorite authors and look at their use of being, if you like. They all, to a greater or lesser extent, incorporate this fundamental building block of our language into their writing.
Somethings things just are. When they are, trying to form a sentence that eliminates the sense of being will sound convoluted and wrong.
"The couch is blue."
"The couch exudes bluness."
YUCK! Granted, you could probably combine this sentence with another to remove the being..."The blue couch sits in the den." but maybe that's not what you're trying to say. Maybe you're trying to piont out someone's fasination with blue.
"Bill loves the color blue so much that it overwhelms the decor in his house. His carpet is blue, his walls are blue, his couch is blue."
*****************************
So, where's the compromise? How much being is the right amount? That is largely up to the author.
I went through a stage where I tried to eliminate all being verbs from my writing. It lasted for nearly a year before a friend of mine got honest with me and told me, "I love the way you write through e-mail and in your posts, it sounds so natural, but your stories sound forced and stilted. I think you're trying too hard."
It was a lightbulb moment for me. I eased up on being, adverbs, and aejectives and truly found my voice.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that it is probably a good exercise for writers to try to eliminate being from their writing for a while. Not because total elimination of these words is always right or good, but because it helps them to practice finding other ways, stronger ways or writing. Then, when you've had enough practice, ease up a bit. You'll probably find you don't use being as much as you did because you've found some new tools to help strengthen your writing, but there will still be existence in your work.
I'm glad I'm done with my being stage for a lot of reasons. I realized after the fact that I had stopped enjoying reading nearly as much because of my hypersensitivity to this word that everyone uses. I would notice it in works by my favorite authors and in works I was critiquing. Everywhere I went -- there it was.
Now that I'm past that stage, I notice being when it's annoying, when it's really overdone, or when the story feels slow. Usually, though, I notice the slowness first and then think, "Hey, I bet using more active verbs would help."
re: annoying...
"He was running."
"He was jumping."
"He was smiling."
There is almost never a reason to use this phrasing. "He ran." "He jumped" and "He smield." almost lways work out better.
Anyway, feel free to talk amongst yourselves and disagree or agree with what I've said here.