3-Day Magical Editing Mini-Course – Day 1: -ING Verbs
Cut back on your word count one weak verb at a time.
This is day one of our Magical Editing Mini-Course.
Today’s editing assignment is my absolute favorite. Mostly because it had such a big impact on my own writing.
Let’s start with a little lesson about strong verbs.
For the most part, the strongest verbs you can use are plain old past- or present-tense conjugations.
Past: He ran on the beach.
Present: She sits in a chair.
Past: Mary wrote a letter to her sister.
Present: John contemplates his life.
Here’s what often happens instead. We add -ing to the verb and a to-be verb. When we do that, those sentences become:
Past: He was running on the beach.
Present: She is sitting in a chair.
Past: Mary was writing a letter to her sister.
Present: John is contemplating his life.
I hope you can see that those examples are pretty much the same whether you’re writing fiction or creative nonfiction. Even more prescriptive nonfiction (like how-to articles.)
I sometimes see this construction called passive. It’s not. But it is considerably weaker than using a past or present tense verb instead.
Here’s today’s magical edit.
The first step is to make a copy of your manuscript if you haven’t already. I’d like you to be able to compare your writing before your edits and after.
Search through your editing copy for ‘ing.’ No quotation marks. No spaces before or after.
Fair warning, you’re going to get a lot of results. Maybe 100s. Maybe even 1000s, depending on how much you rely on this kind of verb and how long your book is.
That’s okay.
Start filtering through them and change as many as you can to regular past or present tense verbs. Don’t worry about rewriting the whole sentence. That’s a job for another editing day.
You’ll want to keep some -ing verbs, of course. For instance, I used the word ‘depending’ above. I’d keep that. I’ve also used ‘editing’ and ‘writing’ in this email. I’d keep those, too.
But when you see a sentence structured with a to-be verb (is, was, has been, etc.) and an -ing verb together, then change that to a simple past or present tense verb.
Set a timer and go through as many of those -ing verbs as you can. If you have all day, you can probably get through your whole book. Aim for at least a chapter, though, and plan to make the two edits still to come on that chapter as well.
Tomorrow, I’ll share my favorite dialogue edit.
Love,
Shaunta