All right, all right! I’ll talk about being, but only with the greatest reluctance. Being has bothered me as a topic ever since a long-ago but well-remembered critique I receieved in which a well-meaning peer underlined each and every being verb in a short story, including the ones appearing in dialog, suggesting I replace them with stronger verbs. Every last one. All I can say is…*whimper*
But, and this is a big but, being isn’t a particularly strong verb. I almost forgot its weaknesses until last week, when I stumbled across a book by a new author (sorry, no names) that WAS so passive I wanted to reach in and strangle some life back into it. A plane is crashing. The heroine is feeling scared. There is little hope. The reader is wondering how a plane crash can possibly be so dull.
Well, no, I didn’t really wonder. I knew. Instead of using strong verbs to put us in the moment of the crash and in the terrified mind of the heroine, the crash was described in the most static manner possible, using an instance of being in almost every sentence.
Here is the tip, and it’s pretty simple: Whenever possible, your story should move. Being is a static state. Action verbs move, breathing more life and excitement into a story. There is no need to go crazy, trying to replace every single instance of “to be” with another word, twisting your sentences into painful knots of incomprehensibility, but do ask yourself, each time something is, whether or not it could act instead.