Erin M. KinchSometimes, it’s really hard for me to turn off the editing portion of my brain and just read. I’ll be reading along, be it a novel or the latest offering from one of my favorite online fiction venues, and I’ll come across some bit of language and think how much better it would have been if they’d edited just a little more closely — eliminate that passive voice or not say the same word twice so close together, things like that.

Now, of course, if it’s a style thing, that’s totally different, but a lot of the time, it reads to me like it’s just a be verb or whatever that the author didn’t notice, as opposed to a conscious choice to stick with the passive.

I was reading a story recently that said something like, “Her dress covered her like….” (The quotes have been changed, because I don’t want to point fingers.) I thought the simile that the author used to describe the outfit was lovely, but the sentence would have been so much more impactful to me if the author had written, “The dress covered her…” instead. Having the same word twice so close together bumps me out of the story and has me thinking about repetition and redundant word choice instead of marveling over the simile and description.

Then, not much farther down in the same story, there was an intrusive be verb — something simple like, “He was walking down the street.” Again, I was thrown out of the story to wonder why the author didn’t just say, “He walked down the street.” Why put in that passive voice, when the active voice flows so much better and creates a more vivid picture?

It’s like, now that I search for these things in my own work with such a critical eye, I can’t shut my brain off when I see these things elsewhere. And then I wonder why the author didn’t see them. If only he or she had taken a few extra minutes to edit — perhaps do a search for be verbs. Such a small thing can make a story so much crisper and cleaner!

Is it the mark of a writer who has not spent as much time honing his or her craft? I know that I used to fling passive voice, repeated words, and complicated verb constructions around with abandon. I go back to some of my earlier work and wonder how I ever didn’t see that! It’s thanks to the efforts of my writing group that I’ve learned to go through my first drafts with a fine-toothed comb, searching for better, more active, more descriptive ways to say things.

(A quick shout out here to writing group mate Jens for his Nazi like devotion to marking complex verb constructions in critiques, and to writing group mate Virginia for doggedly pointing out each and every repeated word! And, heck, to all of Writer’s Ink in general — I’ve learned so much from you guys!)

Part 2 on Wednesday!

Erin M. Kinch lives and writes in Fort Worth, Texas. Visit her blog, Living the Fictional Dream (www.erinmkinch.com), for links to her published stories and more of her musings on writing.  She a new mommie these days.