Part 8- I am scared

So I'm reading this story, thinking that it is really good so far, when I think that it is missing something. Then I read one line. "It wassnowing." It doesn't sound bad, in fact, it sounds a little pretty or devastating depending on what the plot was, but there was still something off about it. Then it hit me, like the after affects of bad ramen, and I knew what was lacking. The description.

Woah there, that was description! Well, I mean the fluffy description. Instead of "It was snowing." It turns into, "Small speckles of frost flew past the window and bit him on the nose. The few flowers rested head deep in a continuously piling snow." Or course the second sentence sounds better, you are able to picture how much snow there is and what the tone of the story is. But how do we turn THAT into THIS? Well, there is an easy tool called "Eliminating the To-be verbs." The verbs? IS, WAS, WERE, BE, BEING, BEEN, ARE, and AM. These are the words that often make a story sound like a list. 'It was snowing. I am cold. We were shivering."

I can't get rid of some of my to-be verbs! Some of them we can't get rid of without turning the sentence into something wordy and strange. I've had my own failure with trying to eliminate all my verbs from a one shot. The result- all but 5 were gone, but the story wasawkward sounding. Others are actually very easy to get rid of. For instance, "What is lacking," goes to "What the story lacks." Englishis a funny and strange language and there are many ways to walk around the rules of the language. By changing tense can also affect how the story is written and how easily it is to eliminate these to-be verbs.

The writing challenge! After writing a chapter go back and take note of all the to-be verbs. Now, get rid of half of them!

But I've already posted some chapters! I've had authors come up to  me later and do rewrites of their stories because they changed how it was written. If you ever decide to do that then this is a great opportunity to edit these things. Or, you can just change things from now on. This is a hard core editing tool so I'm not even demanding that people use it. I just hope people can make their stories the best they can be because we all have the potential to be good writers.

Can you share your experience with this format? Of course I will, I'm not tired in the least or suffering from the aftermath of bad ramen. I used this method a little wrong. I didn't want to waste my time rereading what I had written so I checked for all the to-be verbs as I waswriting it. I think I had about 66 in the one shot- it was 5 pages- and I said I got rid of all but 5. The challenge is the eliminate half, so don't go all slicing crazy like I did and try to cut out only half. The second time I cut out a fifth and it sounded better for a different story.I'm not going to lie, I get all writers insane and go tooooooooo far!

Why are you scared? Because the word "am" is in the title. There is a little hidden meaning in everything I do. So, hopefully I'll do the hidden meaning thing soon, because I think it is really important.