Well, OK, maybe verb tenses are inherently boring, but I just wanted to get you to read the blog post. I think this is quite interesting anyway.
I was recently in a workshop where someone had commented that using lots of sentences with ‘was’ and ‘were’ in them slowed the pace down. I thought about it and decided that they had a point, but when I asked myself why, I no longer felt terribly sure.
This morning I went for my constitutional jog around the local reservoir, and came up with the following thoughts. It’s an answer (of sorts) that comes in two parts (I think this applies to all conjugations from the verb ‘to be’, but I’m going to use ‘was’ as my model).
‘Was’ in a sentence either creates a statement about a static state of being (as in ‘Fred was a man’, ‘Jean was beautiful’) or, if it appears in an imperfect tense construction (as in, ‘it was raining’, ‘he was running’), it denotes a state of continuing action. In either case, there is no change implied within the verb and no change created by the sentence. It describes a scene but it doesn’t move the scene forward, so – although you may need such a construction once in a while – having a bunch of them in quick succession creates a very static unchanging image in the reader’s mind. QED, I thought to myself, that’s the pace problem right there.
However, as I ran on, I started to worry that I might be reading too much into the verb form, if it is ever in fact possible to read ‘too much’ into anything, so I followed up with some thought experiments.
Maybe this is just the way my mind works, but I’ve tried to picture the sentence ‘he was running’. You’d think there was action in that, right? But wait a minute, when I close my eyes, I don’t see a guy running from right to left or left to right, I see a man centred in my imagination going repetitively through cycles of arm and leg movements. There’s no real change implied by the sentence. He was running before the sentence began and he’s still running at the end of it. However, if you give me, ‘He ran,’ I see a guy who was not running at the start, but moved from point A to point B as the sentence unfolds.
Am I weird or unusual in this? Well, maybe (and some would say, ‘Absolutely’) but this is one you can try at home . We might be about to discover something profound about how different people react to text. Try the mental experiment and describe what your mental image shows you when you read these two sentences:
• He was running.
• He ran.
(It would be really weird if the person you saw doing the running changed between the two sentences, so if that happens, definitely note it down too.)
Contributed by Dave Martin
leicesterwritersclub.com 