Linking verbs/auxiliary verbs in narrative fiction
- Thread starter UberStein
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No, it is not. Here's why.
There are only two tenses in English; present and past. Everything else depends on an auxiliary verb/helping verb/linking verb/suppletive verb
It's pretty difficult to entirely avoid them. It's an artificial limit.
That advice -- to avoid linking/helping verbs -- is a well-intentioned effort to encourage the use of active verbs, and avoidance of passive voice.
But even "avoid passive voice" is not a rule; sometimes you need and want to use passive voice.
The thing to do is ask yourself "Is this the best way to write this?"
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No, not worth it. The only time you might want to rethink it is if it looks like you haven't shown enough of the character/situation/your voice.
Example:
Mary was ill.
Mary had a terrible cold, it seemed. She was sneezing all over the place.
Truth be told, readers don't tell themselves: 'Why is he using 'was'? This writer's terrible!'. They might get annoyed if you overuse it, but they'd also get annoyed if you repeated anything too much.
We have a 'was' thread also near the top in the basic writing questions forum and my opinion is stated pretty succinctly there, and why I think avoiding 'was' is a crock of shite. But I won't restate here to avoid starting some stupid argument I'm not really interested in fighting.
The correct question to ask is never "can I do ..... ?", it's "does .... make my writing better?"
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