I've come across my habit for adding 'were' constantly. It's getting overused and it was hard to see till I started reading back once I finished one of the chapter's. I tried googling for lists of words to in their place, but nada. I could be missing it totally. If you guys could lend a hand here and give me some to use?
Use any active verb. It might require changing the sentence around a bit. There's loads of ways to do it. "She was cold" --> "Cold air bit through her jacket," etc. ("She felt cold" is really no better than "was" because you're not putting the reader inside the character) "The paperwork was boring" --> "Joe picked up the papers, already thinking about his coffee break as his head swam and his mouth watered with sleepy drool." "She was annoying" --> "I nodded along, thinking about the front door and hoping she'd walk through it soon. Her high, loud voice strained my ears." Some will tell you that you can replace "was" with "seemed," "felt," "looked" or some other word, but this is just as bad. It's vague and isn't the quality of writing that will immerse the reader in the story. This isn't to say that you should use long wordy descriptions, because that's not the case at all. But think about it: in a story, readers should be so immersed that they think they ARE the character while they're reading. So phrases like "he felt" will take them out of that, because you're reminding them that it's a story. Does that make sense? I tend to ramble, lol.
It is not a matter of replacing verbs. It comes down to writing less passively. Use stronger actions in your sentences. Instead of "The houses on the street were all painted white or various shades of gray." You would drop the sentence entirely. Instead, you would incorporate the description into an action sentence that takes place on the street. "We cruised along the gray street, passing house after colorless house, trying to find number fourteen."
we can't really help without seeing how you've been using it... you'll need to provide some examples...
1. were continuously 2. were forever 3. were habitually 4. were always 5. were invariably 6. were eternally 7. Were repeatedly 8. Were perpetually 9. were neverendingly 10. Were obsessively 11. Were persistently 12. Were monotonously 13. Were repetitiously 14. were insistently 15. Were consistently 16. Were pestiferously 17. Were incessantly 18. Were unceasingly 19. Were unendingly 20. Were interminably 21. Were unremitingly
There's some good advice in here, but I wouldn't overthink it. I challenge you to open up any novel from your collection and count how many linking verbs the author uses in a single chapter. Let me know what you find.
I wouldn't say so (I didn't take the time to check my novels though), mostly because I've already heard such advice in workshops. Besides that, a less passive sentence seems better from a reader's point of view.
