Joely Sue Burkhart

Krista asked about my “had” hatred and what that entailed.

About 3 years ago or so, I stumbled across something Miss Snark said about hating “hads.”  I believe it was one of her Crap-o-Meters and how she hated all of the “backstory” up front, but somehow that hatred of poor “had” lodged into my brain and didn’t want to come out.  I stripped nearly all the past perfect verb tenses out of my writing.  Even though I knew it technically wasn’t the right tense, it was something my brain started doing as I wrote (not something I edited out later).

Now, I’m trying to break that habit and write any little introspection of the past or mini-flash-back of past history in the correct past perfect tense FIRST so I don’t have to go back through and add all those pesky hads.  It’s been an amazingly hard bad habit to break.

For example, this is a little snippet from Beautiful Death before I fixed it:

As if it were yesterday, she saw her sister slung over an alien’s shoulder all those years ago. She never struggled, never cried out for help, never tried to escape. A look came over her face that would still send Isabella shooting up out of nightmares in a cold sweat if she slept for more than an hour or two. Her sister surrendered to the inevitable. She gave up.

“Never,” Isabella whispered. “I will never surrender.”

And this is how I corrected it to show the action in the past perfect tense:

As if it were yesterday, she saw her sister slung over an alien’s shoulder all those years ago. She’d never struggled, cried out for help, or tried to escape. A look had come over her face that would still send Isabella shooting up out of nightmares in a cold sweat if she slept for more than an hour or two. Her sister had surrendered to the inevitable. She’d given up.

“Never,” Isabella whispered. “I will never surrender.”

Only 200+ pages to go….

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