French for "Was"

Last Friday, in English class, we discussed how to better our writing. My teacher instructed us that nouns and verbs should do 90% of the work while writing, and the other 10% is all the other types of words, including prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, and articles. That's a big difference. He said one way to keep that percentage rate is to cut out all the "to be" verbs, in what ever tense. Words like "is," "am," "are," "was," "were," especially when the word following ends in -ing (that's the past continuous tense, a horribly ungrammatical tense in writing). Many times, an excess of these verbs leads to your character passively being acted upon, instead of your character actively acting. He said that if your writing ever seems to drag, it may be because of an overbearing presence of these verbs. That prompted me to analyze my story MtH, for I find it dragging and boring in many areas, and I'm the author! I searched for "was" and found over 300 occurances, so over the past few days, I started the process of slowly editing my work and lessening my "to be" verbs. It is a challenge, but an extremly gratifying one. I find myself on page 12 with 270 occurances of the dreaded word, and still more to eliminate. Perhaps my writing skil will increase through this exercise. Other words to avoid include "would," "could," and "should," although we did not do any excersizes related to deleting these words from our writing vocabulary.
Now, another challenge presents itself. In French class, we study various verb tenses. This past week, we learned the imperfect and the conditional tenses. Imperfect means "was doing" and conditional is "would." This makes me wonder, is there such thing as Proper French, and if so, what are the rules and do to the imperfect and conditional tenses count as improper. If so, why are we learning them? Why are we learning them in the first place, if, when we translate, we should be translating into Proper English? Until I answer these questions, however, I will continue to study hard these tenses to increase my French knowlege. Also, learning these tenses makes translating songs fun, like "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof. That song fits perfectly with these new tenses. Also, the line from Peter Pan (with Jeremy Sumpter and Jason Isaacs) "If I were you, I'd give up." "If you were me, I'd be ugly." translate more easily now. Learning French, although confusing, makes me happy.

Undoubtedly

So, here at school there's a bi-weekly writing workshop, on Tuesdays and Wednesday, that I have started to consistantly attend, and share my work. It is really fun to see everyone else's writing style and story ideas. They also give little lessons and writing prompts which helps aspiring writers be better, not just through the critiques that come. I love it. Currently, I am sharing Dreamrunners, and they love it, which makes me so happy! Perhaps one day I will share MtH, but I am still hesitant because it is still in the works. But it would be good to get a critique on it thus far.  Anyway, we're about 1/4-th of the way into the story, and each night after the workshop I make edits based on their comments. Most of the comments so far have been "Work on Showing, not Telling" which is a big problem for me, but I feel I am getting better. Plus, I get writing time for my Creative Writing Class.
Anyway, the main reason I wanted to post today was, I just observed a rather interesting phenomenon. I started writing Dreamrunners a few months over a year ago, and it has been finished for a little less than a year. During the workshop session today, we read the part when Camaron meets 901 for the first time. "[Camaron] smirk[s] as the silence continues, a sly confident smile. I hold all the answers to the questions undoubtedly running through his head." As this was being read by a fellow workshop-goer, my mind wandered to Winnie the Pooh singing the word undoubtedly in his Blustery Day song. I have not thought about Winnie the Pooh for the longest time, especially that song, but I think I did not put the word "undoubtedly" in error. I think my subconcious remembered Pooh singing "So it's rather safe to say/That it seems that it may turn out to be/It feels that it will undoubtedly/It looks like a rather blustery day, today" and added ubdoubtedly so that I could make the concious connection later.
It wasn't until I got home and began editing the section we read in the workshop that I made the connection and started singing "Blustery Day." It brought back sweet memories of childhood. I now have a strong desire to watch Winnie the Pooh, but as a college student, I will refrain.

Another writing exercise I think would be interesting to try is create a dialogue between two characters from different stories. This would help you guarantee that each character has his or her own voice, and that you're not just relying on dialogue tags between characters. That is my goal for one day. It would also just be interesting to see how two different characters from entierly different worlds meet...