Six word story

She found him fleeing the war.

grammar thing/style thing

So my writing group tells me that was and were are bad, not altogether, but need to be very sparely used. Afterwar has a lot of description and a lot of past progressive tense. So I'm trying to replace almost every incidence of was and were with other verb things.

But I want that past progressive.

I do think they're on to something, though the thing they're on to is not what they say it is ("sentences in the passive"). I have been struggling to make the story more robust and frightening, and I tend to fail, I think because of my own personality defects, really.

I think I've figured out something that might satisfy the need to liven the prose as well as my need for the past progressive: retaining the past progressive structure but replacing the auxiliary verb with an "active" verb. We'll see.

But I refuse to join them in calling sentences with the structure "He was a bureaucrat" or "He was pulling the wagon" passive. Passive is "He was called a bureaucrat" or "The wagon was being pulled by him." That's a fact of grammar, not an opinion about style.

Another pernicious movie

I didn't want to see "Flicka" because I'm not a horse girl and I'm not crazy about horse movies. But we had seen everything else in Watsonville that either of us would be willing to see, so we went.

( can you spoil a remake of an old movie of an older book? )

I wish that "Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles" hadn't already left the Nick: I'd have driven into Santa Cruz for that.