Monthly Archives: January 2009

My Friend the Enemy

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Recommended Books

My Friend the Enemy by J.B. Cheaney

After meeting Ms. Cheaney at a local book signing in Kansas City, I was delighted to read My Friend the Enemy, a  young adult novel set during the turbulent years of WWII. The author is a native of Missouri (she lives in the Ozarks).

Hazel Anderson is a young girl who dreams about leading a squad of marines against enemy “jap” soldiers. When she isn’t in school, she’s scouring the skies above her Oregon home for signs of an expected Japanese invasion, or looking for signs of enemy spies.

Instead, she discovers a lonely Japanese boy hiding from the prospect of internment at a camp for Japanese-Americans. Hazel’s discovery will forever change the way she sees people. What does the enemy really look like? Can one tell friend from foe by the shape of a face, or the color of an accent?

Most of us who lived after WWII have ready access to facts and information about the events of the war. Countless books have been written; more than one cable channel delivers battles, dogfights, tanks, footage, and docudramas about the politics of the war.

In My Friend the Enemy we see instead a homeland America–a country that is at once beautiful and repulsive, quaint and disturbing, fearful and courageous. The book is not an attack on the U.S. during WWII, nor is it a dismissal of our past. It doesn’t rewrite history, and it isn’t one of those modern YA novels that sees all of history through the lens of one pet issue. Ms. Cheaney seems to have captured the flavor of the era without condemning it.

Why Not Was?

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This comes up a lot in writing conferences when I suggest students avoid using the word “was” in their prose. I always get some blank stares.

Was? Are you serious?

I am. Even though it may be used to grammatical perfection in one’s novel, it usually weakens your narrative flow. The OYAN curriculum discussed this in more detail, perhaps because first person POV lends itself to a more casual style, and thus more frequent use of the conversational was.

The cat that was

The cat that was

Put briefly, was is a boring word. It denotes existence. The cat was. The car was. The knife was. Big deal. Lots of cats and cars and knives are. If you want to make me care, show the cat, car or knife doing something interesting: howling, crashing, stabbing.

I agree that in some cases this is impossible. In some places in your novel, you need to tell you audience that something merely exists. But was should be used sparingly, avoided whenever possible.

How do you do this? Two simple techniques may help. If one doesn’t work, the other probably will.

First, change the verb. Pick anything else, even if it doesn’t make sense, and plug it into the sentence. So instead of “The cat was black,” you’d have, “The cat sang black.” No, this doesn’t work, but at least it is less boring. Hopefully it will jump-start your brain into seeing the cat and what it is doing more clearly. What is the cat doing in the first sentence? It is being. What is it doing in the second sentence? Singing. Do cats sing? No, they yowl, or meow, or hiss, or run or fight or lick or nap. Now ask yourself which of these verbs might demonstrate the cats blackness, since that is clearly the intent of the sentence. Just to get the story moving, I might pick “lick.” So, “The cat licked black.” Does that make sense? Not quite, but it is closer. How about, “The cat licked its black fur.” Still not great, but infinitely more active, and therefore more visual, and therefore more interesting, than a cat that just was.

Second, change the subject. Instead of focusing on the subject of a was sentence, focus on something else. Ask yourself, what is it about the cat that my reader needs to know? What is this particular black cat doing in my story? Adding ambience? Spying for a wizard? Plotting to take over the world? When you know the answer, you may know what you need to focus on. Let’s say the cat is there for ambience. Now we can shift the camera off the cat and focus on something more ambient. Perhaps a shadow. “Shadows draped across a black cat that stared out at them from the corner with ghostly eyes.” This sentence delivers ambience AND the fact that the cat is black.

I should add that it is probably a mistake to think about was sentence constructions while writing a rough draft. If you let your internal editor jabber at you about was while you are writing, you will never get anything done. Save your was revisions for your second draft.