JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #35
January 14, 2021
This week I want to continue discussing verb aspect, this time addressing the habitual. In fiction, we often summarize a period of time in which a character or characters perform a ritual of activities by using the habitual aspect. This will sometimes manifest with the word "would," as in She would return to her house every evening and check the mailbox.
In most cases, I think it’s stronger to leave the verb in the simple past without the "would"-construction. So, for example, we might rewrite the above example as She returned to her house every evening and checked the mailbox. In this case, the phrase "every evening" provides the habitual meaning, while the tensed verb suggests more specific, concrete action. In many cases, the "would"-construction might fill an entire paragraph, providing a "mood" for a summarizing description of some period of time in the character’s life: Every day, she would confront the elevators at work. She would look at her reflection and dare herself to go through those sliding doors. Then, with a firm clench of will, she would instead turn to the door of the stairwell and begin her ascent. Notice how it reads when we revise out the "would"-habitual: Every day, she confronted the elevators at work. She looked at her reflection and dared herself to go through the sliding doors. Then, with a firm clench of will, she instead turned to the door of the stairwell and began her ascent. Here, instead of a mood-creating summary, we begin to enter into what reads more like a concrete scene.
The "would"-habitual tends to generalize the action by stripping tense and specificity from the verb (grammatically, these are instead carried by "would"), while the simple past (with perfective aspect) gives the action more specificity, more concreteness because it’s better defined by its tense. For this reason, I find that I prefer the simple past over the "would"-habitual, especially in passages that serve to describe concrete action, even if they are habitual in the sense of taking place many times over some span of time. The simple past invites us into an emblematic moment of that array of actions and makes them more vivid and immediate for the reader.
Next: On Grammar Advice