when is ing passive and when is it carrying the action

[Jo Zebedee]

Early on it appeared I had too strong a passive voice, so I took out most of my ings and replaced them with ed. I then had a critique which told me an action should have used ing as the action was continuing through the scene;

He watched as the soldiers laughed and the scene moved on

Against

He watched the soldiers laughing as the scene moved on.

I see it came up in a critiques thread today and I find it I move all my ings to ed the writing becomes flatter, lacks some of the looseness/casualness of the world as I kind of view it.

So I just wondered how to balance it; when should I use ed, and ing, or have I got it vaguely right above and in mixing the two up a bit? Plus if its an action scene should I veer towards ed, and use ing more in slower scenes.

 

[Boneman]

Some ings are bad, and some are good: ing is okay, as long as the whole sentence isn't inging.

'He was watching the soldiers laughing as the scene moved on' would be picked on, but 'He watched the soldiers laughing as the scene moved on' is okay.

'Watching the soldiers laughing, the scene was moving on', and ing is becoming (aargh!) silly...

If you're uncertain if ing is okay, and worried ed is flat, try reading (!) it aloud, that shows it every time.

 

[Boneman]

Too late to edit: one of the most useful edits I do, once I've finished, is a search for ing and was. Surprisingly, often they're fine, and sometimes they're not, but it really helps me to focus my writing, when I see how I can slip into inging loads of times in a sentence.

 

[The Judge]

It isn't the "-ing" which makes it passive, or, rather, makes it feel passive, springs, it's the "was" -- but that "was" can be very necessary if it is indeed a continuing action. The important thing is to ensure you don't get bogged down in always doing one or the other -- you need to vary sentence structure and feel. A paragraph in which every sentence starts "He [verb]ed" becomes boring very quickly, but overuse of "He was [verb]ing" is also distracting.

So, yes, both the sentences you have written are fine, and a "He was watching as the soldiers laughed" would be OK, too, in context -- it gives a slightly different nuance to the sentence, as if the soldiers aren't aware of him being there.

NB Just to nitpick Boneman's example: "Watching the soldiers, he laughed" is absolutely fine; "Watching the soldiers laughing, the scene..." is wrong grammatically and shouldn't be used in narrative. The participle (the "-ing") has to agree with the subject of the following sub-clause, ie the "he" in my example. So in Boneman's version it literally means the scene is watching the soldiers, which isn't (I don't think!) the case.


EDIT: Just re-read your post and I see I didn't answer your questions in the final para. Yes, you've got it right in mixing the two up. If in an action scene everything is happening very fast, then yes probably "-ed"s, eg "He ran down the corridor, side-stepped a lunge, hit one guard, kicked the next, and jumped out the window." That reads faster -- but even in an action scene that might not be the effect you want. If in doubt write the same scene two different ways and see which reads best.