I've been wandering the Wastelands for three months now and I've come to a conclusion. There is no God.

Let me tell you what happened today. I was heading south along the river, walled in on the left by decayed office buildings. I remember thinking how beautiful they looked in the falling sunlight.

Suddenly I saw Mutants. They had a captive, and she was bound up, blindfolded, kneeling on one side of their camp. I thought, I've got to get her out of there.

There was no way to avoid a fight. Before I knew it they were on top of me. One of them came at me with a sledgehammer, and I prayed with every blast of my shotgun that he would fall before he reached me.

But then something else happened. Somehow in the chaos somebody threw a grenade. It bounced near my feet, then rolled past me as I leaped aside. I heard it pop behind me, but I didn't have time to look.

After I turned the Mutants' heads into spaghetti I went back for the captive. I found her in pieces. The grenade—she never saw it coming.

That's when I knew. Nobody's looking out for us. Nobody made this world. Nobody's telling this story—it just happens like it happens.

In my heart I've known ever since I stepped out of the Vault and looked out over the polluted carcass of what used to be Washington D.C. There was something lovely about that scene too. A golden light lay over the shoulders of the hills. A rusted water tower reflected the blue sky. A dust devil teased the earth along the path in front of me. Then I walked up between some boulders, and a feral dog nearly ripped my throat out. I had to beat it to death with a police baton—couldn't get the blood off for three days.

Now I've been out here three months and can't see my own skin for the muck and the grime. Still searching for my Dad, I tell myself. But who am I kidding? I'll never find him. If the Mutants haven't got him, the Yao Guai have.

At first I told myself that Fate would guide me. When I looked into the faces of the people around me—the people I knew and loved growing up in the Vault—I saw beauty and mystery and spirit. These faces, these eyes, the light behind these eyes, were not random happenstances of chemistry or science. Someone made these people, directly or indirectly. Someone was telling a story through them and through me. Whoever that Someone was would make it all come out all right. Even if I died, I would die heroically. But I wouldn't die—no one I loved would die. I would prove myself the hero of this story that Someone was telling.

That was then. What a self-righteous, stuck-up little chump I was! And naive, so terribly naive.

Then I met the raiders, watched their brains splatter on the rotting concrete—one by one, day after day. The slavers and their tortured slaves. The rats, the scorpions, the Deathclaws. All the poisoned freaks who haunt this hell hole. They taught me, without words but undeniably: There is no story here. No God. No Designer. This world just happened. It's just happening. It'll just keep on happening, because there's Nobody to put it out of its misery.

A few weeks ago, I met a tough, smart fighter named Sydney in the ruins of the National Archives. She carried a mean SMG and knew more about ammunition than anyone I'd met. We teamed up to find an old, valuable document—"The Declaration of Impediments" or something.

Her dad had left her behind, too. When she was fourteen, he went out and just never came back. "Never even said goodbye," she said. "Do I have to tell you what it's like for a young woman alone in the Wasteland at that age?" Boy, that stuck with me.

Then a few days later I was exploring an old building downtown and came across a skeleton curled up on a cot. Next to the corpse was a recording of Sydney's father that he hoped would somehow reach her. It explained everything. He had gone out to do some business, the deal went bad, bullets were exchanged, he took one in the gut. He had just enough time to tell her that he loved her, that he never meant to leave her, and that he had faith she would make it.

So Sydney grew up hating the father who loved her, fending for herself in a vicious world where the only language anyone understands travels at 896 feet per second.

Now what kind of God would let that happen?

I'm not looking for my father any more. I'm going where he has gone, following in his footsteps, doing what I'm supposed to do to someday catch up with him. But I know he's gone.

This story can have no happy ending, no resolution. This world is too cruel, too grotesque for me to believe it has any Storyteller but Mr. Luck and Mrs. Chance.

I'll keep wandering the Wastelands, because that's what my body and brain tell me to do. But don't talk to me about Fate or God or Destiny or Designer. If he ever existed, he died when the bombs fell.

Or maybe he just walked out. Like Sydney's father. Like my father.

Labels: faith, fiction, games

A couple of years ago I took a course in journalism from Kindred Spirit editor Sandi Glahn. On the first day of class she established, to the shock and horror of the students, a rule I'll refer to as Glahn's Law. It's simple.


In all our writing for class we were allowed two "be" verbs per page. Any more than that and we lost—oh, I don't remember—a finger or something.

At first I thought she was crazy. After all, "be" verbs are everywhere. Passive sentences are written with them. They are employed in stating facts of all kinds. They are arguably the most common verbs in English. Is, are, am, was, were, will be, would be, should be, could be—are all "be" verbs. Not counting that last sentence, this post has already used seven of them. Did they hurt you? No, me neither. So why did Sandi deplore them?

I thought she was crazy, but she was the boss, and there was nothing to lose by taking up her challenge. So I wrote a Word macro to help me count the number of "be" verbs on each page I wrote. As I worked on each assignment I hunted down "be" verbs with a toothpick, like a mother hunts lice.

By the end of the semester the mere sight of a "be" verb would give me the Clockwork Oranges. But on the last day of class Sandi released us from Glahn's Law, authorizing us to use them again. As I emerged blinking into the glare of unconstrained writing freedom, I realized that my time under Glahn's Law had taught me something crucial about how and how not to write.

Here's the fundamental, practical fact: "Be" verbs clog up your writing. They slow it down and make it harder to understand.

Consider the following two sentences.

General Motors is a manufacturer of cars.

General Motors makes cars.

Why would you say the first when you could say the second? Or this.

She was the victor after ten rounds.

She won after ten rounds.

Don't you prefer the second sentence? The difference here is a "be" verb versus a strong, active verb.

"Be" verbs talk about the state of something—what it is, its nature, its attributes. Consequently, whenever you use a "be" verb you end up talking in abstractions. Any toddler can watch a boy playing soccer and say, "He runs." It takes an older, more sophisticated mind to say, "He is quick."

Active verbs like "make," "win," and "run" talk about what things do. They talk about what we see rather than what we think. "The boat floats"—there it is, we can see it floating. "The boat is buoyant"—of course this means the same thing but it gets at the meaning through an abstract idea. The active verb is better.

"Be" verbs talk about what things are. Active verbs talk about what things do. Whenever possible you want to talk about what things do. Why is this?

As I labored under the tyranny of Glahn's Law, I began to understand why do is better than are. In our hearts, human beings really think in terms of action. When we were babies, and the foundations of our observing and thinking were formed, all we knew were the facts of what we saw in front of us. We saw father's mustache bend downward, his eyes narrow, his eyebrows pull together, and we knew we were headed for a spanking. We didn't think, "He is frowning." We didn't think, "He is angry." We experienced the action we saw in front of us in a direct and primal way. At a fundamental level, human beings deal in terms of action.

The higher level notions of state, attribute, nature, and existence only come together as we get older. They are a separate and, in some sense, artificial layer over the top of those primal, active observations. And it's this higher-level, abstract way of thinking that we convey when we use "be" verbs.

So what I discovered under Glahn's Law is that it's better to talk about doing than to talk about being. You should prefer a "do" verb to a "be" verb whenever possible, because then your writing will tap into the deepest and truest part of your readers' minds. Make your readers see things happening and they will find the abstractions. Tell them the abstractions, though, and they'll skate over the surface of your writing without really making contact. They're likely to skate right off the page.

I don't obey Glahn's Law anymore, but through it I learned a new law, and this I live by.


"Be" verbs aren't evil, just unregenerate. Use them, but make sure you know that you're using them and why you're using them. Make them pay their keep.

Labels: thinking, writing