Verbs

An Element of Fiction

You’ll find it impossible to write an action sentence without a verb, and very hard to write any sort of sentence. We do things. Things do things. Even the tiniest doing takes a verb (even if very small) to express.

Some verbs are direct and unequivocal. “Kill” is one of them. We have to go to the Bible for its direct opposite: “Resurrect”. “Revive” could also work. “Raise from the dead” is a more roundabout expression of an action that opposes “Kill.”

They are all verbs: kill, resurrect, revive, raise, et al.

My take is that the simpler, more direct verb is the more effective or efficient verb. That’s why God made Thesauri. Make sure you have one within reach or a digital one on your laptop; and reach for it whenever your verb is too indirect, convoluted or soft.

True, when it comes to grammar, writers usually don’t wax loquacious but if you look around, you can still track down a few illuminating, based-on-experience, quotes; I did and I found these:

William Sloane offers this usual common-sense view about verbs: “Forward motion in any piece of writing is carried by verbs.” He then goes on to elaborate, “The core of our language is the verb, the word that denotes an action, whether transitive, intransitive, or reflexive.”

If doing is the core of living, then yes indeed, then the verb is the core of language, our description of living. I could not agree more.

So does Charlotte Perkins Gilman when she says, “Life is a verb, not a noun.”

Sloane then P.S.’es, “Use of passive verbs often signals authorial hedging or limpness of thought.” Which is the long way of saying that, whenever you can, use the active verb voice. In other words, don’t mask or hide the cause or effect of life’s doing. Let it stand up and out and shine.

“He said,” is a lot stronger than “… was said by him”. Take this to heart.

Othello Bach agrees, “Use strong verbs and short sentences. That is how you strengthen the action.”

Which Jacques Barzun echoes, “Give the central role to a strong verb.”

He then adds, “You must use these strong verbs of your choosing in the active voice whenever possible. The subject of your thought acts upon other subjects and objects. Naturally, no suggestion of this sort can be carried out against the resistance of the material itself, which is your thought. But if you bear in mind the preferability of agents acting on their surroundings to the surroundings being acted on by the agents (passive voice of the verb), you will gain the invaluable power of movement that comes from actions.”

He then sums it up with “Visual and rhythmic variety increases as each verb strikes its particular note.”

Martha Graham then points out, “Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.”

While Michel Thomas, quips, “If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.”

Constance Hale observes, “A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting. What makes the difference? The verb.”

Or as Stephen Fry puts it, “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

The always pragmatic William Zinsser puts it this way, “If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.”

I love Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s take on this, “So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.”

And Annie Dillard nails it, “Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.”

The amazing poet Mary Oliver illustrates the verb’s value, “Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.”

Amen to that.

Donald Hall, also musing on poetry, “Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems — especially wonderful tough monosyllables like ‘gasp’ and ‘cry.’ Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.”

Which Marianne Moore certainly endorses, “Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”

Another view on this from J. Anthony Lukas, “If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective.”

And this from tongue-in-cheek Jennifer Cruise, “His sentences didn’t seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.”

I think the lesson here is that you make your writing sing by using the exact, correct verb for the occasion and as often as you can in the active voice.

Enough verbed, methinks.

© Wolfstuff