All these verbs go down like wine
I’m in the middle of revision two of novel three, and noticing that I have a tick. I don’t use enough verbs. Oh, I think I do, and there are always people running around and thinking and doing things, but… well, let’s go with an example.
Here’s a snippet from a work in progress:
It was loud, and bright, and wet, and Yeshe wanted more than anything to stay in the soulscape, where none of these things mattered. Where she’d held together the prisoners of Algattas, bound them to her own soul with sheer determination.
Sure, there are verbs there, like is and wanted, held together and bound. What’s wrong with them?
Contrast with these first two lines from Gaelen Foley’s The Pirate Prince:
He took a faceful of sea brine, flung the stinging salt water out of his eyes with a furious blink, and hauled back on the oars again and again with all its strength. All around him, the swirling, bucking surf smashed itself in silver plumes of foam, drenching him as it sought to dash his longboat against the shark-tooth rocks guarding the cave.
Or these first two lines from Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train:
The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm. It was having to stop at smaller and more infrequent stations, where it would wait impatiently for a moment, then attack the prairie again.
Nothing makes a page-turner like active verbs. Movement trumps everything else. None of the verbs I used in my initial snippet involve motion.
It’s easy to think you’re using verbs. But you might be using:
Invisible verbs: Words like said, thought, felt, was and saw disappear into your story like cartilage. They hold the whole together, but they don’t count.
Verbs as adjectives: The more glaring pirates and brooding princes you have in your story, the more likely you are to believe you’re using verbs when you’re not.
Gerunds: Knowing about gerunds doesn’t keep you from abusing them, as I did with knowing in this sentence, which is not a verb.
Passive verbs: Verbs that don’t convey movement—held, stood, sat, stared, waited—can make you feel you’re moving the story along when you’re not.
This is a painfully hard thing to fix in an edit. It’s easier to start your scenes with a plan to have your characters be physically in a different place by the end of the scene. And if they’re on a boat, a train, a car or a plane, have the landscape become active as well. Have trees blur past your protagonist rather than have your protagonist see the trees blurring past them, and maybe, just maybe your sentence will survive the next edit.
Below: a view of Michelangelo’s David from behind. If a statue of marble poised to strike can articulate movement, your sentences have no excuse.