Verbs
Your Muscles

The power of writing comes from the muscles of your story organism: verbs. Verbs describe the action of a story; they are the fuel that drives a reader along.

Well-chosen verbs crackle like electricity in your writing, resurrecting dead sentences, inspiring tired ones to dance.

There's no reason to use verbs like go when you can say dart, scramble, crawl, or slither.

Charge your writing with power by using active verbs.

Follow these guidelines when using verbs:

• Watch your subject-verb agreement.
• Use the active voice.
• Keep your tense consistent.
• Use strong verbs, but don't exaggerate.
• Try using a noun as a verb, intelligently.

Watch your subject-verb agreement.

Nothing conveys illiteracy faster than incorrect subject-verb agreement:

Ma and I is the finest writers in this here county.

The good news is that by reading and listening to literate people, you have a good chance of catching errors like that by reading your work aloud and hearing the mistakes.

For more subtle grammatical rules, you might not be so lucky.

Singular subjects combined by or/nor require singular verbs.

Neither Mac nor Ray understands the true nature of the Force.

Subjects preceded by each or every are singular and require singular verbs.

Every day is a new day, the counselors used to tell me.

Nouns of quantity, distance, time, and amount are singular.

500 pounds is a lot to weigh when you're catapulting into space.

Make sure that the number of the verb agrees with the subject of the sentence, not just the noun closest to it:

Incorrect: The list of victims were written in blood on the back of a Chinese takeout menu.

List is the subject of the sentence, not victims. Hence, the verb should agree with list instead:

Correct: The list of victims was written in blood on the back of a Chinese takeout menu.

Use the active voice.

This is an extremely important guideline.

You can use one of two voices in a sentence: the active, which denotes that the subject performed the action, and the passive, which denotes that the subject received the action.

Passive: The knighthood was conferred upon Tom by the Queen of Kamchatka.

Active: The Queen of Kamchatka conferred the knighthood on Tom.

Looking at those sentences, you can see several important reasons to use the active voice instead of the passive:

• The active voice is more direct.
• The active voice is more clear. We can tell who is doing the action.
• The active voice is more concise and uses fewer words.

Additionally, the passive voice distances the reader from the subject of the sentence. If you're writing from a consistent point-of-view, changes to the passive voice mean that the reader becomes estranged from the subject.

The fire hydrant was opened by Randy.

Randy opened the fire hydrant.

The passive voice is often the grammar of blame evasion. It appears frequently in business documents:

Clients were offended, contracts were improperly executed, and the company was undermined.

Who is doing all of that? The writer doesn't mean for us to know. The passive voice conveys a dishonesty you do not want to display in your fiction.

How do you find this insidious evil? Do a search in your word processor for the word by. Passive phrases rely on by. Also, search for was. This verb is usually a conspirator with by in the Great Passive Voice Scandal.

Keep your tense consistent.

There are three common verb tenses:

Past:

The Mayans built megaliths to unknown gods.

Present:

Mac searches for a new job, scanning the want ads like an alcoholic in search of drink.

Future:

I think I will go slowly mad and conclude my madness with a descent into total senility. Care to join me?

Most fiction is past tense. You'll notice, though, that when you tell stories informally to your friends, you often use the present tense:

So I says to him, "You want a piece of this?" Then he runs away like the big coward he is.

You can use the present tense in your fiction to denote urgency or informal storytelling, but the past tense provides a more consistent, measured narrative.

Use strong verbs, but don't exaggerate.

Use powerful verbs whenever you can. There are few circumstances in which go is a superior verb to a more descriptive one describing how the subject does so.

The temptation is strong to use exaggerated verbs for extra power:

George shattered his preconceptions and agreed to attend Dexter and Michael's wedding.

This seems a little strong. Be descriptive with your verbs, but be sure they're of the correct power and emphasis for your subject.

Try using a noun as a verb, intelligently.

Bradbury occasionally makes nouns into verbs, and you can do the same:

I windowed my soul so that she could peer inside.

This can easily be ridiculous:

Every morning, I shirt myself before donning my pants.

Be reasonable. Do nothing that breaks the narrative dream. If the word conveys an image, use it. Otherwise, use one of the millions of verbs that currently exist.