Strong Verbs! by Jason Black

When you think about it, verbs are where a story comes to life. Your novel's plot has characters leaping across rooftops, stealing treasures from angry dragons, meeting new people, devising their own crafty schemes, making coffee, and making love. Everything that happens in your story involves some kind of change in your story's world: changes in location, in attitudes, beliefs, relationships, and so forth. They are all conveyed to the reader with verbs. Even moments of stasis, times when nothing at all changes, are described by verbs. To be or not to be, and all that.

Verbs are where your story comes to life. It behooves you, then, to get the most life out of your verbs.

Unfortunately, this is one area where I consistently see problems in my clients' manuscripts. There are two main ways people mess this up. Neither one of them is rocket science (good thing, because I wouldn't have the math to explain it if it was). Mostly, I think writers have problems simply because no one has ever explained the alternatives before. Let's fix that.

Generic versus specific

Verbs come in families. If you look at all the verbs in English, they come in some basic varieties. Verbs of motion, for example: move, go, walk, run, slosh, creep, ooze, fly. Verbs of creation: create, make, invent, build, assemble, even cook. Verb families have branches within them. The creation verbs have a bunch of cooking verbs as a subset: cook, bake, sauté, steam, parboil, braise. It goes on and on. Linguists, who like to get all fancy-sounding about this stuff, put the most generic verbs at the top of these families, and call them "hypernyms." The least generic--or better, most specific--verbs are "hyponyms."

Ok, so now you can impress people at your next critique group meeting, but so what? Why should you care? Because in most cases, you can swap any verb for a more generic hypernym and readers will still know what you mean. You can replace "roasted" with "made" in "Jane roasted a rack of lamb for dinner" without confusing anybody.

You can, but this doesn't mean you should, because generic verbs are weaker than specific verbs. Generic verbs inherently carry less meaning--and less life--with them. "Made" lies there flat on the page in a way that "roasted" does not. If your character simply makes a rack of lamb, well, ok, it's just made. So what. But when they roast the rack of lamb, you bring into the reader's mind all the delicious, lovely connotations that come along with roasting. Warmth, comfort, rich, flavorful, golden-brown goodness. Roasted things have all that going for them. Food that is simply made, may as well have come out of a vending machine.

Yet, time and again, I see generic verbs littering my clients' manuscripts, draining the life out of the action.

It's worse than that, though. I get the sense that writers know, deep down, that weak verbs are a problem. How do I know? Because writers who use the greatest number of weak verbs also use more adverbs to bandage them up than anybody else, too. You've heard the advice "don't use adverbs," probably. This is why. An adverb is a half-hearted attempt to camouflage a weak verb in the hopes that nobody notices. It's like drowning an overcooked pork chop with gravy, in hopes nobody notices how dry and tough the meat is.

A rookie writer who reached for "make" instead of "roast," might nevertheless long for that missing sense of deliciousness, and reach for a crude hack: "Jane deliciously made a rack of lamb for dinner." Do you laugh? You should. The slightly less rookie writer may slather on a less laughable adverbial phrase to replace the missing meaning: "Jane made a rack of lamb for dinner, bringing out the flavorful, golden-brown comfort of the meat." Better, but it still lacks the economy and punch of "roasted."

Here's the thing about English: it's the Borg of languages. Over its history, English has dined on the combined vocabularies of Greek, Latin, French, and German, with appetizers and desserts from languages as far-reaching as Sanskrit, Hindi, and pretty much anything else you care to name. We are blessed to write in a language with access to an enormous pantry of verbs. What this means is that there is nearly always a specific verb that closely fits the nuance of meaning you need in the scene you're writing.

The more specific the verb the stronger it is, because when readers encounter that verb, the reader has to do the work of unpacking the verb's nuances. You draw on the reader's knowledge, rather than having to fill in for it with more words on the page. Don't write "made" when you can write "cooked." But why write "cooked" when you can write "roasted" instead?

Simple versus compound

The other weak verb problem I see a lot of is using compound verb forms rather than simple verb forms. Here, I'm not using "compound verb form" in any rigorous, grammatical sense that you might remember from primary school, but to capture all the circumstances where writers bury their main verbs under obscuring layers of other verb-like junk.

Sometimes, writers bury their main verb underneath so-called "helping verbs" like "had" or "will have" or "will be," to create past-perfect, future-perfect, and similar complex verb tenses. Other times, writers bury their main verb underneath additional verbs to create finely-shaded nuances of time.  So you'll see constructions like "began to <verb>" or "started <verb-ing>" or "finished <verb-ing>" and so forth.

All this does is give the reader extra work in sorting out what's actually going on in your scene. Sure, sometimes the difference between "I had been going to be leaving today" and "I intended to leave today" is significant. And similarly, sometimes the context of a scene demands that a character "start answering the phone" rather than simply "answer the phone."

But not most of the time. Most of the time, it's enough simply to say that the character answered the phone, and to let the reader visualize the specific sequence of actions for themselves.

Notice something else, too: the "helping verbs" (Heh. "Helping." Now that's a lie!) are themselves weak, generic verbs. They are various forms of "to have" and "to be," which are two of English's most generic verbs. And the verbs used to create fine gradations of time are typically variations on begin, end, start, and finish. Weak verbs, the lot of them!

When in doubt, simpler is better. Strip off all that verb-like junk in front of your main verbs. If a simple form accurately conveys what is happening in your scene, use it.

Conclusion

The basic idea, like I said, isn't rocket science. A strong verb is a specific verb, rendered in a simple form. That's it. Learning to write that way as your first instinct, that will take practice, but the life it brings to your writing is well worth the effort.