What’s the most important part of a story? The plot? The characters?
How about the verbs?
Okay, maybe they aren’t the most important part but wow, they can make or break it.
I’m reading The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton and I am dumbfounded (love this word – oh, and what a great verb!) by how he simply makes up verbs. Out of thin air. He takes ordinary words and he verbizes them (there! I just did it too! I verbized the noun, verb.).
Watch how he does this:
I remember watching my mother from the backseat as she stared at the telephone poles flishing past us, the reflection of the white highway line in the window strobing her haggard face.
The first time it happened, on the first page, mind you, I thought – flishing? huh, never heard of that verb.
But then again and again (and again) he simply created verbs where there were none. Jounced? (okay, that one’s real, but who uses it?) Vigiling? Birth-defected?
How empowering, I thought.
The verb you choose for a sentence can be the difference between eating vanilla store brand ice cream and Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food flavor ice cream. Totally different experience.
For example:
He walked slowly along.
He lollygagged.
The bird flew across the grass.
The bird flashed across the grass.
She thought about it.
She sloshed the idea around in her head.
See? It’s easy. And what Scotton has proven to me, is that if you can’t think of a verb, you can simply make one up. Nobody minds. Really.
The toddler wasted time.
The toddler fiddle-de-dooed.
Cake? Right?
If you need a few lists of verbs check out foxhugh.com who teaches ESL and has lists of action verbs, PLUS a cat and the hat rap video and a number of other interesting posts. You could also check out ResumeGenius.com which claims to be the longest action verb list in the universe, although I’m quite certain that Fox Hugh has it beat.
If worse comes to worse, you can also right click on a boring verb in your document and look at the possible synonyms, there could be a more interesting alternative there.
Want to pump up your manuscript? Search out words like was, is, walk, sat, run, read, stand, etc., you know the standard stuff from your first grade primer, and see if you can liven up your sentences by plugging in more interesting verbs.
It used to be we had to stick to Webster’s for our word choice, but I’m pretty sure that rule is long gone. I can’t imagine how spell check or auto-correct keep up. That’s their problem, though, because clearly best-selling writers make up words everyday—why can’t you?
Thanks for reading!
If you’d like to read more, meander on over to my website. We’re just getting my Street Team (Cara’s Cronies) off the ground. I’d love to have you on my side!
Oh, and if you’re totally into dogs, check out my blog about fostering rescue dogs!
Enough of the shameless self-promotion. Have a blueberry pie with fresh cream kind of week!
Blessings,
Cara
My Life in Paragraphs 