Verb It Up

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Verb It Up

Another lifetime ago, when I was finishing my PhD, I used to set up conference calls with authors for my classes. This was before FaceTime and Zoom, when flip phones were hard enough to hear right next to your ear. So I had to set up a sci-fi-looking speaker phone.

The scene seems almost laughably boring now — twenty students staring at a black box in the middle of the room for an hour, straining so they didn’t miss a word. But it was magic.

I wanted my students to know that the books we were reading weren’t spit out by a machine somewhere. A real human being had labored over those pages, usually in isolation, for months or even years. Authors weren’t gods whose every utterance dripped of gold. They were people like us who suffered from malaise and self-doubt, who procrastinated with video games, who snorted when they laughed.

There wasn’t any money for a T.A. to book visiting speakers, so I just asked the authors I’d assigned if they’d do it for free. Many of them did. My students heard some famous voices through those speakers. Ana Castillo. Mark Doty. Terry Tempest Williams.

But the conversation that lingered longest with my students was our call with Danielle Ofri. Her memoir, Singular Intimacies, had just debuted with Beacon Press, and she’d been featured in the Best American Essays series. None of that mattered to my students. They couldn’t stop talking about her advice to “verb it up.”

This came out when I asked Danielle if she had any favorite revision methods. She explained that most of her first drafts used throwaway verbs. She put her notebook on the table. She got the medical chart from the foot of the patient’s bed. The attending physician came to the doorway.

Beginning writers compensate for weak verbs by piling on the adjectives and adverbs, sensing the need for more imaginative cues. But experienced writers know that one well-placed verb can conjure an image, a mood, the whole scene.

• She slammed her notebook on the table.

• She slipped the chart from the foot of the bed.

• The attending brooded in the doorway.

Verbing it up means reading through a draft with an eye only for verbs, cutting the placeholders, snapping the scene into focus with more evocative action.

This is one of those techniques that AI simply can’t do well, because choosing the right verb requires taste. Plenty of powerful verbs jangle in the ear or just don’t fit the moment. The difference between a haunting line and an overcooked one is more felt than seen. It doesn’t matter if you’re the hottest topic on Instagram or Taylor Swift herself: this rule still applies to you.

Take the time Ofri had to present a case at the Morbidity and Mortality rounds:

The case summary was gripped in my right hand, a cup of coffee in my left. Only a few drops spilled onto the typed sheets as I squirmed into my seat under the weight of their stares.

No need to say “stress.” It’s all there in the verbs.

Ted Kooser’s poem “Fireflies,” which first appeared in the Cream City Review in 1992, qualifies as haunting to me for its suggested metaphors. But it’s the verbs that make it pop.

Fireflies

The cricket’s pocket knife is bent
from prying up the lid of a can
of new moons. It skips on the grindstone,
chattering, showering sparks
that float away over the darkened yard.

This is the Fourth of July
for the weary ants, who have no union,
who come home black with coal dust.
Deep in the grass you can hear them
unfolding their canvas chairs.

There is a pier that arches out
into the evening, its pilings of shadow,
its planking of breeze, and on it
a woman stands snapping the shade
of a lantern, signaling someone.

Here’s Philip Levine, from What Work Is. Levine illustrates the importance of *not* verbing it up too much. No need to strain for a ten-dollar verb into every line.

Snails

The leaves rusted in the late winds
of September, the ash trees bowed
to no one I could see. Finches
quarreled among the orange groves. 

I was about to say something final
that would capture the meaning
of autumn’s arrival, something 
suitable for bronzing,

something immediately recognizable 
as so large a truth it’s totally untrue,
when one small white cloud – not much
more than the merest fragment of mist –

passed between me and the pale 
thin cuticle of the mid-day moon
come out to see the traffic and dust 
of Central California. I kept quiet.

The wind stilled, and I could hear 
the even steady ticking of the leaves,
the lawn’s burned hay gasping 
for breath, the pale soil rising

only to fall between earth and heaven,
if heaven’s there. The world would escape
to become all it’s never been
if we would let it go

streaming toward a future without
purpose or voice. In shade the ground
darkens, and now the silver trails
stretch from leaf to chewed off leaf

of the runners of pumpkin to disappear
in the cover of sheaves and bowed grass.
On the fence blue trumpets of glory
almost closed – music to the moon,

laughter to us, they blared all day
though no one answered, no one
could score their sense or harmony
before they faded in the wind and sun.

Sometimes prosaic verbs like say, rise, and fall are fine if the scene is vivid enough. We’d probably grow weary of every inanimate object quarreling like the finches. But for me the whole poem turns on that surprising line about burned hay “gasping.” I’ve never thought of a dying fire’s hiss as breath, but it brings autumn’s melancholy alive.

Verbing it up doesn’t mean carrying your scenes over the top. It just means sharpening their focus.

One exception to this rule is dialogue. Dialogue should nuance how each speaker says their lines in the spoken words themselves. Start throwing too many action verbs around (he groaned, she spat) and your reader will soon start thinking sounds like writing instead of just dreaming the scene.

I’ll close with another example from Eren Orbey’s essay in the latest New Yorker.

Scott Johnson was found dead at the base of North Head, a sandstone promontory in Manly, Australia, that looms two hundred feet above the craggy shore of the Tasman Sea. A pair of spear fishermen were walking along the water on a humid morning in December, 1988, when they came upon his body, which was naked and badly disfigured. A storm had swept the coast the night before, washing away most of the blood, but seagulls were picking at bits of innards strewn across the rocks. One of the men left to call for help; the other waited for the police to arrive and hiked with them to the top of the cliff. Thirty feet from the edge, they spotted a neatly folded pile of clothes and a pair of sneakers stuffed with personal effects, including a rail pass. There were no signs of foul play, and there was no suicide note.

You might argue that the difference between “saw” and “spotted” is so minor as to matter little or that there’s no fundamental difference between a storm “blowing through” and “sweeping the coast.” And you’d be right that not many publishers or even readers hover over those distinctions anymore.

But the difference matters to discerning readers. It matters to many readers who aren’t even aware of the effects.

If you want your poetry or prose to reach its full potential, it ought to matter to you.

Read more craft essays ⬇️

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