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Let Your Verbs Run Wild And Free

By Dara Lurie

I said this recently to a writer in a workshop reacting spontaneously to the wonderful story I could see trapped behind the bars of overly condensed description.

This kind of thing happens a lot. Rushing to make our point, we summarize and condense the life out of our stories. Instead of allowing our language to expand and transport us somewhere unexpected, we harness it for our predetermined goals. This approach works well for reports, memos and academic papers but not so well for literary writing.

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler, writes that:

Fiction is the art form of human yearning. That is absolutely essential to any work of fictional narrative art — a character who yearns. And that is not the same as a character who simply has problems….. that yearning is at the heart of all temporal art forms.

The same idea holds equally true for poetry, memoir and to a certain extent, the essay: the reader needs to connect at an intimate level with the driving force within the narrator. Otherwise, they won’t care.

Consider the author’s use of verbs & imagery in this excerpt from Janet Fitch’s “Oleander”

In the afternoon, the editor descended on the art room, dragging scarves of Oriental perfume that lingered in the air long after she was gone. A thin woman with overbright eyes and the nervous gestures of a frightened bird, Kit smiled too widely in her red lipstick as she darted here and there, looking at the design, examining pages, stopping to read type over my mother’s shoulder, and pointing out corrections. My mother flipped her hair back, a cat twitching before it clawed you.

“All that hair,” Kit said. “Isn’t it dangerous in your line of work? Around the waxer and all.” Her own hairstyle was geometric, dyed an inky black and shaved at the neck.

My mother ignored her, but let the X-acto fall so it impaled the desktop like a javelin.

Notice how the editor doesn’t walk into the room but ‘descended……..dragging scarves of Oriental perfume that lingered” She never walks, in fact, she ‘darts’ like a ‘frightened bird’ intruding on everyone’s space.

In contrast, the narrator’s mother ‘flipped her hair back, a cat twitching before it clawed you.’

Evocative use of verbs & image economically sets up the tension of this moment.

You won’t necessarily find the clearest, most potent language in the 1st or 2nd drafts of your piece though you probably will find a few jewels buried in the clutter of ideas. So where to start?

Read more at http://www.Transformative-Writing.com

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