Why verbs matter in writing

How can upgrading your verbs transform flat writing into vivid, page-turning prose? Why do so many writing problems turn out to be verb problems — and how can you fix yours? Sarah Kaufman explores the art of the verb and shares practical tips for making your writing stronger, clearer, and more alive.

In the intro, writing as a caregiver and grief [Stark Reflections; The Creative Penn episode]; Beyond Bookshops — Bulk Sales, Gifting and Alternative Distribution [Self-Publishing Advice]; list of money books; London walk along SouthBank; Bones of the Deep: AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why verbs are the most versatile and underrated tool in a writer's toolkit
• How to replace flat, explanatory sentences with vivid, action-driven prose
• The power of physical and metaphorical verbs to show emotion instead of telling it
• When passive voice works, and when it's hiding something
• Balancing beautiful language with the demands of storytelling and deadlines
• How to broaden your writing expertise into a sustainable portfolio career

You can find Sarah at SarahLKaufman.com.

Transcript of the interview with Sarah Kaufman

Jo: Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, an award-winning author, and a writing teacher. Her latest book is Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.

Jo: This is such a great topic, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Sarah: I got into writing in a backwards way, I guess. The romantic, wonderful thing about writing is the freedom that it gives you, right? That's what we all think about—this freedom to address the world.

Then the practical, wonderful thing about writing is developing a focal point, which I had to do in order to write in the first place. I'll explain a little bit about that.

I became a dance critic, which is what I did at the Washington Post for 27 years, to have something to write about. That was necessary because, though I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since earliest childhood, I just didn't really find things to write about when it came time to actually try to make a living at it.

As I was approaching leaving college as an English major, I was getting very anxious about what I was actually going to do, and I didn't have this burning desire to write about any certain thing.

I happened to be working as a full-time secretary at a ballet school because I had been a ballet nerd all through my youth. I knew quite a bit about doing ballet, about the steps and about the lingo, so I was a suitable candidate to work at a ballet school.

I was learning so much from the teachers there—who had all been professional dancers—about the aesthetics of ballet and how you shape the steps into art and into a performance. I was getting more and more interested in dance.

One day the director took me out to lunch and she said, “You should write about dance.” I had seriously never considered that before, but she knew that I was an English major, that I wanted to write. She said, “Look, you know so much,” and she really encouraged me.

So I said, “Well, okay, I'll give it a go,” because I had been reading dance criticism. I just started picking it apart and seeing how critics put their reviews together, called up a local paper, took on some freelance assignments, and did a lot of freelancing for years and eventually landed at the Washington Post.

So the point I want to make is that I had that thing to write about. Now I had a focal point, and my books grew out of that.

The first book I wrote is The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life. That was an exploration of aspects of grace stemming from physical grace, which I knew about from dancers, and looking at connections there with social grace and spiritual grace.

Then this verbs book likewise grew out of my work as a dance writer because my goal in writing about dance was to capture the experience of it. I didn't want to be a scholarly type of critic, though I do love that kind of criticism and I read it and learn so much from it, but I knew that was not going to be my style.

I wanted more to primarily recreate the experience for the reader, as well as then coming in with analysis of it. I was just so fascinated by the look and the feel of what I was seeing on the stage. I wanted to be able to share that with the reader.

So I had to lean on verbs to capture the action, and people occasionally would say, “Oh, you're so good with verbs, Sarah,” which I thought was kind of interesting. It's like, oh, so this is a strength I had developed. I didn't really realise it.

Then that, coupled with my teaching experience, is what led me to think I have some things to talk about regarding verbs. I'd like to share with the world because, as a teacher, I often see that writing issues my students have are actually verb issues.

They get into a corner with a lot of explanation or clauses on top of clauses, and they get lost. Where is the point that you want to make here? What is the meaning? What is it you want me to take away from your work?

Well, if we pare that back and look at the verbs and try to get some direction in the sentences, that often brings clarity. Suddenly the student will say, “I was thinking more about adjectives and nouns. I didn't realise that verbs were really something to focus on.” I thought that would be an interesting challenge to bring that out.

Jo: It's so fascinating. I love how your career has emerged and that you've leaned into different things. It has a kind of dance to it itself.

We're going to come back to your career, but let's start with that, because you mentioned that with many of your students you are reading their work and you think, “Oh, we can fix this with some verbs.”

Let's get into that because you talk about weeding and this verb-first editing process. Most of the listeners will have some kind of writing already—either they've got a lot of books or they've got a draft in progress. This is the kind of thing we struggle with: how do we make our work stronger?

Talk about why you are so obsessed with verbs some tips for making our work stronger.

Sarah: Yes, I am obsessed with verbs. I will cop to that. They're so interesting and I felt like they were a little underrated as a writing tool.

Verbs, as we learned in school, drive your sentence forward. They're the engine. Really, I feel like they are the secret soul of language, because they're so versatile, they're so essential.

First of all, they hold it all together. They're the only part of speech that in itself is a full sentence. You can have a full sentence that's a verb. “Watch.” “Look.” “Continue.” You could go on and on. That is a full grammatical sentence. You can't do that with any other part of speech.

They're so essential. The word “verb” itself comes from the Latin verbum, which means “a word.” So verbs became that name for all words. Our literary ancestors understood this—that they're really the beginning and the end as far as words go.

They can add to your work when you start thinking about verbs in this way, and you start thinking about how can I elevate my writing—well, verbs are very efficient and very evocative. They can add not only clarity to your work, but a kind of elegance. They can say so much in such a little amount of space.

For example, say you have something like this: “The cook was facing the dinner rush, and so she decided to put together something quick and easy so no one would know how nervous and unprepared she was.”

In that sentence, I'm doing a lot of explaining and describing. I'm just explaining to you the situation, but I haven't really brought it to life much.

A better way to do it might be something like this—and you can see it comes a little bit more active: “The dinner rush pressed upon her. To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley with her bare hands and flung it all onto plates like Jackson Pollock splashing his canvas.”

I show you what her nerves and the pressure resulted in. I show that manifesting. Or you could even shorten it and just say: “Dinner rush loomed. She whisked and whipped, chopped and dripped and masked her nerves with glistening omelettes.”

There are stylistic differences there, but it's just to give an example of how you can take something that, on the face of it, sure, it makes sense—it's perfectly fine as a sentence—but it just lies there. It's flat. Maybe it's not very exciting. It doesn't really move the story forward.

You can bring it to life by showing us. You show us with the action.

Jo: You haven't really specifically said what a verb is in that sentence you just had around “whisked” and all of those things. Those sentences were actually quite different in a lot of the different words you used. You didn't just swap out for stronger verbs.

Could you just point out what the verbs were, in case people are confused about which words are which?

Sarah: Right. Great. In the first, inferior example I have: “The cook was facing the dinner rush.” So then I amended it to: “The dinner rush pressed upon her.” I'm giving the dinner rush itself a verb—”press.” It weighed on her, it pressed on her.

Also, in the third example—”the dinner rush loomed”—so that's even shorter. “Loom” is a wonderful verb. I love it because it conveys a sense of threat. That's what I mean by verbs being so efficient and evocative in one word.

“A storm loomed.” “The dinner rush loomed.” You convey the emotion around the whole event.

“To hide her nerves, she whisked eggs and milk into omelettes, shredded parsley.” So “hide”—she's hiding her nerves rather than just saying she felt nervous. You give it a little bit more action, you give her a little bit more character by saying she's doing this to hide her nerves.

Then whisking the eggs, shredding the parsley, flinging it onto plates—that shows how she's being creative and surmounting this problem, right?

Instead of simply describing—”So she decided to use her expertise and create a nice dinner”—you show that in motion with things like whisking and shredding and flinging it onto plates. That's an example of how you can slide in upgraded verbs to lend a sense of energy and life.

Jo: I think this idea of motion is so great, and you tie this in a lot to your work. You've written a lot about physical action, and in the book there is a chapter on physical action. I think this is so important because many authors will say, “Use the word ‘said'” without thinking about dialogue within a pattern of action.

Your chef there could say something as she flung the parsley on the plate, rather than “the chef said this.” Get moving as she flung the stuff onto the plate. The action verbs are so important.

Could you talk a bit more about [action verbs] and the physical action side of it?

Sarah: Yes, and that's so right. When you have a scene really rolling, you don't need to do so much explaining about the way a person says something with those dialogue tags. It's very interesting.

I feel like words are alive—they're living, breathing things—and the more that we let them come to life on the page, the more you can draw your reader into the story.

The reader gets a sense of that life and wants to come into the story with you. You've really created a scene that your reader feels immersed in. And that's so exciting as a reader to discover. Writing about movement is part of that.

Of course writing is very vast—it's hard to say, “Well, you should always write about movement.” That would be silly.

If we think about movement and action and action verbs as being effective not only for the actions that we see around us, but for inner actions—the subtle feelings, thinking, non-action, but internally what's going on—that's also space for effective verbs.

For churning emotions, for metaphors about fright and what that feels like in the body. Or despair. Or regret. I have a lot of examples of that in the book.

It's another beautiful use of verbs where, instead of explaining what someone is feeling, you can show it through metaphorical verbs and actual physical changes—things roiling inside the body.

Jo: For example, someone in their draft has “she was afraid”—

How could they make that much stronger and use a lot of those things you were just talking about?

Sarah: That's an excellent question. Instead of “she was afraid,” you might say something like: “She felt her chest fill with ice, freezing her lungs and choking her breath, and her heart bashed around as if to tear itself from her body.”

We could get very dramatic about it, but you can play with that. What I like to encourage readers to do is open their minds and open their imaginations. When you have a pretty standard phrase like “she was afraid” or “she felt too frightened to move”—well, put yourself in that position.

What does that feel like? What does that really feel like inside when you're too frightened to move? Is it an icy feeling or is it a burning? Is it a numbness? And what verbs might help with that? Is it thrashing? Is it raging? Is it paralysing?

How can that type of expressiveness fill in the picture and make it palpable to the reader—what it's like to be in the room with this person?

Jo: Do you recommend using a thesaurus? I try to do this myself, and I often use Power Thesaurus, which I just find so useful, because as writers, when we are writing novels or books in a similar genre, we often reach for the same words.

Are you a big thesaurus user?

Sarah: I am a huge thesaurus user. I have a stack of actual book-type thesauri, but I do like, as you mentioned, Power Thesaurus.

I like OneLook, which is an interesting resource. I think it's OneLook.com and you can go in the other way—you can use it as a thesaurus, but you can also use it to find one verb that combines a couple of words.

Like “walk clumsily,” for example. You could put that into OneLook and it would come up with lists and lists. And among them might be “hobble” and “limp” and other words to say what a weak verb plus an adverb can say.

Online resources are wonderful. I like Merriam-Webster.com—that's what I rely on a lot. Cambridge too. A thesaurus is wonderful.

Now, the caution with the thesaurus, however, is that I would like to urge people to be mindful about just swapping in one word for another, or one verb for another, because even though they may appear in the same groupings, there are going to be subtle differences among them.

I find it fascinating to really investigate the subtle difference between, say, “limp” and “hobble” and “stumble.” Those all mean slightly different things.

So the finishing tip is just to make sure the word you choose is going to be right for the context.

Jo: And also perhaps the audience. I mean, you are a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, which is amazing, and you were writing for an audience who wanted dance pieces. The audience for dancing in terms of the words you would use—I'm not really into it myself, but I would know the word “pirouette.”

I imagine there's a ton of words that you would know and use in your writing that wouldn't be so relevant for a wider audience.

So we have to think about the audience as well.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. We want to be very thoughtful in our choice of words. If you distilled my book down to one single message, it is to think carefully.

Not in the first draft, perhaps, and certainly not when we're speaking, because we speak so spontaneously. But in writing, where you put your thoughts down and then—hopefully, if you're not under too much deadline pressure—you can come back, give it another look, shape it, refine it, and really make sure that you've chosen your words with care.

I feel like that's really what writing is all about—communicating one mind to another through this magnificent medium of language.

Language is intentional, and having that intention in mind about what you want to share and what you want to communicate and how you want your readers to approach your work—well, that's up to you.

That's the freedom I hope to be able to present to people who check out my book: here are some ways, here are some suggestions, here are some techniques and tips for issues that can arise.

Really, once you've taken these in, I hope to fire your imagination and inspire you with being able to communicate what it is that you really have inside that you want to share.

Jo: I think it is a book for falling in love with the joy of words again. You did mention deadlines, though, and the pressure.

Especially for those of us who write genre fiction series, which is a lot of people listening, sometimes we might feel that we don't have the time for that. Do our readers appreciate it, or do they want story first? Sometimes is it too much?

Where do you come down on balancing getting story over words?

How long can we spend on finding beautiful words when we are writing another 70,000-word book?

Sarah: I think that's an excellent point. I think story comes first. That's probably what first drives you to your desk—telling a story. Although it may not. The realities of writing are so vast and unlimited that it's very hard to come out with rules, and I don't write about rules.

I really want to give suggestions and examples and insights, but I do think that story is absolutely tops. And that's the power of verbs, in fact. They can help us tell the stories with clarity and with efficiency.

I do want to make sure that I'm being clear. I'm not advocating that before you ever sit down and write, or you write one sentence, you then go back and check every single word, because that wouldn't make any sense at all.

The idea is to free yourself, free your imagination. These are ways to open your imagination up that maybe you haven't thought about before. But storytelling is primary, and the way that you tell it is going to be individual to every writer.

It's useful to bear in mind that there are a lot of avenues one can take in terms of creating a scene or building a character and even evoking the landscape and the atmosphere, and we can look at verbs to help us do that.

Jo: One of the biggest problems, I think, especially for new writers, is the passive voice versus more active voice.

Can you give some examples of passive voice?

Often in editing we're told to get rid of passive voice, but of course you do need it sometimes.

Sarah: Yes. There's understandably a lot of confusion about passive voice. Just to have a tiny tidbit of grammar nerdery here: the voice of a verb refers to a very specific construction. It doesn't simply mean that the writer is expressing something in a boring way or taking on a dull subject.

The voice of the verb tells you how it relates to the subject of the sentence. When the subject does the action—when it's doing the verb—then you have a verb in the active voice. But when the subject of the sentence is receiving the action, then it needs a verb in the passive voice.

Here's an example. If I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? My grandmother walked on the moon.” That's active voice. “My grandmother walked on the moon”—it's interesting, right?

But if I said, “Hey, Jo, guess what? The moon was walked on.” You might be left thinking, “What? What am I supposed to take away from that? Is there more to the story?”

“The moon was walked on”—well, that's the passive voice construction. There's no subject who did the walking. I haven't told you, and yet the subject was actually pretty important. My grandmother was the one who walked on the moon.

So that's the frustration that often comes when we read the passive voice. We don't know the full story, and we might suspect: are they hiding something? Do they not really know who did the thing? It brings up a lot of questions.

Especially in official situations. The classic example is “mistakes were made.” Officials love to say that because it puts nobody on the hook. Nobody is responsible. “Mistakes were made.” Well, who were they made by? They're not telling us.

I heard this just recently, by one of the representatives here. This phrase is still being used: “Mistakes were made.” I think most people understand there's a bit of obfuscation. There is something being hidden.

Now, there are times when the passive voice is perfectly fine. It's not necessary to say who did the action. If you say, “Joe Blow was arrested and charged with murder,” you pretty much have the full thing there. You don't need to say, “The police arrested him. The prosecutor filed the paperwork.” It's kind of assumed.

If you just want to get to the point—he was arrested and charged with murder—that's sufficient. Maybe further down in the story you'll explain the circumstances, but you don't need them right there.

Or say, “Fires are still being reported throughout the region.” In a news story, that's perfectly fine. We just need to know that fires are still happening. We don't necessarily need to know who's reporting it. More details may come later in the story, but right then it's perfectly fine.

In news reports, in historical situations when we're giving a history, in scientific data and scientific reports, you often see the passive voice.

It can be a perfectly good and oftentimes even more efficient way to tell something, but you don't want to lean into it and overuse it because it becomes very dull. When you don't have someone doing an action, it becomes very dull.

Jo: As you've mentioned the legal side of things, and I'm reading a lot of academic papers at the moment. I'm doing another master's degree, and goodness me, I feel like sometimes it's designed to turn you off.

Sarah: You are exactly right. I've come to that feeling too, and especially in seeing student work, where I feel like there is so much of that in academic writing, which students are reading and digesting. It naturally comes out of them, and it's a kind of cycle that's hard to break.

Jo: Do you think it's a form of hedging? “Mistakes were made”—or anything legal—you are hedging it so it can be ambiguous. Whereas a strong verb—and you mentioned “your grandmother walked on the moon”—you are really making it very clear.

If you want to hedge things, then using passive voice might be more appropriate.

If you want to make it stronger, the activeness is important.

Sarah: Yes. And it makes such a difference. I discovered this in my own work. I would read other critics, for example, and I would think, “I feel like the piece I've just written is kind of flat. It doesn't really have the effect I want, doesn't have any zip.”

I would go and read other critics—not just dance critics, but other critics. It's so useful to just read other people in any type of writing that you're doing. I advocate doing a lot of reading.

I would see that the pieces that really touched me, that really inspired me, had a lot of active voice constructions. They're not turning things around passively, which I think, as a young critic, I may have been doing because I was a little bit afraid to take a stand.

Jo: Mm.

Sarah: I think I see that in student work, that sometimes we don't want to take a stand, and so we hedge. But writing is intentional, and readers can pick up on that hedging.

If you don't intend to hedge—in many cases it can be perfectly appropriate to be fuzzy for an effect that you want, or something like that in the context—but if you are hedging and you're trying to get away with it, like you don't want anyone to notice that you don't really want to give an opinion on this matter, it's going to be very clear. So it's better to address something directly.

Jo: And make it stronger. I also wanted to ask you more about the writing career, because I, perhaps like many people listening, was like, I didn't even know you could make a career as a dance critic.

Now I know you are not at the Washington Post any more, and it's possible that that role no longer exists—like a lot of writing roles.

How has your writing career changed over the years? Do you have these various aspects of a portfolio career?

We often talk about multiple streams of income on this show and how, as writers, we can't necessarily rely on one thing.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. It's true, there is no longer a dance critic at the Washington Post. The position was eliminated. It's a shame, and it's happening to critics in all fields, in all media organisations, sadly.

That's where, for me at least, having that focal point was very key. A thing that I became comfortable writing about, that I could then spiral out and use the eyes and the brain that I had developed from writing about this certain focus for a while. Where can I take that?

Oh, athletes. They also move. I began writing stories and pieces and essays about athletes that moved beautifully, beyond racking up statistics about winning. They were just gorgeous to look at, just so pleasurable to watch.

I started writing about the body language of political candidates in debate situations and so forth. Using my focal point to then widen my lens, to mix a metaphor, I guess.

Having that subject matter and then broadening it out beyond the limits of the actual subject matter, broadening it out imaginatively into where I could find other places to use this perspective. That was really key for me.

Say you are writing historical fiction or you're writing thrillers. I would imagine that you would develop a kind of expertise in things that I would find very difficult. Suspense, maybe, or political or police procedure, or what exactly was the weaponry in seventeenth-century France.

How can you take that expertise and use it either in an aesthetic way or an actual factual way to address other topics? I think there are so many people that would be interested in what writers who have knowledge and expertise in anything can then use to show us something that we've overlooked.

Something we always thought we knew, but that really, when you look at it this way, is reminiscent of how the scabbard was used in seventeenth-century France—or whatever it is, in whatever way.

People are craving a new perspective on something they've overlooked or taken for granted. And that's where writers who have a body of work, or are interested in pursuing a certain topic. That's the promise that they have.

They can work towards being able to enlighten us on so many other things that maybe only have a tangential connection, but they can make that connection for us.

Jo: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Sarah: I am at SarahLKaufman.com. That's my website. My books are available on any website or bookshop that you want to order them from. Verb Your Enthusiasm comes out April 28th. I am not much on social media at the moment, but I do enjoy hearing feedback from readers, and there are ways to do that on my website.

Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Sarah. That was great.

Sarah: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

The post Verb Your Enthusiasm: Transform Your Writing With Stronger Verbs With Sarah Kaufman first appeared on The Creative Penn.