Graphic by Peg Ihinger
I thought the nonsense about “weak verbs” in fiction died some time during the pandemic. Apparently, I was wrong; somebody helpfully forwarded a list of “weak verbs you should never use in your writing” recently. Which inspired this post.
The first problem with talking about “weak verbs” is that it’s actually a grammatical term, not one of writing craft. Grammatically, a weak verb is one that ends in -ed, -t, or -d in the past tense.” (In English, anyway.)
In other words, “weak verbs” are regular verbs. One of the most interesting things about this definition is that the verb that is most commonly cited as being the ultimate “weak” verb—to be—does not fit it. Grammatically, “was” fits the definition of a strong verb.
Yet “to be” is almost always at the top of the “forbidden” list. Some places list every verb form explicitly—not just “to be,” but is, was, were, am, are, be, been, being… Honestly, people, “to be” covers it. The do-not-use list also regularly includes “to have,” “to do,” and often “to go,” “to become,” “to give,” “to look,” “to feel,” “to make,” and “to get.”
In other words, these lists of “weak verbs” include a lot of the most common verbs in English. (I suspect that’s part of the issue, but more on that later.) These verbs are variously termed “repetitive, passive, wordy, boring, generic, and too general.” No one ever seems to point out how useful they are…
In their eagerness to banish the copulative, these folks nearly always either forget that “to be” is a necessary part of the progressive tenses, or else they include all progressive tenses under their idiotic prohibition. “When she walked in, he was shrieking at his cell phone” is not the same as “When she walked in, he shrieked at his cell phone.” And just try removing all forms of “to be” from Hamlet’s soliloquy…
It’s a little more reasonable for these folks to banish passive voice (which also requires using a form of “to be” along with the main verb) but only a little. Most of the time, “Many people stole the Baseball Diamond over the years” will be fine…but you can pack a lot more information in more elegantly by using passive voice in a string of phrases: “The Baseball Diamond was stolen four times over the years—once by the dwarves, twice by the goblins, and most recently by the Queen of Arabia.”
Passive voice is also necessary in certain sentences. “He was murdered” is passive voice. Rephrasing it in active voice would either weaken the impact (“Someone murdered him” is just not as dramatic) or reveal the murderer (which would be a problem in most mysteries). And the sentence structure of “The tycoon, having been insulted, stormed out” requires passive voice in the subordinate clause, because it’s the only way to make “the tycoon” the subject of both clauses (which it has to be, because the tycoon certainly didn’t insult himself).
I think that what the anti-weak-verb crowd are actually on about goes back to the fact that their list of “weak” verbs includes some of the most commonly used words in the English language. They’re ordinary, and because they’re ordinary, they end up being almost invisible.
That ordinariness is useful, if you want the reader focused on what’s happening in your fast-paced action scene, but it’s a huge drawback if you’re trying for a memorable turn of phrase or an evocative description. Also, something like “Grace looked at the ring” gives very little hint of how Grace is reacting. You pack a lot more into the sentence by changing the verb to something more specific, like “Grace glared at the ring” or “Grace studied the ring.”
And that last is, I think, what the complaints about “weak verbs in fiction” are really about. Whoever came up with this idea wanted to get the biggest stylistic and informational bang possible out of every word they used. (Obviously, they were not of the generation of writers who were paid by the word.)
Most of the time, writers get more metaphorical bang out of specific words than general ones, (as long as they’re not simply showing off their vocabulary). Frequently, that more-specific word is less commonly used than the general one. From that observation, it’s a small step to making prescriptive “rules” about general versus specific verbs (and adverbs, and adjectives, and…).
Personally, I am extremely skeptical about rules that include either the word “always” or the word “never.” (OK, I am skeptical about a lot of rules, period.) I prefer things like the 80/20 rule—80% of the outcome derives from 20% of the causes.
In my case, 80/20 means that when I’m looking at my default search-and-destroy list, my goal isn’t to eliminate all of them. (And nothing on the list is there because somebody decided it was “weak.” Verbs and phrases get on that list because I have noticed myself using them too often in my rough draft.) My goal is to find the crucial 20% where I really need an extra bang. The other 80% of the time, the “boring” commonplace words do the job and don’t get in the way.
In my experience, the lower the word count I have available, the more freight every word needs to carry. If one is writing haiku, every syllable is vitally important, and every word has to be carefully chosen. A 100,000-word novel needs a different level of attention.
Yes, “Maria walked through the parking lot” is not quite the same as “Maria strolled (or passed, ambled, hiked, plodded, sauntered, strode, or wandered) through the parking lot,” but at least 80% of the time, saying “Maria walked” says all that needs to be said. Using a different verb every time Maria goes anywhere can be, at best, distracting. At worst, the reader can’t tell whether the specific way Maria is walking is important. And if Maria always strolls, ambles, hikes, and saunters everywhere for a hundred thousand words, readers are very likely to get annoyed.
So there really isn’t a need for writers to get exercised about purging “weak verbs” from their work. Because give, look, have, do, and most definitely be are not weak. They’re the solid, everyday workhorse verbs of the English language. And while you probably don’t want to enter a workhorse in the Kentucky Derby, you also don’t want a thoroughbred racehorse pulling your vegetable cart.
“The Baseball Diamond was stolen four times over the years—once by the dwarves, twice by the goblins, and most recently by the Queen of Arabia.”
This sounds like the opening line of a very interesting novel…
We look forward to reading yours
In the one creative writing course I ever took, the first writing exercise was a descriptive passage. Mine went something like this:
“The bridge was quiet, and the setting sun was red against the clouds. The river beneath the bridge was silent as well; the flow of the water was slow though steady…”
I’m sure everyone here can see how “weak” that passage was. Every verb was “was.” The scene doesn’t do anything except…”be.”
Does that mean never use “was”? Of course not. It means that if that’s your only verb for several sentences in a row, maybe some revision is in order.
As to passive voice, you just haven’t lived until you’re in or subject to some bureaucratic organization, and a directive comes down, and it’s all in passive voice.
Why is it written like that? Well, if “_____ is to be accomplished” is the mandate, and there’s no indication who’s doing the mandating, why then you can’t argue with that person, can you? It’s a way of evading accountability.
So, in fiction, is passive voice wrong, never to be used? Of course not! Aside from our hostess’ examples, you can use passive voice to show a character in your story evading accountability…
You are right in that your description “doesn’t do anything except…be,” but the problem isn’t with the verbs. It would be really creepy with just a little more emphasis on the silence and quiet, along with an implied narrator who was being creeped out by the unnatural silence. The repetition of “was” would actually add to the creepiness, if it went in that direction.
The bureaucratic use of passive voice was borrowed from science, where the absence of “I did it” was supposed to make clear that anyone would get similar results from doing this experiment. Neither the bureaucratic use of passive voice nor the scientific one is appropriate in most fiction, unless you’re including science papers or corporate memos in the work, though the point about characters evading accountability is a good one.
Possibly I should do another rant entirely on passive voice?
Yes, please!
My view on verbs in description is strongly influenced by Scott Oden’s introduction to Robert E. Howard’s Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (Del Rey, 2011).
He quotes one of Howard’s sources for one of the places in one of the stories in the volume, then includes the corresponding passage of Howard’s. I’m maybe too cautious with fair use, but I’ll quote a sentence from each:
Stanley Lane-Poole, a favorite writer of Howard’s (this is fiction, the medieval source for all of this isn’t quoted):
“Sudani swordsmen filled the corridors of the Great Palace, and paced the mosaic floors of the antechambers, by the marble fountains where peacocks strutted and parrots screamed.”
That’s pretty good. I like “paced” and “strutted.” But here’s Howard:
“…tongueless Sudanese stood like images of black silence, sword in hand. … Fountains jetted their silver sheen into the air, peacocks spread their iridescent plumage, parrots fluttered on golden threads.”
Now, Howard was great with imagery, and his adjectives help his passage as well. But ever since I read that intro, I’ve dipped back into Howard from time to time just to look at descriptive passages, and they are *so* dynamic, thanks to his verbs.
Am I too influenced by that? Maybe so.
I’m an idiot. That wasn’t Lane-Poole, in the first part, it’s Harold Lamb.
I think that passage is very close to being gorgeous–as Patricia said, it’s moving towards creepy–and less “was” is not necessarily the nudge it needs.
Rhythm counts, particularly in descriptive passages, and this one has a rhythm I like up until “slow but steady,” which doesn’t quite work for me.
Thank you, but I promise you, it didn’t have those rhythms then. I’ve worked very hard indeed on getting tempo and rhythm right since then. I’ve improved in 40+ years! 🙂
The big question is what your viewpoint character would use. Then, there’s how tight the viewpoint is, and also that your viewpoint character’s style can be changed by you, the writer, whenever you please.
In other words, writers hate copulas, which are sometimes not properly considered verbs at all. But useful yes. They are literally the most common because they are the most useful. Grammar is largely invisible to the reader and supposed to be. Turns out the average reader couldn’t care less if you use a passive verb.
But I remember I was a baby writer when I learned all this too boring, repetitive, etc. was actually overstated. I was rereading Anne of the Island for the umpteenth time and suddenly realized it used the tag “said Anne” three times in a row in the same short incident and I’d never noticed as a reader even once.
The whole use these words or don’t use these set of “rules” all seem to follow the same pattern. Overthinking.
I read a classic book of writers essays last year that pointed out writers who try to better communicate become better writers with a better voice and style. Writers who try to improve their writing voice and style generally do not,just cause their communicative power to suffer.
All of which is to say, I thoroughly agree with you.
Thank you for this! I’ve been criticized in writers’ groups so many times for writing “He was sitting” or some such construction, because of the presence of “was”. Now I have a nice, concise argument against that criticism.
I’m far from wishing to defend the “never give your prose a chance to catch its breath” heresy and all its horrible progeny – perhaps soon we’ll see a writing course advocating using stack ranking on one’s vocabulary to improve one’s expressiveness every year, until at last the diligent student has only Words of Power left and their masterpiece practically writes itself – ?
{repeat: LOVE MARMITE DEATH until $wordcount}
– and yet I have one complaint:
>And just try removing all forms of “to be” from Hamlet’s soliloquy…
This was wicked bait to leave out in a public place. The operation is surprisingly easy to perform with minimal disaster, though it does help that the forbidden verb disappears from a large middle block of the original, and only resurfaces once for a last despairing gulp of air before the end. Which I guess fits with the speaker’s general bias towards “not to be,” in an unexpectedly on-the-nose fashion!
Thank you, I think…
I think passive voice is absolutely useful for when you need the actor to be unstated; it’s pathological only when you are withholding that information for no reason, or a bad reason.
“They found the body after three days.”
“It was three days until the body was found.”
The second one keeps your eyes on the body, not on the finders: they are almost invisible. That may be what you want, and if so I think you want the second version.
Which gives me a thought – thank you again!
You’re absolutely right about the unseen actor. There’s nothing wrong with something like:
“The other person in the apartment wasn’t noticed. The heavy bookend being picked up wasn’t seen. The soft footstep wasn’t heard. The bookend being lifted high, and then swung down…”
Passive voice, focusing on the action not the actor. Perfectly fine.
Switching to active is simply effective in another way:
“He puttered around his apartment, unaware of its other occupant. He picked up a book, not seeing the other lift up a heavy bookend from the other bookshelf, not hearing as the other stepped up behind him…”
Instead of writing about a violent act, we’re writing about a victimization.
Or we can make it a little creepy:
“The unseen hand picked up a heavy bookend. The unseen hand began to lift it further while nearing the oblivious, turned back. The unseen hand raised it high…”
Writing’s fun. So it talking about it. 🙂
Not to beat this to death, but this is part of something I wrote up in 2018, more of looking at Robert E. Howard and how he did description:
“I’m not going to show you Howard’s version first, I’m going to show you his text as messed up by me:
“Horses moving swiftly through the tall reeds; a heavy fall, a despairing cry. From the dying steed its rider stood, a slender girl in sandals and girdled tunic. She had dark hair that reached her white shoulders, and had eyes like a trapped animal. Her attention was not on the jungle of reeds around the little clearing, nor on the blue waters beyond the low shore behind her. She was intent on the horseman who rode up and dismounted before her.
“As I said, that’s not how Howard wrote it. This is:
“A swift crashing of horses through the tall reeds; a heavy fall, a despairing cry. From the dying steed there staggered up its rider, a slender girl in sandals and girdled tunic. Her dark hair fell over her white shoulders, her eyes were those of a trapped animal. She did not look at the jungle of reeds that hemmed in the little clearing, nor at the blue waters that lapped the low shore behind her. Her wide-eyed gaze was fixed in agonized intensity on the horseman who pushed through the reedy screen and dismounted before her.”
Now, see, that messed-up version is how *I* do description if I’m having a bad day. I know I have to work at it, and one thing that helps *me* is to watch my verbs.
But! If this isn’t a problem for you, don’t worry about it. I as a person (and thus as a writer) tend to focus on what I’m doing, ignoring everything around me. I have to stop and look around.
Which means if I’m not careful, as a writer I stop the story and look around, describing a static scene. But I want my prose dynamic, so *I* have to work not to let my description go the opposite of how I want it to.
If you think something like this helps you, then give it a shot. If you don’t, then, *please*, ignore it!!!! 🙂
This post alone has made me swear off grammerly or other such tools for editing. I used it in my 1st book b4 it had AI and it did feel a bit off to me sometimes but this post is the explanation. Even b4 AI those things treat prose like its math, like just making every word tick a check box will make it sound nice.