Let’s recognize, celebrate and practice fabulous writing in 2009.
After that, she’s running home to pack. She’s slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.
Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they’ll turn. She’s trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She’s trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. Each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.
Today is moving out day, another longest day of the year. – From Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk crafts short, nimble sentences to manifest the scenario in the reader’s brain. You visualize Misty’s actions. You taste her emotions.
The verbs Palahniuk chooses: sling, shoot, jab, stab, twist, turn, pop, dump behave as good little verbs should and create drama for the reader. They’re diva verbs, demanding Cristal champagne and a puppy for the night in their private dressing rooms.
Constance Hale, former editor at Wired and author of Sin and Syntax, says verbs are the part of speech that determine if a writer is a wimp or wizard.
The pros make strong nouns and dynamic verbs the heart of their style; verbs make their prose quiver. — Constance Hale
Better verbs for 'die'
Before you go willy-nilly replacing ‘to be’ verbs with dynamic verbs, break out the Roget’s or, more likely, head on over an online thesaurus and select an exciting verb that reaches out and smacks (or caresses, or pinches, or elbows) your reader’s face.
Verbs should tell the story, create the happening, elicit the emotions. Check out all the kick-ass verbs for ‘die’ my 1989 copy of The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus gave me. I could write about death all day without using the same verb twice …
