1,000 Strong Verbs for Fiction Writers by Valerie Howard is a reference booklet for writers that contains a list of 1,000 strong verbs.
When to use strong verbs? It’s not as straightforward as you think. Which of the two following sentences is better?
Which of the two following two sentences is better?
A) Sophie crossed the room.
B) Sophie scurried across the room.
It depends. If moving across the room is not important for the scene and just needed to orient the reader, keep it simple and use cross.
The same applies to dialogue tags. If the purpose of the dialogue tag is to orient the reader, use she said, not she declared or other strong verbs.
If the crossing of the room is important for the scene and the characters involved, for example, to save a baby from falling out of a bed, then we shouldn’t use scurry either. We should use a fresh expression that delivers an emotional punch and/or reveals character. Example: Daddy crossed the room so fast he must have found a wormhole.
When to use strong verbs? When we need action, character, or world-themed words. Example: With a sudden move, Mother frees herself from the grip of the armed man, races to the monk, drops to her knees, and covers his foot with kisses like one covers graves with flowers. “Please, leave her alone. I beg you. She just turned seven. I do anything you want. Do anything you want to me, but leave her be.“
The verb in question is race. We can’t use cross because we need an action-themed verb. See for yourself: With a sudden move, Mother frees herself from the grip of the armed man, crosses the room, drops to her knees, and covers the monk’s foot with kisses like one covers graves with flowers. “Please, leave her alone. I beg you. She just turned seven. I do anything you want. Do anything you want to me, but leave her be.“
The question remains why we shouldn’t use a fresh expression for race. The reason is focus. The focus isn’t on crossing the room but on what follows. Here is the same example with a fresh expression: With a sudden move, Mother frees herself from the grip of the armed man, darts like a hunted deer to the monk, drops to her knees, and covers his foot with kisses like one covers graves with flowers. “Please, leave her alone. I beg you. She just turned seven. I do anything you want. Do anything you want to me, but leave her be.“ The fresh expression darts like a hunted deer is a distraction and speed bump, and weakens the emotional punch. It also makes the paragraph hard to digest.
What to emphasize in a long action beat? Follow the emotion, see where it peaks, and dramatize that moment with rhetorical devices. In the above case, the emotion peaks when the mother kisses the monk’s foot.
