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Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

Caesar proclaimed “veni, vidi, vinci.” Matthew reminded, “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” Bellow saw in every face in New York “the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Deadwood’s mayor E. B. Farnum, when he saw the Widow Garret, said, “She enters,” rather than the “There she is” of lesser mortals. And my dog? Well, you’d better believe that Homer understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “fetch.” (He wasn’t so good on “lie down.”)

Verbs have been called everything from “action words” to “the heartbeat of a sentence.” They have even been called The Almighty—by Buckminster Fuller:  “God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.” Verbs make the fulcrum of every sentence, the essence of any story. They put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.

Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a dynamic one, the passive voice and the active one, means knowing how to write purposefully and powerfully. In fact, understanding the verb means understanding English itself, for in English more than in other tongues, verbs enjoy a kind of primacy. Think about it: The word itself comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs, nor can we boast of verbal dexterity!

Yet, for all their primacy and vibrancy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch aims to change the way we think about verbs—and about language itself.

Beginning writers often ask me: “What is the one thing that will improve my work?” Aside from the obvious answer—read more, write more—I tell them to bone up on verbs.

Vex, Hex will take writers from the basics (static and dynamic verbs) to the esoteric (the indicative, the imperative, and the oh so subjunctive). It will set writers straight on objects and why it’s easy to use who and whom correctly. It upends conventional notions of verbs, sentences, and literature itself, marching from Caesar to Sorenson, from Woolf to The Wolfman, from Dickens to Didion, from Hemingway to JFK. And we won’t forget rappers like Dr. Dre, or TV writers like David Milch (Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire).

Vex, Hex also helps writers reinterpret the old rules for the new media landscape. The books show how verbs figure into the 140-character messages of Twitter and how they can elevate blogs into literature. (Or at least something worth reading.) This is a book for every writer trying to figure out how to rise above the digital din by crafting prose that is lean, powerful, and punchy.

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Doesn’t it sound like fun? Look for it in fall 2011. In the meantime, I’ll be creating a page here and inviting you to send in your favorite examples of writers who get verbs and how to use them to perk up their prose.

Related posts:

1. The Exquisite Corpse

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally. The name of the game allegedly derives from the phrase the Surrealists created when they first played the game, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the game: “Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”

OK, I’ll grant you that we didn’t exactly turn 109 Sever Hall at Harvard University into 54 rue du Chateau in Paris. But following the rule Subject/Transitive Verb/Direct Object we gave the Exquisite Corpse a good try, coming up with:

• The coffee beans sautéed the rooster.
• Vampires borrow snow.
• The conductor kicked the can.

Changing the rule to Subject/Static Verb/Complement, we got:

• The Easter Bunny is upset.
• Santa Claus was a worrywart.

Good enough for Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and André Breton? I’d say so.

Related posts:

1. Seven Deadly Sins