Verb It Up: To Be Is To Be Boring

Verbs are the workhorses of your poems. Strong verbs, exciting verbs, unexpected verbs, specific verbs: They make your poem sparkle and they surprise the reader.

Here are a few ways I try to make my verbs more interesting.

1 Combine a noun and verb. Sometimes, you have a phrase like, “I tossed the leaves into the sky.” Pretty straightforward and unpoetic. That phrase needs lots of work, but one place to start is to amp up the verb—and you might not even need to change any words. Just rearrange them! Try, “I sky-tossed the leaves.” Still not a beautiful phrase, but it’s more poetic and more intriguing (and more condensed, too). For me, at least, it’s an improvement.

2 Look it up. Find each verb in your poem and say it out loud. Does it make a picture in your mind? If it doesn’t, you need a different one. Go ahead, pull out or click on that thesaurus. Look up your boring verb and see what other ones come up. Try using some of those words until you find on that fits.

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