Active Verbs pt. 2: writing sample!

I said yesterday that I would post the flash fiction/prose poem I wrote using mostly active verbs. Here it is! It's called "We."

We

1

When the last of us finishes finals, we drink. Run our pinkies around the edges of Jell-O shots and slurp, strawberry, lime, an unidentifiable flavor we just call blue. Spit out the mushy, tasteless Swedish fish swimming in the Jell-O. Cinco de Mayo celebration with Tostitos, mild salsa and two dorm room desks covered with bottles. Our own bar. Pray the RA on duty skips our sorority house tonight. We contemplate ordering Papa John’s. Last weekend the delivery boy forgot our two-liter Coke so he gave us a voucher: two for free. We’re running low on mixers but nix pizza since none of us earned enough selling back textbooks. “We’ll just do shots once the mixers disappear.” Problem solved. Peach schnapps and iced tea, lemonade and strawberry vodka. TV plays Aladdin in the background, brand new Blu-Ray. Our voices shriek, then hush when we hear the door open downstairs until we realize it’s our roommates heading to trivia at the tavern. We text our exes and our almost-somethings in fickle desperation, like the room is filling to the top with water, limiting our chances left to breathe. We don’t mention the G-word. Anytime we try, we flick the word away with our fingers, like crumbs left on the dining hall table by the group who ate before us. Next weekend, the G-word will steal some of us, kick us into the real world, leave our group full of holes. We can’t decide which is worse: leaving or staying behind to reassemble the leftovers.

  

2

 

Time to stargaze. We hold hands, skip down stairs, fumble with shoelaces and finally go barefoot. We piggyback across the parking lot, flop onto the soccer field grass behind the house. Dew chills bare feet, grass like Papier-mâché around toes. Someone remembered to snag a comforter off her bed. We squish. Selinsgrove stars remind us of South Africa stars, some from experience, others from photographs scrolled through on laptops. Stars are backwards there, a mirror image projected in an opposite hemisphere. Some of us will visit Prague next month. We wonder if the stars look different there too. Reminisce about the classes we whined about all semester. “I hated Betsy’s ethics class,” one of us proclaims, “but sitting in the back row and sharing dry Cheerios straight from the box was nice.” Will anyone share dry cereal with us at our summer office jobs, graduate school classes, awkward family reunions?

A flashlight beam. Public safety. “Probably wants to check how drunk we are.” The officer swings his arms wide when he walks even though there’s no gun on his belt to bump. He gives us his “crazy kids” head shake. “I need you all to stay in the light.” He points at the sputtering streetlamp. “University policy. Don’t want anything happening to you.” He waits. We gather the blanket and start our pilgrimage back across the field. “Bullshit,” we hiss as he struts away. “Who’s going to attack the group of us?” “Someone crazy. And I don’t think a beam of light is going to deter him much.”
 

3

 
The streetlight shines in our eyes and we can’t see the stars. Lie on the grass, scan the sky anyway. Our cars face us in a row, three piled with suitcases and boxes and hampers, ready to drive home tomorrow morning. Two cars remain empty. They’ll wait out Senior Week until they too fill with belongings. The next time our cars reunite, it’ll be Homecoming or a twenty-first birthday. “Who do you think will take our two empty parking spots next year?” we wonder. We are seniors. Juniors. Sophomores. Just for tonight. Soon we will be alumni, seniors, juniors, moving up and moving out. But for tonight, we are still a we.

Active Verbs - my latest grammar obsession!

ATTENTION: THIS IS A GRAMMAR NERD POST. Feel free to skip if you don’t care about grammar…I promise I won’t be offended. But this is a grad school lesson I’ve learned that has helped strengthen my writing, so I wanted to share it with all my other writers out there (and anyone who has ever had to write something ever, because this might help you too)!

One of the main criticisms I received from my fiction professor at the beginning of the semester was my use of passive verbs. There, look, I used one in that sentence right there! Was. Sure, the sentence is fine (look, I did it again! Is) but slightly weak. Here’s a better sentence: My fiction professor critiqued my use of passive verbs in several of my stories this semester.

(Okay, I’m going to shut off my passive/active radar for a second while I write this post. It’s similar to counting how many times you say “like” in a discussion about how you hate people who say “like”…I’m going to notice it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME in this post.)

I didn’t realize how often I wrote with passive verbs until my professor pointed it out to me. I had a habit of using passive +-ing verbs (She is running, I am crying), a habit I think I developed after reading YA novels for years. Passive verbs are super common in YA, I’ve found, because it’s how we talk, and authors want their MCs to sound authentic. But once I reread my short stories and circled every passive verb, I realized almost every sentence had one!

Most of the time, active verbs sharpen your writing, particularly in fiction. Solid action words are almost always better than a dulled down version (“I sprint down the sidewalk” vs. “I am sprinting down the sidewalk”). A quick way to strengthen your writing is to look for passive verbs when you edit (see list below) and try and rearrange some of your sentences to contain active verbs instead. They tighten up your story A TON. I wrote a short-short/flash fiction piece with 99.9% active verbs…SO FUN! Try it sometime! Maybe I’ll post my piece tomorrow as an example.

This isn’t to say passive verbs don’t have their place. I accidentally left out “has” and “had” in a few places where my story needed them (past-perfect tense). Too many active verbs can be distracting in the same way certain dialogue tags can be (Sometimes “He said” is better than “He boomed like a thunderclap” because the longer tag can disrupt the reader’s flow). It’s important to achieve a balance in your piece.

Active verbs aren’t solely used for fiction writing. They help spice up a cover letter or query, article or announcement. So even if you aren’t a creative writer, try and work some active verbs into your life. They’re like vitamins for your writing!

Hopefully this post is helpful! Here’s a list of passive verbs for you to avoid when you can (we learned them all set to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, when I was in eighth grade!) :

Am

Is
Was
Were
Be
Being
Been
Has
Have
Had
Do
Does
Did
May
Might
Must
Can
Could
Shall
Should
Will
Would
Are