Improve Your Writing… INSTANTLY!

“Okay I got lured in by the clickbait, but I know there’s no INSTANT advice!” And you’re right. No don’t click back yet. I still have a great and relatively quick nugget of wisdom I think you must know. Beginner writers! This one is for you, (they’re all really for you), because the instant you start to adopt this mentality, people generally will stop calling you a beginner writer! Because you’ll finally stop writing how all the other beginner writers do!

Today I am not here to talk about the essence of writing or grand lofty themes or moral implications or anything fuzzy-wuzzyily high concept like that. Nope nope this topic is easy. Today I am here to *slaps the table* talk to you about your TECHNIQUE.

The words you put on the page by which you tell the story. The ‘prose’ as they say. Don’t get sucked up by that jargon into thinking, ‘I don’t need to think too hard about that. It’ll come out of me naturally.’ Oh no, beginner writer, oh no it won’t. What is going to come out of you is the amalgamation of all the prose you’ve already read. The phrasings you think are impressive. The vocabulary that makes you go ‘wow’. At least it’s like that for me! And I know what you’re reading.

YOU’VE BEEN READING FANFICTION.

How can I tell that?

Because your text is infested with the ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but I guess this works’ fanfiction-typical “as Verbed, Verbing” sentence structure. That is our topic today!

The Verbed/Verbing Sentence Structure.

To understand the Verbed/Verbing sentence structure, let’s first establish what it is. The Verbed/Verbing sentence structure is a structure like this:

To give more illustrated examples:

And so on. There’s lots of variations of this structure, but the crux of it is that new actions are being added onto the sentence not through conjunctions (like ‘and’ or ‘but’), but through simultaneous verb clauses. We’ll come back to examine it more but this is the basic idea of the structure.

Here is an excerpt of ~250 words from a random fanfiction I found on Ao3. I’ve changed the character names, nouns, and verbs used for the author’s privacy, but retained the basic idea of the scene and its sentence structure:

A yellow flower sprouted across the verdant meadow, covering everywhere with the sweet fragrance of a garden. Sunshine beamed out its warm radiance, spilling a buttery bath of light over the field as picnickers sat upon tartan blankets. Among those were Frank and Joshua, taking a souiree from their hectic lifestyles to indulge in a day at the park with a particular goal in mind: babysitting Lisa.

Lisa’d never been to the park before.

With all the stuff that had gone on before Joshua and the squad had abducted her, could she ever have? But now having restructured some mundanity into her life alongside a bunch of surrogate parents, this was the prime chance for the trio to venture on a small trip to the park. They didn’t roam distant and it was rather unspectacular, but really Joshua and Frank desired it as much as Lisa.

Joshua sat on top of the mat of a bold tartan blanket, fingers immersed in the pockets of his frayed ripped jeans and his hair tied up into a messy braid as he observed Lisa pat her little palms on the grass, her big eyes interested and childish. Aside him, Frank was perched on a tree pressing a sunhat onto his already shaded head, complaining vaguely about how he’d managed to neglect the most critical part of picnicking (the basket).

Dressed in a garish pair of red leather chaps with blue printed cats on them and a couple of tie-die bandannas, the brunette meshed well with the group of luncheoners.

Here is an excerpt of ~250 words from Micheal Moorcock’s “An Alien Heat,” depicting a similar scene:

Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Orchid and her son sat upon a cream-coloured beach of crushed bone. Some distance off a white sea sparkled and whispered. It was the afternoon.

Between the Iron Orchid and her son, Jherek Carnelian, lay the remains of a lunch. Spread on a cloth of plain damask were ivory plates containing pale fish, potatoes, meringue, vanilla ice-cream and, glaring rather dramatically, from the centre of it all, a lemon.

The Iron Orchid smiled with her amber lips and, reaching for an oyster, asked: "How do you mean, my love, 'virtuous'?" Her perfect hand, powdered the very lightest shade of gold, hovered for a second over the oyster and then withdrew. She used the hand, instead, to cover a small yawn.

Her son stretched on his soft pillows. He, too, felt tired after the exertions of eating, but dutifully he continued with the subject. "I'm not thoroughly sure what it means. As you know, most devastating of minerals, most enchanting of flowers, I have studied the language of the time quite extensively. I must possess every tape that still exists. It provides considerable amusement. But I cannot understand every nuance. I found the word in a dictionary and the dictionary told me it meant acting with 'moral rectitude' or in conformity with 'moral laws' — 'good, just, righteous.' Bewildering!"

He did take an oyster. He slid it into his mouth. He rolled it down his throat. It had been the Iron Orchid who had discovered oysters and he had been delighted when she suggested they meet on this beach and eat them. She had made some champagne to go with them, but they had both agreed that they did not care for it and had cheerfully returned it to its component atoms.

Can you see the difference? I figure you can definitely feel it. Moorcock’s scene has a certain tone that feels odd, tense, and full of intrigue — the fanfiction, while still having an interesting premise, feels like it has the tone of ‘fanfiction’. There are several things contributing to that, but I want you to especially look at the sentence structures in these two excerpts. Rather, I’ll now highlight how often the fanfiction used the ‘Verbed/Verbing’ structure, and how much Moorcock used it:

A yellow flower sprouted across the verdant meadow, covering everywhere with the sweet fragrance of a garden. Sunshine beamed out its warm radiance, spilling a buttery bath of light over the field as picnickers sat upon tartan blankets. Among those were Frank and Joshua, taking a souiree from their hectic lifestyles to indulge in a day at the park with a particular goal in mind: babysitting Lisa.

Lisa’d never been to the park before.

With all the stuff that had gone on before Joshua and the squad had abducted her, could she ever have? But now having restructured some mundanity into her life alongside a bunch of surrogate parents, this was the prime chance for the trio to venture on a small trip to the park. They didn’t roam distant and it was rather unspectacular, but really Joshua and Frank desired it as much as Lisa.

Joshua sat on top of the mat of a bold tartan blanket, fingers immersed in the pockets of his frayed ripped jeans and his hair tied up into a messy braid as he observed Lisa pat her little palms on the grass, her big eyes interested and childish. Aside him, Frank was perched on a tree pressing a sunhat onto his already shaded head, complaining vaguely about how he’d managed to neglect the most critical part of picnicking (the basket).

Dressed in a garish pair of red leather chaps with blue printed cats on them and a couple of tie-die bandannas, the brunette meshed well with the group of luncheoners. Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Orchid and her son sat upon a cream-coloured beach of crushed bone. Some distance off a white sea sparkled and whispered. It was the afternoon.

Between the Iron Orchid and her son, Jherek Carnelian, lay the remains of a lunch. Spread on a cloth of plain damask were ivory plates containing pale fish, potatoes, meringue, vanilla ice-cream and, glaring rather dramatically, from the centre of it all, a lemon.

The Iron Orchid smiled with her amber lips and, reaching for an oyster, asked: "How do you mean, my love, 'virtuous'?" Her perfect hand, powdered the very lightest shade of gold, hovered for a second over the oyster and then withdrew. She used the hand, instead, to cover a small yawn.

Her son stretched on his soft pillows. He, too, felt tired after the exertions of eating, but dutifully he continued with the subject. "I'm not thoroughly sure what it means. As you know, most devastating of minerals, most enchanting of flowers, I have studied the language of the time quite extensively. I must possess every tape that still exists. It provides considerable amusement. But I cannot understand every nuance. I found the word in a dictionary and the dictionary told me it meant acting with 'moral rectitude' or in conformity with 'moral laws' — 'good, just, righteous.' Bewildering!"

He did take an oyster. He slid it into his mouth. He rolled it down his throat. It had been the Iron Orchid who had discovered oysters and he had been delighted when she suggested they meet on this beach and eat them. She had made some champagne to go with them, but they had both agreed that they did not care for it and had cheerfully returned it to its component atoms.

Of the fanfiction’s 10 sentences, 5 of them are Verbed/Verbing. 2 full paragraphs out of 5 are entirely Verbed/Verbing. Of Moorcock’s 22 sentences, it’s one — and a precursor to dialogue. I want to remind you that I did not hunt for this fanfiction. The structure is genuinely so prolific in fanfiction that you can extend these tendencies to the rest of the text, and in the end a fanfiction will probably be over 50% this exact structure, even though all through the story, and in their other works, this author is clearly trying to be conscious of sentence variation to produce rhythm — and even so they keep falling back into this exact same structure, for every action, in a way that sticks out, badly.

What about you?

Oh shoot, do you use it that much? Is it 50% of your sentences? 30%? 10%? Even 5% is significant.

So what’s going on here, and why does Verbed/Verbing spread like such a weed in amateur fiction?

The Mystery of Verbed/Verbing.

The thing with Verbed/Verbing is this. If you’re an inexperienced writer, and you need to present an idea, you’ll be prone to doing so unconfidently, and from that unconfidence, present multiple images to depict the idea instead of one. You will also present multiple ideas at once instead of establishing them one at a time. The Verbed/Verbing structure is great for doing both because you can slap clauses upon clauses and ideas upon ideas until one of them ‘probably works’. Further, when you’re midway through a sentence and suddenly get an idea, you can immediately slap it on as a new clause, without restructuring anything. The fanfiction example does this squared, having two sentences off the bat that are trying to do the same thing:

A yellow flower sprouted across the verdant meadow, covering everywhere with the sweet fragrance of a garden. Sunshine beamed out its warm radiance, spilling a buttery bath of light over the field as picnickers sat upon tartan blankets.

You could easily truncate this to, ‘It was a beautiful, busy day at the park for a picnic’. Because that’s effectively all those lines are saying. Do you lose imagery in saying that? Yes, but if you want it back, remember, you have the whole rest of the paragraph. You could use something more detailed, like, ‘At the park by <location>, amid blooming flowers and chattering tourists all clustered around blankets of tartan spread across the whole green, Frank and Joshua laid out their mat for a picnic.’ Am I calling that great writing? No. But I am saying that if you do this, you are already more interesting than most online writers, solely because, to depict this idea, you didn’t use Verbed/Verbing.

When you start a sentence unsure of what you’re about to write, and only a vague idea like ‘it's a pretty day, so um... flowers’, the spontaneous nature of Verbed/Verbing will likely, as much as the image is coming spontaneously, slap down the ideas spontaneously. It's a horse running without any reins.

I want to write a plane flying through the sky, but I can’t envision the plane? ‘The plane coursed through the sky—’ Oh! ‘—beaming like a shooting star, piercing through the clouds, flashing a quicksilver glint across the azure horizon…’ no. NO! Stop, go back, pick one image. By this point your verbosity has killed the dream.

Figure out the one idea you need to achieve with this sentence. Execute it.

And rephrase it all to remove the Verbed/Verbing.

‘Wait… that’s hard.’

Yup!

YUP!!!!!

WELCOME TO ACTUALLY WRITING.

 And this is the method, if you’ve realised, ‘Callie is right, oh shoot, 50% of my sentences DO use Verbed/Verbing’, that by for weeks, for months, and for years removing the ‘Verbed/Verbing’ crutches in your prose until you never write them again… you will instantly get better at writing.

The Atrocity of Verbed/Verbing.

Now that’s the advice—stop using Verbed/Verbing—but I’m not done complaining about the use of Verbed/Verbing.

Verbed/Verbing construction does not let the ideas in a sentence breathe.

Look at this:

Joshua sat on top of the mat of a bold tartan blanket, fingers immersed in the pockets of his frayed ripped jeans and his hair tied up into a messy braid as he observed Lisa pat her little palms on the mud, her big eyes interested and childish. There are six ideas all fighting in this sentence to be the relevant one: Joshua sitting, Joshua’s posture, the description of his jeans, the description of his hair, Lisa patting the mud, and the emotion in her eyes. On top of that being a lot in the first place, there is no priority to them because they’re all simultaneous. The reader holds the information of Joshua’s hands in his pockets, as though it will be relevant to the end of the sentence, only to refocus midway because it’s actually not. Look what happens when you do this: Joshua sat on top of the mat of the bold tartan blanket, with his hands in the pockets of his ripped jeans and his messy braid trailing down his shoulder. He watched Lisa pat her little palms on the mud, her big eyes interested and childish. That’s way more comprehensible. Is this variation not as zippy? Not as interesting? Well, that’s the thing. Verbed/Verbing enchants ‘nothing-sentences’ into ‘something-sentences’ by the activity of the ‘-ing’ clauses, even when nothing is happening. It laces oatmeal with meth. Every sentence. Not healthy!

The Perniciousness of Verbed/Verbing.

Another of Verbed/Verbing’s sins, especially in fanfiction, apart from every sentence being it, is that it’s used wrong. Verbed/Verbing construction denotes that both verbs occur simultaneously. That does not mean ‘one shortly after the other’, or ‘in a quick sequence’, or ‘modifying the first clause as an adverb’. It means actually at the same time. Look:

The car crashed, blowing up in a massive inferno. No it didn’t. It crashed and then blew up. Correct it sensibly: The car crashed and blew up in a massive inferno. Now your reader can fully register each event in this sequence as a sequence. Is the first example ungrammatical? No, because it’s in the form of an adverbial clause (while masquerading as a sequential verb), but it does confuse the sequential aspect and diminishes the weight of the first clause. If you want to emphasise the inferno again, use the next sentence to emphasise the inferno by describing its awfulness instead of relying on meth. Let’s try another example: Joshua blinked, his gaze lowering onto the person on his sofa while clearing his throat anxiously. This is three redundant actions (blinked, lowered his gaze, and cleared his throat) ALL HAPPENING AT THE SAME TIME. Like just stop for a second and try actually doing this. Apart from how weird it is to ‘clear your throat’ and ‘blink’ simultaneously, ‘lowering your gaze’ while ‘blinking’ is impossible. Fix it: Joshua blinked, lowered his gaze onto the person on his sofa, and cleared his throat anxiously. Or if you argue that’s not impossible, what about something like this: Running to the left, Lisa careened down the alley on her right. …What does that even mean!? You might think I’m being egregious, but this happens, as people get so used to chaining every single action into the Verbed/Verbing form that it becomes their automatic manner of writing all actions, and the sane people get to distinguish themselves by not abandoning the poor lost conjunctions. Fix: Lisa started down the left, but readjusted to careen down the alley on her right. And then you get chaos like this: Joshua hummed in thought, checking his options before choosing a pink and white polka-dot band shirt with Joy Division’s Unseen Pleasures mountains printed on it, throwing it to Frank. NO. How to untangle this. It starts with a sequence where Verbed/Verbing would work, because the humming and checking is simultaneous, except it’s all in an adverbial clause that links it to an action that isn’t simultaneous, which ruins the whole sentence. I get what they’re trying to say though. What’s actually happening is THIS: Joshua hummed in thought, checking his options, before choosing a pink and white polka-dot band shirt with Joy Division’s Unseen Pleasures mountains printed on it, which he threw to Frank. And if you’re still holding on to Verbed/Verbing as an adverbial form: The plane coursed through the sky, beaming like a shooting star. Just trust me: The plane flew through the sky like a shooting star. You can do more with this.

So before you even start to start using Verbed/Verbing, you can start to stop using Verbed/Verbing by asking yourself before you write your sentence:

The Redemption of Verbed/Verbing.

It’s fine when the clauses are actually simultaneous, or when you really need that shot of meth to heavily emphasise the action in the -ing clause while deemphasising the -ed clause. Or if you're getting really advanced and want to depict a character experiencing subtle temporal confusion. You can have one Verbed/Verbing then, as a treat. ONE.

By necessity it crops up around dialogue to balance the weight of concurrent actions to the inherent extreme weight of speech clauses (characters doing nothing while speaking is awkward). This is how Moorcock used it in the excerpt.

An Aside To Explain How Moorcock Does It Right.

Speaking of Moorcock, let’s consider what he did: Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Orchid and her son sat upon a cream-coloured beach of crushed bone. Some distance off a white sea sparkled and whispered. It was the afternoon. We can see scene establishment achieved through a simple sentence executed by fixation on interesting ideas. A ‘cream-coloured’ beach of ‘crushed bone’ is interesting, because it immediately asserts an individuality about this beach. It implies a certain history of death in a dreamy, fantastical landscape where people with such extravagant names as ‘Iron Orchid’ care about what they’re dressed in when lounging around on ‘cream-coloured’ death beaches (revealed to be indulgently eating a luxurious picnic). The shift onto the ‘distant’ sea waves then evokes dreaminess, drowsiness, and indulgence. It is a story about finding the meaning of love in a future where everyone is a careless hedonist. That is theme establishment. That is thesis statement on line 1. This is what ‘showing, not telling’ is.

(He’s also established rhythm by varied sentence lengths, going from long to short, that mirrors the swelling of a wave. This is tier 2 of ‘showing, not telling’; describing elements of a scene through the prosody of a paragraph/sentence. You can hear the waves moving through the sentences. And then it’s in iambic pentameter. That is tier 3 and why it’s immediately gripping, despite using unadorned language; the syllabic rhythm promises itself as a build-up that you have to read further to pay off.) A yellow flower sprouted across the verdant meadow, covering everywhere with the sweet fragrance of a garden. Sunshine beamed out its warm radiance, spilling a buttery bath of light over the field as picnickers sat upon tartan blankets. The fanfiction tried to do similar. You can tell what the author is thinking: ‘I need to establish this scene, and illustrate it evocatively’. But when you’re reading proficient writing, unless you’re dissecting it to emulate it for yourself, you should not be able to see what the author is thinking, unless the author wants you to think it. You should, from the very first line, be transported into a dream-realm where the settings, actions, and characters are real and the author doesn’t exist, except ambiently as the world’s unseen focus of God. Very much, Moorcock did that here — and Moorcock is not building to write just an evocative sentence in this, either. This rhythm persists for the whole book, and the concepts established here are retained the whole time.

Practice, practice, practice, friends. If you are a Verbed/Verber, challenge yourself! You are the author! This is your house! And whatever thought you have to get across, you can definitely use more than Verbed/Verbing!