Verbs do ... pretty much everything

 Thanks to the 10-12 people in the room today for Jacqui Banaszynski's webinar on verbs, via newsu.org. She covered so much ground about what verbs can do in your writing that she buzzed through some of her 10 verb tools too fast for us to take notes. Fortunately, the webinar replay is already up at the link above.

The 75-minute webinar was full of great stuff; if you don't have time to watch the whole thing, scroll to the part where Jacqui starts going through the 10 tools. She ends with a way you can vet your own copy for verb use -- print it out and highlight each verb/verb form in your story; see the patterns; revise as necessary. (There's much more to it -- scroll to about the one hour, 10-minute mark of the webinar and hit 'play.')

The group talked a bit after the webinar. Couple thoughts from me (and anyone who was there, please add your thoughts in comments):

•  I was really interested in Jacqui saying that verbs can "bend time" -- you can change tense and tone to accomplish time changes in a story without losing clarity, as she put it. I need to go back into the webinar to focus on this part. I suspect some of you/us do that without realizing it, but if you don't realize you're doing it, you're probably not using it to its maximum advantage. 
• I was struck by several examples she used that showed a paragraph crammed with action verbs -- so that, physically, there is a lot of activity in the graf -- followed by, or ended by, a line with a more "quiet" verb or verb form. The effect was almost physical for me -- a flurry of action and then a soft settling down of the language, of the story. Again, that is something worth learning how to do, learning to master.

Present tense, or past?

Writers often like present tense when they write about something they've witnessed; present tense makes the scene feel more fresh, more there somehow. But past tense is powerful, too, and to me, present tense has to clear some hurdles before it gets in the paper.

If I come across present tense in a story I'm editing, I'll ask at least a few questions about it -- why use present tense? What are you accomplishing? Can you sustain present tense all the way through the story?

That last one is key. If the writer's answer is no, I usually advise the story be written all in past tense.

However ...

I've edited two stories in the past couple weeks, both of which opened with a scene in present tense. One was Melissa's story on Eric Sajko, and the other was Jeff's on Sean Brame. I thought past tense worked better in Melissa's, and she changed the present-tense scene to past. I thought the present-tense scene worked in Jeff's, and it's in the paper.

I remember talking with Melissa and saying, if you wanted to do the opening in present-tense, I think you'd have to set it off as its own part of the story, to put us in that scene as a way of making a point or showing us something important about the story; then make a clear break to a new and different part of the story. You couldn't write in present tense for several grafs and then suddenly shift to past in the middle of the story. It just doesn't work.

In Jeff's story, the opening scene is set off; it shows us something important about the story and it does so by allowing us to be in the scene as it unfolds. And there is a significant break in scene/topic when you move into the second section.

Bottom line is, I'm comfortable that both stories were well-served by decisions on verb tenses. Both are very good; both have descriptive scenes with good action verbs and bright observations rendered in fresh language by the writers. They were both a pleasure to read, let alone edit.

Read the openings to both stories, and let me know what you think.