This week the Spring Intensive writing group played around with an exercise from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. It's called The Action of a Sentence (p95 of the latest 30th Anniversary edition).
You fold a piece of paper vertically down the middle. On the left side, list ten nouns, any nouns. An example list:
cinder
staircase
Mediterranean Sea
Italian scarf
Guinness
papaya
chicken noodle soup
Mars
violin
Golden Retriever
Then select an occupation (teacher, pilot, chef). On the right side, list fifteen verbs someone in the occupation might perform. Here's a list of verbs I generated:
scold
nurture
correct
write
lean
lead
inspire
direct
teach
listen
read
motivate
instill
play
embody
Let's play a game. Can you guess the profession? I'll give the answer in the comments of this blog article. Here's another list.
greet
count
type
ask
confirm
smile
handle
give
address
add
subtract
wait
stand
inquire
protect
How was that one? A bit harder, right? Answer below.
Next, create sentences linking the nouns and verbs together. Use verbs in the past or present tense. The result: sentences with electrifying verbs. If some of the sentences written on Monday night appeared in a novel I was reading, they'd paralyze me. I'd underline them with my blue rolling ball pen, then mention them in a book club discussion. Some read like one line poems. My favorites from the exercise:
His hat barked authority and cockiness.
A plate of spaghetti listens when no one else will.
The Italian scarf smiled on her shoulders
And a few Natalie examples from Bones:
Dinosaurs marinate in the earth.
The fiddles boiled the air with their music.
The lilacs sliced the sky into purple.
Verbs bring energy to a sentence. You don't need to ring your hands on every verb, of course, but sprinkling some eyeball-stoppers here and there will invigorate your work.
Try the exercise out. It takes 20-30 minutes, depending on how fast you work. Next, take something you've written - a writing practice session, an article you're working on - and perform the exercise with a handful of the nouns from it.