Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, an award-winning author and a writing teacher. As the Washington Post’s chief dance critic she wrote about the arts, entertainment, and society for 27 years. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books and Boston Globe, among others. Sarah’s latest book, Verb Your Enthusiasm, is a clarion call for all of us to get back to basics: to mean what we say and say what we mean.

Dan Richards

Sarah, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

It’s a great pleasure.

 

Dan Richards

Oh, well, thank you. Your book, Verb Your Enthusiasm, has a great title, which I don’t think needs explanation, but I think you’re keying into a moment. I was thrilled to read it. It’s a wonderful book, and it’s about verbs, but so much else besides. It’s a practical guide to better writing.

You approach that in such a wonderful way. I wonder if I could start by asking you how the book came to be written, what was in your head when you began thinking about it?

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes. Well, first of all, thank you so much for your kind words. It is about verbs, but it is about more. I think it’s essentially about capturing life as it moves past us. It’s about writing about action, whether that’s the action we see in front of us or interior action that we feel inside, or that we want to evoke about characters we’re writing about, or whatever it is.

The idea of the power of verbs really crept up on me gradually. It kind of assembled itself before my eyes. It was really the building blocks of my career as a dance critic, which is what I pursued for 27 years at The Washington Post, where I was the chief dance critic.

I started out quite young. I was faced with deadlines. I didn’t really have a lot of scholarly background to bring to bear in the process of evaluating dance. But what I did have was my own knowledge of dance, because I had studied it for a long time. I wanted to capture the experience of being in the theatre and watching these remarkable athletes, these musical athletes, every night.

So I leaned into the movement and the stories that it tells. The interactions between dancers, between characters on the stage, what their body language spoke of, more than technique, because that’s not really that interesting to read about, I don’t think. It’s more, what does it mean? What does it mean when a dancer leaps towards her partner, or dashes to the other side of the stage, or spins away?

That’s really the process that we face as novelists and non-fiction writers, capturing whatever it is that we’re writing about. I used a lot of verbs to describe the action that I was seeing, as well as what I was feeling inside.

I realised that my writing was perhaps a little different from some other dance critics I was reading, and it found its audience. I thought, these verbs really are kind of underrated as a matter of writing style and artistry.

I wasn’t able to read much about that. I love reading craft books. I started out as a copy editor, so I’m a real grammar nerd. This is just something I’ve always loved. As most writers do, we love words and playing with words.

But it seemed to me this was rather fresh territory to explore, and I wanted to share what I had acquired over the years, and also the writing that inspired me the most.

So in my book, it’s primarily based on literary examples and other examples from great journalism that I draw on and wanted to share with readers.

 

Dan Richards

Yes. And that’s something that’s a delight in the book, the fact that there are so many varied examples. Quite early on you have some Sally Rooney, and then there’s the chapter on poetics, or the second half, which begins with some Conrad.

So we’re right across the history of, as you say, not just literature, not just novels, but non-fiction writing as well, and the way that verbs have been deployed to tell stories.

Central, I think, to everything in the book is this idea of clarity, grace, communication and narrative, really, and getting what’s inside, outside, to some degree, in order to best articulate what’s going on.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes, and that was a big part of it, how to share the power of verbs with writers of basically anything. I mean, I even have examples from advertising copy. One of my favourite verb examples comes from the website of a jeweller that I came across, where they describe the turquoise as having ‘slipped from the sky’.

It’s just that one verb. This is what I love about verbs so much. ‘Slipped’ has so much resonance. It tells its own story in just a word. The way it slips from the sky gives you a sense of magic and lightness, and almost a spiritual quality, as though it loosened itself from this celestial realm to come and delight us here on Earth.

Verbs are like that. They can carry so much emotion and drama.

Some of the examples we’ve recently been able to tune into come from sports writing. As you know, we won’t be surprised that sports writing delves into verbs quite a lot, but I came across this in a recent article about Spain reaching the World Cup final. This was in The Guardian, written by Nick Ames. He’s got a great sentence here:

‘The first half had dripped with mutual respect until Lucas Digne, tasked with defending Marc Cucurella’s cross from the left, nodded the ball up in the air and shaped to smack it clear.’

There are just great verbs there. ‘Dripped’, ‘nodded’ the ball into the air. They really bring the moment to life.

That’s a key aspect of verbs, as you mentioned, the narrative and the storytelling. I think if we have a passage of our writing that feels a little flat, but we want to keep it in, we can go through and see if maybe we can upgrade the verbs to sharpen it and bring more clarity.

 

Dan Richards

And I think you do that. There are two sections to the book. There’s the practical, which is the first half, and there’s the poetic, which is the second half.

The first half of the book, which is divided into sections, was, for me, the most wonderful primer for so much of the detail, the sort of grammar chops that, I mean, I’m a writer, and I’m aware that for so much of my career I’ve felt like a fraud with this sort of thing because I clearly deploy techniques that I could not name, if that makes sense.

I’ve used adverbs and, looking here at page 22 of the UK edition, you’re taking me through nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles and interjections. I’ve used all of those, I’m sure, over the years, but I was unaware that together they form the nine categories of language, essentially.

And then there it was. Of course, it makes total sense, but it takes a book like yours to lay it out, not only in detail but also in an approachable way. I think for many people, their school days, if you say ‘verbs’, immediately come to mind. A lot of people in the UK think, ‘Oh dear’, because it reminds them of French grammar, where they had to conjugate all these verbs.

I genuinely think one of the reasons people are frightened by that is because they don’t know how to conjugate verbs in their own language, let alone in French, with a French teacher, in my case, who was quite demonstratively cross most of the time in, as I discovered, a very French way.

Except she cared quite a lot, which, having been to France recently, is not always the case.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the primer is incredibly useful. While it may ring bells for people, it might also feel unfamiliar because I think schooling has perhaps moved away from this kind of learning by rote or drumming in the core essentials of language. Does that make sense?

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

That does make a lot of sense. This is what I discovered in writing the book, because it was a journey for me as well. I was delighted over and over again by the things I was learning from talking with linguists, language specialists, psychologists, social scientists and so forth.

The thing about writing just about verbs is that it’s a way to see everything through a very focused lens. I think what you’re talking about, and I was crying with laughter as I was listening to you because I relate to it so much, is that when we’re in school, or at least when I was in school, we were confronted with every aspect of grammar all at once. You’re supposed to learn it all at once. All about the nine parts of speech, all about adjectives, nouns, prepositions and verbs.

What I’m trying to do in my book is keep it very focused on verbs, but set verbs like the diamond in a setting of the other parts of speech, showing how the verb operates in conjunction with those parts of speech, and in opposition to them.

The chapter on grammar is quite short, and it’s the only time I really talk about grammar, because I didn’t want to re-traumatise people, as you and I both seem to have been.

The thing about verbs, and I think one reason we tend not to think about them, as you mentioned, is that they’re intangible and invisible. A noun is something we can see. It has a physical presence, or at least it occupies a space that we understand in our minds. Here’s a pencil. We know what a pencil looks and feels like. We know what it does. Democracy and kindness are nouns too, but we use them enough that we have an idea of what they are, what they look like and what they should be.

Verbs are completely invisible. When a bird flies through the sky, we see the bird go from tree to tree. We may see some feathers fall. We may hear its song. But the flight is really the bird’s physical transit through space. We don’t actually see the flight. That’s our interpretation of it. That’s what we name this movement, this change.

We could also say it soars. We could say the bird shoots through the sky. This is the beautiful part about verbs. Because they’re invisible, and because they are our interpretation of the change we see around us, they have more to do with ourselves than with the creatures or aspects of life we’re describing.

That’s the overarching message of my book. It’s about you, the writer, and how you interpret the world.

My aim is to expand the imagination. So when you see a bird in flight, to say it flies is perfectly fine. But depending on your objectives in your writing, maybe you do want to say the bird darts, or soars, or travels like a shooting harpoon, whatever it is.

The point is to open the imagination, because we can describe action in so many ways. It really depends on how the writer themselves is interpreting that moment.

 

Dan Richards

This is putting me in mind, if I can get it, I think I have it just here. There’s a Ted Hughes book that he wrote, a little one for children, Poetry in the Making.

I love this book, and one of the reasons I love it is that he goes into exactly what you’re talking about with the flight of a crow. If I can find it, it’s incredibly apt, because what he’s talking about is the attempt to elucidate exactly what you’re saying and how it is, I suppose, ineffable.

We can gesture towards it with something like the right words, but we’re no closer, really, for having done that. It’s an impossible task. But at the same time, we’re trying. We’re trying to elucidate the ineffable in that way.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes. And to communicate from one mind to another what we are seeing, what we are feeling. Verbs, I think, can do that in such a beautiful and poetic way. They really are an artistic tool, like a paintbrush with which we can paint the world around us, with which we can add colour and feeling and shape to these things that flash before our eyes so quickly, that cannot be grasped except by trying to remember that feeling we felt when this action happened.

There’s so much that we can draw from that. It’s just a fun exercise to try to slip in different types of verbs, different words to describe ordinary actions and the extraordinary as well.

There’s no shame in ordinary, blunt, plain verbs, which I actually love. I draw a distinction between a kind of blunt verb and a fancy verb.

My personal preference is that I do love the blunt. I think there’s a lot of power in them and in how one can use them. The fancy, kind of pretentious verbs are really not what I’m talking about.

Although these are not one-size-fits-all suggestions. I want to layer in ideas in the reader’s mind rather than establish hard and fast rules.

 

Dan Richards

Well, I know one of the chapters that I liked most was the chapter about sharpening, and essentially also about stripping out this sort of thing. You talk a few times in the book about Orwell and that maxim to essentially speak plainly and use fewer words, which should absolutely be a placard above every writer’s desk, I think, to a large degree.

And again, the examples that you use with that, I mean, I don’t know if you talk about Lee Child specifically, but I love the Jack Reacher books for this because they are all sinew. There is nothing wasted.

Jack Reacher walks into rooms. That’s what he does. He says things. He leaves rooms. He picks things up. He puts things down. There is no flowery language. Maybe that’s why Lee Child, for many writers, is a writer’s writer. People really enjoy this in the same way they like Knausgaard, potentially, because he is just somebody who does what it says on the tin, to use another kind of advertising slogan. We aren’t getting anything superfluous.

And at the same time, verbs are hugely emotional. What you were just saying about this, the grappling with things and the attempts, this kind of dance of the verbs. You mentioned Woolf and Mrs Dalloway quite early on in the book, which is a beautiful thing because we’re talking about the internal, I suppose, fretting of one of the characters. That was a part of the book that I really, really loved.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes, well, I’m so glad. Virginia Woolf is, I mean, I kind of worship at the altar of Virginia Woolf, as well as George Orwell. He is absolutely a North Star in all of this.

But to your point about Jack Reacher, the other thing that he does is he’s so perceptive. He walks into a room and instantly gets what’s happening, and I love that writing style.

In fact, I have an example of how readers and writers can boil their own work down, where it seems to suit the moment, from something wordy to something very sharp and punchy. It’s by thinking about action and reaction.

If we take a sentence, a sort of Lee Child style sentence, but in a wordy form, here’s a sentence that should have more action in it than it does. I’ve deliberately made it kind of boring:

‘He had a knife in his hand and looked like he was coming for us. So we got out of there fast.’

That’s a kind of chewy, long sentence that really we should pump the drama up in a bit. If you think about action and reaction, you can really bring it to life with just two strong verbs by saying:

‘He seized a knife. We fled.’

Instead of all the wordiness, it’s just that action. He seized a knife. We got out of there fast. We boil that down to ‘we fled’.

Another example: ‘It looked like a storm was coming. So we decided to head home in a hurry.’

If we boil that down to action and reaction, we might have something like:

‘A storm loomed. We dashed home.’

You can get rid of a lot of wordiness by just focusing on the action and then the next action that flows from that.

But to your point about Virginia Woolf, she is really, obviously, I don’t have to inform anybody about how great she is, but she writes in a vastly different style from Lee Child. Her use of verbs is just amazing.

I love this example from To the Lighthouse, where the father is standing on the beach at one point: ‘He’s standing on a spit of land which the sea was slowly eating away.’

Then, a few paragraphs later, she comes back to that idea of the sea eating the land. She writes about him ‘turning from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on’.

She’s brought the landscape to life, which is another key point, something that we can do with verbs. We can bring the natural landscape into the story as a character, or as a living being that can also do some work in terms of foreshadowing or adding to a gloomy or any kind of atmosphere that we want to set.

She’s evoking the natural atmosphere here with this wonderful metaphor of the sea eating the land. That’s so resonant. It’s nibbling it away. It’s destroying something. It’s taking away what’s underfoot. It’s producing this unstable situation that is perfectly mirroring what the father in this book is experiencing.

Even in a writer whose work is so full of gorgeous words, where every sentence of Virginia Woolf’s is like a feast, you can sometimes get such a great impact from her use of verbs.

She has really changed my perspective, because a lot of her work is so interior, right? It’s about feeling. So it’s not big, vast actions like seizing a gun and running away, but she gets at the actions that those emotions work on us.

 

Dan Richards

And it strikes me that the work, I think, the book time and again comes back to these practical gems of advice. A lot of it is about how writing is rewriting, and verbs and the correct use of verbs can really help you hone and pare your writing, not just for pith, but also for sense.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Exactly. You can bring so much more clarity into your work by going over it and seeing if some honing of a sentence or a paragraph can bring about a deeper meaning. In some ways, that may be a chance to expand your writing rather than trim it down.

For example, if a writer is telling us about a character and their emotion, saying something like, ‘Nellie was afraid’, there is a moment where the meaning could become deeper with some more description and with using words, because we’re talking about an emotional state.

Emotions are actions. The word ’emotion’ is like the word ‘motion’. They both come from the Latin movere, and e-moveri is the root from which emotion comes. That means movement that’s outside of ourselves. It sort of overtakes us. It bursts out from within.

That’s what emotions do, right? They move us. They move our organs, our hearts, our blood, in various ways.

If a writer tunes into that, and here again I come back to the idea that verbs are really about us, about the individual writer, maybe a writer could come up with something like, instead of just ‘Nellie was afraid’:

‘A chill spread through Nellie’s chest and seized her heart.’

So we have the action of what fear feels like. We have that sensation. ‘Spread’ is a slow action, a chill spreading through Nellie’s chest, while ‘seized’ is sharp. You can also have a nice contrast there that gets at more drama and more feeling.

Those feelings then transmit to the reader and pull us deeper into the story, into Nellie’s situation.

 

 

Dan Richards

And that’s something else that you say, that not all writing has to be obviously understandable on first reading. A lot of verbs, you know, they have an effect on us. They work on us.

You use a wonderful example from The Great Gatsby quite early in the book, which is to do with alliteration, and this sense of ennui, this sense of almost a feeling of regret that the book has potentially ended because we’ve been in the company of these characters.

But then you unpack what the verbs themselves are doing in this very short, I think two or three lines that Fitzgerald has written right at the close of The Great Gatsby.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes, that is just a beautiful way and one of the great final lines in all of literature:

‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

I argue that it’s the verbs that give that line its power: its emotional power, its narrative power and its metaphorical power.

‘We beat on’ is like our heart beating. It’s also a drumbeat, this kind of sense that we can’t escape the rhythm of our lives. We humans are always trapped in this cycle of trying to go forward, struggling to go forward, and circling back into our pasts.

‘Borne back ceaselessly into the past’ is such a beautiful verb phrase. It almost has a religious connotation, or a majestic connotation. It’s a very elegant verb, and in that way, to me, it suggests the profound sympathy that F. Scott Fitzgerald had in seeing the human condition.

He is giving quite a severe note about it here, that we are caught in this endless cycle, but he is viewing it with such a sensitive eye that I think it soothes us, even as it’s sad. It’s sad and poignant, and we’re also sad that we’re ending this marvellous novel.

So it works on so many levels, but really the poetry of those verbs, ‘beat on’ and ‘borne back’, and the way he uses them, is something that I think we can take some inspiration from.

 

Dan Richards

Yes, I have found, if you’ll indulge me, the bit of Ted Hughes that I was thinking about earlier.

He’s describing the flight of a crow, and he says:

‘What are we to say about the crow’s flight? It’s not enough to say the crow flies purposefully or heavily or rowingly or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depths of crowness in the crow’s flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive.

But the ominous thing in the crow’s flight, the bare-faced bandit thing, the tatteredly, beggarly, gypsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the downstroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness, and the undertaker sleepness.

You could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow’s wingbeat. And a book load of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.’

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

That’s gorgeous. That is absolutely gorgeous. It’s so moving.

As I’m hearing that, I’m travelling along with all of his images. And that is really the tragedy and the nobility of writing.

To bring it back to Fitzgerald, we beat on, trying to do this hard thing. We’re trying. And my goodness, even Ted Hughes is struggling at it. Well, that puts us all in very good company.

 

Dan Richards

I think so. We’re all at that same coalface, aren’t we?

The third chapter, ‘Taking a Stand’, because we’ve just had this wonderfully active conversation about verbs, is about the passive voice. You’re also talking about the morality of verbs, and that phrase alone might give people pause or feel like a surprise, because how can verbs have, in and of themselves, a moral aspect?

But of course, as soon as you begin to think about it, of course they do. And particularly at this time, with the politics of 2026, it felt like an incredibly important conversation to have.

You elucidate that so well. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the passive and active voice, and how verbs play their parts in that.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Yes, so there’s a lot of confusion, understandably, about passive and active voice. The easiest way that I find to grasp it is that it all depends on whether the subject of your sentence is the one doing the work.

Let’s take this kind of silly example, this fun example: ‘My dog climbed Mount Everest.’

My dog is the one doing the work. My dog is the subject of the sentence. He’s the one who climbed Mount Everest. So that’s a sentence in the active voice. ‘Climbed’ is a verb in the active voice. My dog climbed.

Now, if we switch it around and say, ‘Mount Everest was climbed by my dog’, Mount Everest is now the subject of the sentence, but it didn’t do the work, right? It didn’t do the climbing. It’s just sitting there being a mountain. It’s passive.

The verb is passive. ‘Was climbed’ is a verb in the passive voice. My dog is at the end, the person, the entity that did the work, is at the end.

But that’s the problem with a sentence in the passive voice. It puts the most interesting part of the sentence, the creature, the person, the whatever it is, the institution that did the work, at the very end. So it’s there, but it’s not the focus of the sentence.

And that is what’s wrong with the common example of the passive voice: ‘Mistakes were made’, right? Even if you say, ‘Mistakes were made by the crew of the Titanic’, the focus is on the mistakes and not on the people that made them.

‘Mistakes were made by the government.’ Same thing. ‘Mistakes were made by me.’ Same thing.

It’s much clearer and more honest to simply say in the active voice, ‘I made a mistake.’ I’m here admitting it. I’m taking the responsibility. I did the mistake. I did that work, and I’m stating it.

When we turn it around to ‘mistakes were made’, we’re muddying the waters. That’s what I mean by the morality of verbs. Like any other activity, they carry honesty, accuracy, precision and truth, and the way we use them reflects these moral qualities.

So when a politician says, ‘Mistakes were made’, which is so common, we hear that all the time, we’ve heard it here in the United States regarding immigration activities and so forth, which are so fraught and often end up so tragically. The response is, ‘Mistakes were made.’

Well, that’s really evasive, isn’t it? No one takes responsibility. No one is acknowledging doing the work of making the mistake, because the subject of the sentence is mistakes and not the person who made the mistake.

 

Dan Richards

You use the example of the Australian documentary filmmaker and war reporter John Pilger in that chapter, and he says that the passive voice can be a weapon of discourse, so that those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.

It’s interesting that ‘who committed terrible attacks in the old empire’ is in the past tense, but we have people committing atrocities in the current empire as well, and it’s still being deployed.

The chapter begins with the idea that all people of empire, and all people who perpetrated things, should be going, you could argue, through this reckoning with themselves. But the passive voice is used in an example of slave labour and indentured labour to make it seem like the labour was freely given, which is quite a striking way to begin the chapter.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Right, exactly. I think I used, I think the example, let me just turn precisely so I don’t misquote myself.

Yes: ‘I was standing in an old tobacco barn in the state of Maryland, which is a southern state, technically speaking, and the description of how this tobacco was produced by this gentleman farmer included the statement: labour was provided by more than 50 slaves.’

The verb is the troubling part there: ‘was provided’. Because ‘provide’ is a positive verb. It’s to give something. Whether you’re providing funding in a marketing sense, whether you’re providing food and comfort to people in your community, whether you’re providing love to your children, the idea of slaves providing labour is, first of all, just a very wrong use of that verb, because it’s not accurate.

And then ‘labour was provided by slaves’ is also in the passive voice, so it fuzzes things over even more.

It’s often used in times of war: villages were bombed, hostages were taken. We don’t name the people doing this. We don’t name those responsible for carrying out the bombing and taking the hostages.

So it’s a very common construction that leans towards obfuscation rather than clarity.

There are many ways in which the passive voice is fine, even preferred. I give some literary examples where it’s used to great effect, and in science and technical writing, even in police reporting. You don’t often need to name the perpetrators or the researchers involved because it’s assumed. ‘Rainfall was collected over the past 10 years.’ We don’t need to know that Joe Bloggs collected the rainfall. We can assume it’s researchers and so forth.

But in many ways, it is used to muddy things. We should be aware of that, because even if it’s used with good intentions, which it generally is, it’s a good idea to go through one’s writing and try to comb out the passive voice unless it’s used with intention and with thought for a particular effect.

We can all fall into habits of turning things into the passive voice, and that just slows the speed down. It can muddy the meaning, and it can turn writing into something stale and flat, which we don’t want.

 

Dan Richards

Yeah, absolutely. You’re very good in the book at talking about, and I suppose weeding out, these deadening habits that we have.

A few times you say, why do we accept this? Because it is common. Common things happen commonly, and so it goes on. We’re in this cycle of, if not lazy, then perhaps very familiar writing.

But we have the opportunity to do something with language that is exciting and surprising. Why wouldn’t you do that if you recognised it as an opportunity? Why wouldn’t you wish to do something that was arresting in that way?

And ‘Sharpen’, chapter four, very much deals with that sort of thing. I suppose overuse and misuse are two words that are quite important for this chapter.

It literally jumped off the page to me that that was happening. Interestingly, I caught myself being ‘etcetera, etcetera’. And you unpack the idea that ‘literally’ is kind of, in terms of this, something of a war crime to use as much as we do.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Absolutely. ‘Literally’, ‘actually’, ‘usually’, ‘crucially’, ‘honestly’… they’re used as crutches, and they’re used for rhythm.

We use them all the time in verbal communication, in casual speech. I’m not going around editing because I use them all the time too. I’m not editing people’s conversations.

But actually, basically, crucially, honestly, usually, these are not necessary. They’re kind of a sign that we’ve weakened the verb so much that we feel like we have to say ‘really’.

‘I like hamburgers.’ ‘I really like hamburgers.’

Well, why isn’t ‘I like’ enough? It is. But we’re used to adding those adverbs, and in our writing, which is going to be a little bit more formal, perhaps, those are good things to go through and comb out.

See when, for example, a great verb can do the work of a boring verb plus an adverb. So, something like, ‘He walked clumsily into the coffee shop on his crutches.’

We could say ‘he stumbled’ or ‘he hobbled’ instead of ‘walked clumsily’.

There are many, many instances where we can use a perfect verb to do the work of a couple of blah words.

 

Dan Richards

Sure. Because also blah words, they beg the question, don’t they?

If I say, ‘I honestly was so surprised’, it begs the question of whether or not that was actually true. If I say, ‘This is actually interesting’, immediately the person on the other end, whether it’s written or we’re having a conversation, thinks, ‘Oh, here we go. I’m now expecting to be disappointed by this.’

I think, as you say, it’s not just bluntness. It’s just correct use of the language, really. We don’t have to upholster something that’s already comfortably doing a job.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Right, and the English language is just like a miracle. It’s so expressive, and we have so many verbs.

That’s one thing that was a great surprise and delight for me to discover when I was writing this book. I did not set out knowing that we had an enormous treasury of verbs at our disposal as writers and speakers of English that, for example, doesn’t exist in other languages.

Every language has its strengths and, of course, weaknesses. We have a lot of irregular verbs in English, which you could pull your hair out over. But we do have a lot of what linguists call verbs of manner, which show the way in which an action happens.

That’s where we can draw on ‘hobble’, ‘stumble’, ‘loom’, ‘wiggle’ and ‘seize’ instead of just ‘take’. Instead of neutral verbs, we have myriad ways to give the exact speed, shape, feel and drama of a word.

As one linguist that I quote explained, other languages like French or Spanish, for example, don’t have as many manner verbs. They would then do a little bit more description.

In English, we can say, ‘The car zigzagged up the mountain.’ In Spanish, a Spaniard might write, ‘The car travelled up the mountain in a zigzag motion.’ So it’s a little bit more wordy.

There are, of course, other glories of the French and Spanish languages, but the point is that in English we have enormous amounts of verbs that we can choose from. I encourage writers to really enjoy that, to luxuriate in what our language offers.

I am a strong advocate of the thesaurus. I have many of them around me. I’m looking at all of them. I really love this one, Actions: The Actor’s Thesaurus. It’s a great book specifically for actors who need to know the specific motivation, like, ‘What am I doing in this scene?’

What is the action that they’re doing? Instead of just, ‘I am engaging with the other character’, you can look up ‘engage’ and you get a dozen and a half other synonyms: ‘attract’, ‘allure’, ‘arrest’, ‘beguile’, ‘captivate’, and so on.

A thesaurus is a wonderful tool for writing. It is not cheating. I sometimes get that question. It’s like a dictionary. It just feeds your brain and improves your vocabulary.

The one caveat is to be aware that there are nuances between synonyms that may come up in a list of synonyms for a word, and to make sure that the word you do land on, the one you want to use, has the right meaning for your purpose.

 

Dan Richards

Of course. And I think that idea of words being this kind of miraculous mulch from which you can grow your meaning, with verbs being chief drivers amongst them, brings us on to the second part of the book, the poetic.

I have a great interest and love in the poetic because it strikes me that the strangeness of things is often where the verisimilitude lies. You can have these amazing works of photorealistic painting, and as soon as you get close, you see the strangeness in it. You see the sudden specks of blue that shouldn’t be there. But without them, the picture as a whole isn’t as real, isn’t as lifelike.

I think strangeness and poetics are one of the most important aspects of good writing.

I love that section of the book. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about chapter seven, ‘Notice’, because it deals with something very much of the moment, and hopefully not necessarily of the all-prevailing future, which is this idea that apparently AI means your book is no longer going to be of use very shortly, because AI will solve all of our creative problems, even though it itself will only ever, at best, be average because of what it is.

It is not a creative force in any way, shape or form, to anybody who understands what it is, I would say. You deal with that in, I’d say, more poetic terms than I just have.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

No, your terms are exactly right. And in fact, you know, I was talking about this book before it came out to, to an acquaintance who sort of archly said, but does anybody write anymore? And, you know, he was making a joke, but yeah, it’s the fear. Of course we have to fight back. We must fight back.

We must battle AI and, the more specific and weird we can make our writing, as you mentioned, that’s where the humanness is. You know, AI will never be able to feel what it’s like to have chill spread through its heart and seize its lungs, AI cannot feel that.

And to the strangeness that you were talking about in a painting. I love this example from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood that I come across where the main character, is describing a sitting room she’s entered, and she draws describes it as:

‘The sitting room is subdued symmetrical. It’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.’

I mean, that is a perceptive eye, a vast imagination, really digging into the theme and the atmosphere that she’s writing about to see money as crusting and hardening and creating and shaping this very environment, this room that many of us would just walk into and say, ‘Oh, look at all the fine furnishings’, but Margaret Atwood sees it as a way to deepen her theme and sharpen the picture in the mind and get at what’s really going on in the scene and how the characters have created this world, what the world is that she’s describing and the feeling of it.

It just gives you this creepiness and AI is not going to be able to do that. Maybe you could ask AI you know, write me a paragraph in the style of Margaret Atwood and it would cough up something, you know, a pale, not even imitation of this.

But you won’t get that human originality, which is what all of us carry inside, because as I say, we’re interpreting everything. I mean, I was interpreting dance when I started down this path through words, but all of us are interpreting everything every day through our thoughts, our feelings, and as writers, through words. And it’s that human interpretation, which is our weapon against AI and the blandness.

 

Dan Richards

I think so. I mean, there’s a sort of, I don’t know why this idea of universal or aggregated theft has just become so attractive to a lot of people.

I think it’s very attractive to people who aren’t themselves necessarily working in these fields and aren’t necessarily creative themselves, because they will never know what’s being lost.

But one of my favourite verbs from literature that I discovered, I think, in the writings of Geoff Dyer, which is originally by D.H. Lawrence, is ‘beshatt’, which is to be beshitten to some degree. It means, you know, this is something that is potentially passive or could be quite aggressive, something that happens to you.

And I think that is the verb that I use most often when I’m discussing AI, because it really does feel like something that is being done and being driven, another verb, to the detriment of our creative life.

And not just of writers or artists, but actually of mankind, because we are being undermined in that way and then being told that it’s for our own good.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

A hundred percent. I mean, it’s like a Margaret Atwood novel or George Orwell. These writers, decades and decades ago, saw what was happening, saw what was coming.

But yes, it’s like a strangulation. And who am I to say that we really can fight back in a material way? But I think, for the sake of our souls, we must. We must throw ourselves at the barricades and take up our creativity, continue to hone it and perfect it, spill it out on the page, mop it up into something, and then gush it out again.

We just have to keep doing it, even if it’s just for our own sakes, that we continue to create and to use words in creative and thoughtful and precise and crazy and Gertrude Stein-ish types of ways, if we choose, if we want to. To spill our souls out onto the page rather than let them be choked off.

 

Dan Richards

Sure. I think I completely agree.

And actually, the wonderfully titled ‘Cigarette Me’, which is chapter nine, is all about this, isn’t it? It’s about this idea of changing language and also this idea of experimentation.

I think joy as well, because of the joyous nature and play, the childlike wonder that language allows us access to.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Exactly. And, by the way, ‘shitify’ is one of my favourite verbs. To your point, it’s a verb that was coined by a journalist to describe what happens to websites over time.

They first come out and they’re very clear, and they’re providing information. Then the marketing drive takes over and they’re selling ads. Finally, they give themselves up to just capturing eyeballs, and they lose all value.

But yes, that’s another beautiful thing about the English language. It’s kind of controversial. When I was talking to people about working on this book about verbs, the most popular comment I got was about newly created novel verbs.

‘What do you think about using Google as a verb?’ ‘What do you think of email and text as verbs?’

Yes, these are new forms, now decades old, but verbs that creep up out of our daily habits. We’ve been doing that since words first flew out of our mouths. We’re tailoring the language to the actions that we do and the things that we have in our lives.

It’s very fun that we can make up verbs to suit things that we’re writing about. ‘I’m going to Miles Davis this tribute with a little bit of improvisation and a little bit of art,’ or a lot of art and a lot of improvisation, whatever. ‘Boy, he really Mick Jaggered that solo.’

To use words in an evocative way, that’s one of the great pleasures of language.

 

Dan Richards

And I think that sort of idea of, I suppose, what we’re talking about here is free expression. There is this kind of jazz element to verbs. You could never have jazz without that sort of flight, I suppose. That’s the way people describe it. That’s throughout the book.

I’m aware that we’re coming to the end of our conversation, so I wonder if I could just round things off a little bit here by asking you about your hopes for the book, because it’s now out in the world.

It’s in America with a wonderful Roy Lichtenstein-style cover and a slightly more muted green one over here in the UK, which I don’t know what that says about the different cultures.

But now it’s out in the world, and you’re having conversations like this, and it’s had some wonderful reviews as well. I wonder if I could finish by asking you about your hopes for the book, and also what it will inspire in its readers.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Well, I hope that the book, first of all, will find its way into schools and academies to replace traumatic experiences of grammar with a very focused one that minimises terminology and maximises expression and freedom of expression.

As you mentioned, it’s a beautiful way to encapsulate it.

I hope that it becomes something that writers turn to for the same reason. I have been so grateful for comments that I’ve heard from writers who say it’s inspiring them to write. And that’s the whole idea: to support the act of writing and to say, ‘You’ve got it all inside you.’

You and your unique perception, your view of the world, your discernment and imagination, are what I want writers to unlock through verbs, and to realise that catching a moment that flashes before us, like in that beautiful Ted Hughes poem, to at least catch some of the dimension of it, or to evoke the many dimensions of it, is such a joy and a pleasure and a gift to the rest of us.

To share one’s creativity with other people, I mean, that’s just such a gift.

And I really want to know what new stories are going to come. That’s why we turn to books. That’s why we turn to writing: to have that communication from another mind, not our own, but with a story to tell.

I really want this book to help inspire readers to look within themselves and tell us: what is it you’re feeling? What is it you’re seeing?

 

Dan Richards

Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Likewise, I really appreciate it, Dan. Thank you for your fantastic questions and for contributing some great verbs of your own. I loved our conversation. Really appreciate it.

 

Dan Richards

Thank you. Verb Your Enthusiasm is out now with Penguin in the UK. Who’s out with in the US?

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

It’s Penguin US.

 

Dan Richards

Great. Thank you ever so much.

 

Sarah L. Kaufman

Thank you.