Karen GoatKeeper's Blog - Posts Tagged "verbs"

Subjects and adjectives are important parts of a sentence. So are the verbs.
Take a look at a paragraph in your latest book and make all the sentences simple past tense. That means no helping verbs allowed.
We do use past tense a lot in writing books but not all the time. When all the sentences are in simple past, they become choppy. Past tense locks events into the past.
Helping verbs modify that time frame in the sentence. Consider how they change this sentence:
Joe ran across the field.
Joe was running across the field.
Joe had run across the field.
Joe did run across the field.
Joe can run across the field.
Each sentence seems much the same until you think about it. Then each becomes a different story. Which one do you want to write? What new plot ideas does each open up?
Helping verbs can do the same for present and future tenses.
Grammar seems so boring in school. Taking another look at it as an author seems a waste of time once you've got a book or two done.
Then again, look at all those possible story ideas.