Breslin made a linguistic point, too. Verbs signify action. And, if you’re going to keep a story moving, you’ll need lots of good ones. That seems like a simple enough order. But far too many would-be narrative writers dilute their impact with flabby verbs and weak sentence syntax. A writer who doesn’t know his verbs can turn the most dramatic events into a snooze. A journalist who documented the long struggle of a wounded soldier described the attack that shattered his body this way:
