Adding Flavor to "Vanilla Verbs"

Today in St. Peters, MO: Sunny, high 70 degrees, but it's was nippy this morning.

Over the weekend about two dozen members of Saturday Writers , whose motto is" "Writers encouraging writers," got a mental workout when board members Tricia Sanders and Amy Harke-Moore put on their "Exercising Your Writing Muscles" workshop. As part of her presentation, Tricia Sanders discussed how writers should experiment to add some flavor to their "Vanilla Verbs." She not only talked, she gave examples--and shared several helpful resources for writer.

One wowser resource is 1000 Verbs to Write By from Deanna Carlyle. If you click on the link, you will find a list of over a thousand action verbs compiled by Carlyle. Want to spice up your manuscript to describe how a character walks or runs? How about: lumbered, plodded, scurried sidled. Want to get rid of some of those pesky passive verbs such as was or were? Try substituting with some of these lively verbs: stood, sat, took up, perched, lay, hung.

Tricia and Amy did a fantastic job with the workshop! To find the list of resources Tricia discussed during the "Exercising Your Writing Muscles" workshop, visit the http://www.saturdaywriters.org/ website.