Weekly out-of-character thread

Read this paragraph:

"They rode through regions of particolored stone, upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock, reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles. And stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm."

This has more readable grammar than the original (which is just a single, long sentence), but the point is that these verbs are all active verbs. Upthrust, reared, curved back upon themselves, broken, stones the lightning had clove open, exploding, etc.

I can't find any author who writes with such language. It works so well. Even if you write with normal vocabulary, it's so much better 99% of the time to write with active verbs. Here's an example of the same paragraph with more 'normal' language:

"They rode through regions of multi-colored stone, jaggedly cut and shelves of rock formed from layers of cooled lava, raised in faults and folds bent back on themselves and broken off like stumps of large stone tree trunks. And stones that had been split open by lightning, with steam emanating from cracks formed in some past storm."

It doesn't quite hit the same. I think I'll apply this practice to my own writing. Nice to be above the crowd.

/r/writingcirclejerk Thread