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the verb to be.
    All verbs, in any tense, fit into one of those three baskets.
    News writers reach often for the simple active verb. Consider this New York Times lead by Carlotta Gall on the suicidal desperation of Afghan women:
    Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.
    Both Fleming and Gall use active verbs to power their narratives, but notice an important difference between them. While Fleming uses the past tense to narrate his adventure, Gall prefers the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting — right now — beside the poor woman in her grief.
    Both Fleming and Gall avoid verb qualifiers that attach themselves to standard prose like barnacles to the hull of a ship:
    Scrape away these crustaceans during revision, and the ship of your prose will glide toward meaning with speed and grace.
    The earnest writer can overuse a writing tool. If you shoot up your verbs with steroids, you risk creating an effect that poet Donald Hall derides as "false color," the stuff of adventure magazines and romance novels. Temperance controls the impulse to overwrite.
    In The Joy Luck Club, novelist Amy Tan exercises exquisite control, using strong verbs to depict the authentic color of emotional truth:
    And in my memory I can still feel the hope that beat in me that night. I clung to this hope, day after day, night after night, year after year. I would watch my mother lying in her bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa. And yet I knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them. I still heard Mrs. Sorci and Teresa having terrible fights, but I saw something else.... I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable.
    Ian Fleming's verbs describe external action and adventure; Amy Tan's verbs capture internal action and emotion. But action can also be intellectual, in the force and power of an argument, as Albert Camus demonstrates in The Rebel:
    The metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe.
    Notice that even with all the active verbs in that passage, Camus does not pass on the passive when he needs it ("he is frustrated"), which brings us to the next tool.
    WORKSHOP
    1. Verbs fall into three categories: active, passive, and forms of the verb to be. Review your writing and circle verb forms with a pencil. In the margins, categorize each verb.
    2. Convert passive and to be verbs into the active. For example, "It was her observation that" can become "She observed."
    3. In your own work and in the newspaper, search for verb qualifiers and see what happens when you cut them.
    4. Experiment with both voice and tense. Find a passage you have written in the active voice and in the past tense. Change the verbs to the present tense and consider the effect. Does it seem more immediate?
    5.I described three uses of the active voice: to create outward action, to express inner or emotional action, and to energize an argument. Look for examples of all three in your reading and for opportunities to use them in your writing.
    So the gold standard for writing advice is this: use active verbs. Those three words have been uttered in countless writing workshops with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?
    Check out that last paragraph. In the first clause, I use a form of the verb to be, in this case "is." In the next sentence, I use the passive voice: "have been uttered." In the final sentence, I resort