In which case, if one were to eliminate the usage of verbs entirely, no one would be able to tell if they were a horrible writer! As my father was once rather fond of saying: "If you can't outsmart them, dazzle them with your stupidity!"
I believe the actual saying is, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." And like nearly all the Tannen clan, I hate manure.
Then again, as Abe Lincoln is credited with saying: "Far better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you a fool than to open it and let them know for sure."
This has actually got me interested. I don't believe I'd ever right a novel without verbs, but I'm curious about what it's like. -googles-
imo, this is akin to writing entirely in second person, or as one member did, with nothing but imperatives... it can be done, but who'd want to pay good money to read it?... or even want to bother reading it for free?... not i, said ducky-lucky!
I'd give it a read, it seems kind of interesting to me. It's clearly a one-off experiment, I don't see any harm in trying to be a bit different.
What's wrong with the second person? If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino is a great novel.
Im no expert, but doesn't the english language structured differently then french? it may be easier to follow in french but looses its flow in translation. again, i failed each attempted at french class and therefore do not hold anything I just said as fact.
I suppose if you have nothing worthwhile to say, you may as well say it in a clumsey, convoluted way. It's actually a technique called 'constrained writing' in which some arbitrary boundary is put on the work. It happens all the time in poetry. One of the most famous constrained novels is: Gadsby: A Novel of Over 50,000 Words Without using the Letter "E". That one was self published in 1939 by Ernest Vincent Wright and is considered a collectors item.
verbs are one of the most important if not the most important things that make your writing comfortable to read. picking the best verbs to fit specific situations and scenarios is crucial.
I'm currently a creative writing major and am taking a class called 'Radical Writing.' Your Thaler book is one we study and there is an entire world of radical fiction and non-fiction out there. Some writers play with form and structure, others use constraints (like Thaler) and some completely ignore grammar. You can write any way you want but be mindful that if you're using a constraint it could hinder the progression of a great story and feel unnatural to the reader. Deliberately trying to force it wouldn't be useful.
He probably did it for fun. I can imagine trying goofy stuff like that just to have fun and maybe, at the end, he thought it was good enough to publish. I wouldn't try it, though.
I've done it as a writing exercise -- just a passage, not a novel. It can create an out-of-time feeling, but it's hard to read for long. The opening of Dickens' Bleak House does have verbs but no finite verbs.
