After a three-hour bike ride up Mt. Tam, down through Mill Valley, and around the winding backroads of Tiburon, I came home, arms raised in triumph and said, “You should have seen me climb that hill!”

My eight-year-old son studied me. “You’re flexing, Mom.”

Indeed. He, too, was flexing, tossing out a phrase he’s heard his teenage brother repeatedly roll off his tongue. Regardless, what a fantastic way to freshen up the tired and weathered comment, “You’re bragging.”

Yes, I was flexing, showing off my sweaty accomplishment like pulling up my sleeve to reveal the blip of my bicep.

Gertrude Stein once lamented that we are in the “period of late language,” with so many turns of phrases no longer conveying emotion but only a sign or a whimper of an emotional state. “He had an ax to grind” no longer makes the reader feel anything other than the writer’s laziness. If done well, though, metaphors are the perfect antidote to the period of late language, transporting the reader from bystander to participant in the emotion on the page.

More specifically, the superpower of metaphors can be injected into your verbs. We already do this when we think and speak. In their classic book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Anderson explain how metaphor is the fundamental mechanism for structuring our understanding of experience. The use of verb metaphors is so common in our speech and thought that we’ve become immune. Someone says, “The car just flew through the stoplight,” and we implicitly understand that the car did not literally take to the air like an airplane, but went fast.

I recently re-read Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy to remind me what verb metaphors can do. When the slim novel was first published in 1991, nearly all the reviews praised the prose—“beautiful,” “the writing, a miracle in itself,” “the writing takes your breath away.”

In the novel, it’s 1906 and seventeen-year-old Mariette Baptiste, a “too pretty postulant,” joins the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent. As all nuns do, she marries Jesus, but her marriage is not only a joining of the mind but the body. In the convent, she becomes the object of devotion and envy when the stigmata paint her feet and palms.

Here’s Mariette getting dressed in the morning, prior to joining the convent.

She then stands and unties the strings at her neck so that the pink satin seeps onto a green Chinese carpet that is as plush as grass.

Seep: to ooze, drip, trickle. The reader compares satin to water. It’s an efficient, compressed way to convey description and, at the same time, engage the reader. “Simply stated,” says Stephen Dobyns in Best Words Best Order, “every metaphor is a riddle, since, if the object is clear, the reader always asks how is A like B.” The questioning is automatic.

“Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality,” writes James Wood in How Fiction Works. “It is the entire imaginative process in one move… Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.”

Here are more from Mariette in Ecstasy:

She haunts her milk-white skin with her hands.

Yards away the still woods drowse with insect whine and the chirr of cicadas.

In the last example, the verb “drowse,” (to be half-asleep) is usually associated with humans, so now we are in the territory of personification, in which a thing, idea, or animal is given human attributes. Hansen has done his work as a writer; the world brims with novelty and the reader is fully engaged. “The more the metaphor involves the entire mind, the greater its chance of success,” writes Dobyns.

In this novel, Hansen delivers handfuls of verb metaphors, creating pages of personification:

Hundreds of yellow butterflies are scheming through the fields and alighting on their gray habits.

Horseflies are alighting and tasting the skins, or tracing signatures in the hot air.   

Tree branches nod and subside.

Everything slants up into hillsides of green fir and cedar and the gray-blue haze that slurs the horizon.

Sister Genevieve is still huffing breathlessly as she shoos pigeons that are discussing their presence and waddling along the rafters.

The novelty can intensify with the use of anthimeria, or using one part of speech for another part, such as a noun for a verb. In this passage, Sister Anne wakes up the eighty-year-old Reverend Henri Marriott and tells him he has High Mass today and he should shave.

She is just four years a widow. She wifes him out of habit.

Hansen takes the noun “wife” and turns it into a verb. I’ve never forgotten that sentence or what anthimeria can do. It’s a simple sentence, yet full of meaning. Sister Ann functions as his spouse, though legally she is not, doing all the things a wife might do, taking care of him, including getting him out of bed and reminding him to shave. But look at how many words it took me to say what Hansen accomplished in one. The word “wifes” also provides you with an image, which is far more memorable than a string of explanatory words.

The French poet Mallarme said that to name is to destroy and to suggest is to create. In a flash, as quick as one word, a verb metaphor crafts a relationship between two parts, inviting the reader into the story to make the connection. Go ahead and create little explosions of fiction. Go ahead and flex.