As writers of speculative fiction our job is to tell a story that transports the reader to a new and exciting place. To accomplish this, we must establish a relationship of trust and, more exigently, arouse the reader’s curiosity as to what will happen next.

As writers, we have only one tool to accomplish this: language.

In his book, The Death of Metaphor, Desmond Egan-- one of Ireland’s greatest contemporary poets-- laments the decline of English prose, decrying it as ‘decadent and lazy’. Egan points his finger directly at the tendency of modern writers to replace transitive verbs with the verb ‘to be’ as the greatest cause of this decline.