Went Is a Plot Twist: In Praise of Verbs That Won’t Behave

English grammar has a dirty little secret: it is full of fossils. The irregular verb is not an error, a lapse or a failure of educational standards. It is a scar left by centuries of language doing exactly what experimental writers do—borrowing, pinching, mutating and refusing to follow the memo. ‘Go, went, gone’ is not a tidier story than ‘walk, walked, walked’. It is a stranger one.

The past tense is a crime scene

Take two sentences. ‘She walked to the station.’ ‘She went to the station.’ The first is a travel update. The second is a hole in the shape of a woman. Walked tells you the manner, the machinery, the plausible route. Went withholds. Went is the verb equivalent of a witness who says they ‘stepped out’ and leaves the room.

This is not just poetic whimsy. Went is a historical accident: it began life as the past tense of wend, then squatted in the paradigm of go and never left. Linguists call this suppletion, which sounds like something that should be treated with antibiotics. In practice it means the most common verbs in English are also the most irregular. Be, have, do, go, say, see, take, come: the verbs we cannot avoid are the ones that refuse to behave. The regular verb is a civil servant in a beige cardigan. The irregular verb is the colleague who vanishes at lunch and returns with a tattoo and a plot.

Consider be. I am, you are, she is, we were, they have been. Identity is the most irregular verb of the lot. No wonder experimental fiction keeps prodding it.

What this has to do with plot

Plot is not a sequence of events; it is a sequence of refusals. A character wants something, the sentence blocks them, the tense shifts under their feet, the object goes missing. If every verb conjugated politely, every sentence would arrive on time and every story would be a rail replacement bus.

Experimental fiction thrives on the moment grammar slips. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, first published in 1969, came in a box of loose chapters; the reader shuffles the order and the book becomes a went-shaped structure—unruly, contingent, refusing to settle. Ann Quin’s Berg, from 1964, is full of sentences whose verbs seem to have misplaced their objects; the prose does not walk you through a scene so much as leave you standing in it. Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between, published in 1968, puts narrative grammar itself in transit, with puns and tense shifts doing the work of a plot. Contemporary UK writers such as Eley Williams and Isabel Waidner carry the same instinct: language is not a clear window but a room with a trapdoor.

The lesson is not that irregular verbs are automatically experimental. It is that irregularity is information. When a verb breaks the pattern, the reader’s ear asks why. That question is a hook. ‘She has gone’ is not the same as ‘she went’. ‘She had gone’ is not the same as either. Each one hides a different body. Each one makes a different accusation.

Three exercises for badly behaved sentences

First, conjugate like a child. Write a page in which a narrator uses ‘I goed’, ‘she runned’, ‘they buyed’. Do not correct it. Ask what the error knows. Child grammar is not failed adult grammar; it is rule-making in public. Experimental voice often works the same way.

Second, remove the regular verbs. Write a 200-word scene using only irregular past-tense verbs. No walked, no looked, no nodded. You will find yourself reaching for went, came, saw, took, gave, left, stood, spoke. The scene will become stranger, faster, more elliptical. It may also become melodramatic, which is fine; melodrama is just plot with its sleeves rolled up.

Third, perform a tense autopsy. Write the same event three ways: simple past, present perfect, past perfect. ‘She left.’ ‘She has left.’ ‘She had left.’ Note what each sentence refuses to say. Then put all three on the page without explanation. That is not confusion; that is choreography.

The sentence that won’t conjugate

The most interesting sentences refuse to conjugate politely. They limp, double back, change tense mid-air, leave the object in the laundrette. This is not a licence for sludge. It is a craft argument: the irregular sentence makes the reader conscious of the machinery, and consciousness is where experimental fiction lives.

So next time a grammar checker underlines ‘went’ in green, thank it for its concern and carry on. The sentence is not broken. It is plotting.