When I first started doing the One Year
Adventure Novel curriculum, I was flabbergasted to see that Mr. S
(wise as he was) wouldn't let me use adverbs and adjectives – at
least, not many of them.
As time has passed, I've come to
understand why it's not advisable to use them. Though it seems at
first to be a direct attack against description, avoiding the two
really is a good way to strengthen your novel.
As a quick review, adverbs are words
that modify verbs, and adjectives modify nouns. Thus, in the
green fish, “green” is the
adjective. It modifies the noun; it makes the fish green. In he
laughed sarcastically,
sarcastically is the adverb; it modifies the laugh, making it a
sarcastic laugh.
So why shouldn't you use them?
Because,
while they are useful, they often clutter prose. The two things that
drive your prose are your verbs and your nouns. Those must be as
good
as they can be. Too often we rely on adverbs and adjectives to help
“move” our prose along, making the verbs and nouns weak.
Take these two examples:
The
colorful bird flew gracefully downwards.
The
brown-striped cat walked
stealthily down the hall.
Both
of these examples rely on both adjectives and adverbs to make the
prose move. That makes them a prime example of what not
to do.
I said earlier that nouns and adverbs drive your prose. Let's strip
these two sentences of everything except those “driving” forces.
The bird flew
downwards.
The cat walked
down the hall.
Not too impressive, are they? That's because they relied on their
modifiers to get them moving. They're rather dull and unspecific.
So
how do we fix it? We start by changing the verbs and nouns
themselves, compacting the most specific information as possible into
one word. Let's change colorful bird
into parrot, and
brown-striped cat
into tabby. Not only
does it condense prose, but in the case of the first sentence, it
makes the description more
specific, not less!
Now
that we've dealt with the adjectives, take a look at the adverbs.
Flew gracefully can
be changed to glided
– again, this gives more
information than the original sentence – and walked
stealthily can be changed to
snaked. (This isn't
the only word you could use, however. Slunk, padded,
and ghosted are all
words that could have been used as well.)
All
right, so we've strengthened our nouns and verbs and gotten rid of
the adjectives, let's put everything back into our “stripped”
sentences.
The parrot
glided downwards.
The tabby snaked
down the hall.
You
can see that the prose is now much
more vivid and descriptive than our original examples. And there
isn't a single adverb or adjective!
Getting rid of adjectives and adverbs helps your prose immensely.
Normally they cloak weak verbs and nouns, but once those are stripped
away, the weaknesses are evident to see and can be modified
accordingly. (Pun intended. Or was that pun too vague for anyone to
get it?)
Before
I move on, I must note one exception to this rule: the word “said”.
As I've said before, “said” is essentially invisible as a
dialogue tag. No one notices it when the author writes “he said”
simply because it's so common. Dialogue tags are merely a means to
an end; they indicate who is speaking. Now, if you wrote
“expostulated” or “interjected” as a dialogue tag, it tends
to jerk your reader out of the dialogue.
Thus,
rather than use a “specific” dialogue tag, I often use “said
[adverb]”. He said dryly
is more interesting and less noticeable (in my own humble opinion)
than he deadpanned,
even though the latter is more specific.
Now, there is one problem that may come out of this: a paranoid
extermination of adverbs and adjectives altogether. This is one
thing I've witnessed myself. In fact, when I let a OYANer critique
my stuff, I give this disclaimer: “All of those adverbs are there
on purpose.”
Because, as long as your verbs and nouns are strong, adverbs and
adjectives can strengthen your prose even more.
Take
this passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, for
instance.
“The
wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now—images
of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable
gift of noble and lofty expression.”
Take
a look at those verbs and nouns: haunted, images,
revolving, gift, expression.
Those are powerful, specific words. But look what happens when you
take out all of the adverbs and adjectives.
The wastes of
his brain were haunted by images now—images of wealth and fame
revolving round his gift of expression.
Not
half as powerful, is it? The adjectives as well as the nouns,
adverbs as well as the verbs; they were all powerful. Weary,
shadowy, obsequiously, unextinguishable, noble, lofty;
those modifiers made the prose sweeping.
This
illustrates my final point: adverbs and adjectives can actually help
prose when used right. That's why wholesale extermination of
modifiers can be detrimental to your novel.
In
fact, you could say that the entire point of this post is this:
adverbs and adjectives, when used with a strong verb or
noun, strengthen the prose; but when used with a weak verb or noun,
they clutter the prose.
The
key is to make sure your central, essential words – your nouns and
adverbs – are powerhouses. Once
you've achieved that, your prose will be a powerhouse too – and
sweep your reader off of their feet.
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