Elements of Wild Style: Adverbs and Adjectives.

I’d figure I’d start off with the “greatest hits” of things I see new writers do that vex editors. The all the time "greatest hit," I see is adverbs and adjectives and the overuse of them. They are the ink of the poison pen. Edit them out, do it and you're left with meat and potato noun and verbs sentences that go bang.

What are Adjectives?

An adjective is a word that describes a thing. They shortcut using a solid description. I like the word “beautiful,” I overuse it, but it was overused --even before I overused it. Now, I kill it out of my writing, but let me show you why. This is how adjectives weaken sentences:

With her beautiful face and body, she seduced me.

Yeah, I’m preying on a weak sentence here, but I’m trying to make a point. Seduced, without beauty:

Her hazel eyes took you to a movie where she was the star. With her runway model face, porn star body, and the elegance of a 1950’s matinée ingénue, she had me.

Adjectives allude to “lazy writing.” When you describe settings or characters or even the possessions of your characters using adjectives you are short-changing the reader.

Barry's 1970 Hemi Cuda was in glorious condition.

Okay, you get the idea that Barry’s car is in “glorious condition,” but above we don’t know about Barry or his passion for the vehicle because of that "glorious" adjective, check it:

Barry simonized the 1970 Hemi Cuda’s custom paint job to a shine of flowing reflections.

Here you got Barry taking the time to polish the car to a shine vs. it looking "glorious" whatever that means. Adjectives suck the punch out of your writing. If you are struggling to figure out if something is an adjective here are some helpers:

They interact with nouns. They “describe a thing” and while you might be thinking “minimal” or “fewer words” you’re right, but not in a good way. Adjectives steal the opportunity for poetry in your prose and make you look lazy as a writer. Lazy writers defend this stuff tooth and nail.

Use a simile, metaphor, or any kind of analogy, you know, write.

Adjectives are the Common Cold and Adverbs are Ebola 

Adverbs will fuck you in the ass. Some editors reject on the basis of adverbs sight on seen. Is this censorship? Is this bigotry? Is this fair? Is this a hindrance to your creativity?

Before whining about the elements of your style think about what writing is. Writing is taking ideas and giving them phonetic symbols others can understand. What happens when the idea lacks clarity? Or the idea is exaggerated? Adverbs are words that fuck with clarity and proportion. They are defined as “a word or phrase that modifies verbs, adjectives, other adverbs --and suck beyond sucking” and they set you up for a one-way ticket to rejection town. 

A shitty sentence with just an adjective :

The fish was big.

The same sentence made shittier with an adverb:

The fish was very big.

Why is this shittier? Because there is no idea of proportion and there is no clarity to the exaggerated “big” done by the “very.” The fish could be very big for a minnow. Who the fuck knows? And then what is big for a minnow? To be clear, if we make our fish into minnows, these two sentences still suck:

The minnow was big. 

The minnow was very big.

But…

The minnow stretched the length of Barry's Hemi Cuda.

There is a string of nouns letting you know how big your bait fish is.

“Very” is not your common POS adverb, most adverbs end in “ly.” Starting out, many of us are guilty of some shit like this –and I know my horror writer friends have written sentences like this in their first stories:*

He walked quietly, softly, gently touching his feet to the floor.

In college English classes all over the US, professors train editor wannabes to replace all words ending in “ly” with the adverb shittly. This is not just a conspiracy theory, I may have dropped out of those classes, but I was there for that. I can tell you, this is real or at least a real conspiracy theory. The only thing an editor worth their salt is going to read when they see a sentence like the one above is:

He walked shittly, shittly, shittly touching his feet to the floor.

Then the editor will reject you for writing a sentence using shittly three times in a row. The reality is adverbs undo impact, and turn lean sentences into melodramatic, redundant crap-o-la:

He brooded.

          Vs.

He anxiously brooded.

Brood means to agonize, worry, fret, etc. Anxious means the same thing, tagging a “ly” at the end of "anxious " and sticking it in front of "brooded" makes the reader do twice the work for the same payoff. And that is Writing Shittly 101 for you.

It’s redundant, and not in the “setting a minimalist rhythm” form of redundancy, but the boring kind of redundancy. Even if you think you're J.D. Salinger and being slick like this:

Maxine uncrossed and crossed her legs, a threatening gesture that filled Harrison with the need to act obsequiously. This earned him penalty points from her parents who could only quietly love their daughter on very sophisticated terms. They all had way too much wine.

Now Mr. I-Hate-Genre-Fiction who thought his story about college kids at home from Choate for a weekend with the alcoholics would get published in “The Atlantic” or “The New Yorker,”  let me show what the editor reads:

Maxine uncrossed and crossed her legs, a threatening gesture that filled Harrison with the need to act shittly. This earned him penalty points from her parents who could shittly shittly love their daughter on shittly sophisticated terms. They all had way shittly much wine.

Use your word processor's search feature for "ly" and get that shit out of your writing, then google “adverbs that don’t end in ly,” get a list of those and get rid of them, replace them, do whatever you need to, but no more writing shittly. Okay? 

I like you and want better for you. 

After all my hateful propaganda toward adverbs and adjectives, guess what? There is a time and place for them. Which is in dialogue.

“Dude, he’s really huge.”
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“One of his gigantically fat legs is bigger then your whole body.”
“At least I can quickly outrun him and maybe wear him down.” She cocked her head.
“Only if he chases you.”

You still don’t want to go crazy with them like I did above. Editors have been beaten and traumatized to hate adverbs and adjectives, and when you see how they weaken writing it's kind of hard not to hate them as a writer. One place where adverbs do work is in children’s dialogue.

“So Denis, how big was the dinosaur?”
“He was very very big.”

Another place some of this can be skirted is in 1^st person narrative, but you have to be careful if you are going to use adverbs there, adjectives are okay-ish, but you’re still short-changing the reader. This is a risk that I wouldn’t recommend. I get it, not everyone in the world is a poet, and if your characters aren’t poets maybe their narrative should at least reflect that? My best answer is to use what your character relates to for metaphors and analogy and the poetry of your prose doesn’t have to be “pretty,” or exist even. With adverbs, adjectives, and simple:

I met Drake at the dog track he was a really sleazy guy.

This is with no “poetry” to it, but it shows you everything you need to know about Drake:

I met Drake at the dog track. He wore a white suit, black greased back hair and five gold chains over his dollar bill patterened tie. He picked at his teeth with his fingernail.

With just a little bit of “spin” on it:

When I met Drake, he was picking his teeth with his pinky fingernail. He donned the garb native to the dog track. His duck suit contrasted his slicked back hair glinting in the sun as did his gold chains resting over his dollar bill patterned tie. He might not be the chief, but this was his tribe.

Even when writing in 1^st person, I wouldn’t go apeshit with adverbs and adjectives, in most writing books they say something like 1 adverb for every 5,000 words of non-dialogue. I don’t know how a number like that is made up, but I’d roll with it. Even in dialogue, adverbs and adjectives don’t always help. If you’re writing a horror story which of these is “scary?”

“Get the fuck out of the water. I see a really big minnow.”

Or:

“Get the fuck out of the water. I see a minnow the size of a car.”

Granted both examples are stiff, but I’d be afraid of the fifteen-foot-long minnow over the seven-inch minnow, but that’s just me.

On a final note: Adjectives and adverbs are imprecise and fuzzy and allow for interpretation and loopholes. Watch a modern politician's speech and count the number of times they use them. The bigger the politicians the more they use them.

More stuff that might help you:

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

^ Won’t get adjectives but it will get adverbs. When in doubt:

http://parts-of-speech.info/

*A simile is when you use “like” or “as.” “His breath was like chemical warfare."
** I know because I did.