Advice From A Newbie Writer 4: Adverbs are not your friends

[foolish_m0rtal]

 Adverbs are not your friends

You probably knew this, but I missed the boat, so I will talk about it to reinforce something I am coming to terms with myself. My temp editor once quoted Stephen King and said that that the road to hell is paved by adverbs. Eliminating them can make your work tighter, cleaner, and stronger. Fun drinking game. Do a Find in your story for 'ly' and take a shot for every adverb you find. When you are in the hospital getting your stomach pumped, resolve to use less adverbs.

This article actually makes a better case for it than I probably can, so I would recommend you look at that first.

We return to our faithful bad fic:

“You’ve been to Rome?” Harsh asked enviously.

I'm being lazy relying on the adverb to finish out the sentence. I'm wasting space I could be using to develop the main character. Alternately, I could just truncate the sentence at 'said.' Readers rely on the bits after the closing quotes to find out who's talking. Their main focus is on the dialogue, and so should yours. Right, but what if I want something more? How do I replace the adverb?

“You’ve been to Rome?” Harsh asked, unable to keep the hushed envy from his voice.

This tells us something about Harsh's character and is more fully developed. I am a great perpetrator of using adverbs with the word 'said,' which is something I need to work on. If you're using adverbs to bolster other sentences, consider stronger words. For instance:

 

James had naturally inherited all the family’s money and property after their father had died and didn’t seem to understand that Harsh enjoyed earning his own salary and living in the tiny professors’ quarters.

We have been told in a previous sentence that James is Matthias's elder brother, and the readers already know the story is set in steampunk Victorian Britannia, so the elder brother inheriting is something that already comes with the territory. Using 'naturally' does not help anything. If anything, it just adds another word to a sentence that doesn't need it. (This is me being a 'taker-outer.')
 

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Comments

[foolish-m0rtal.livejournal.com]

Dude, feel free to comment. Like I said in the beginning, I'm a n00b. I've been writing for nine years, and I'm only satisfied with the last three or four years of that. I have a different style, and I've grown up with different influences. I acknowledged that other people probably have other views, more experience, and opposite opinions.

Please comment if you have something different to say. I welcome it.