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As a writer, I have several writing defects that plague my work. The worst and most annoying is the adverb. As a novice author, I seemed to use more adverbs than I did nouns. I was a novice, what did I know.
With experience, I have learned that, at least for me, the adverb is a crutch for my laziness and an example of shoddy writing. I thought that I was intentionally leaving the explanation more open to the reader’s interpretation. No, I was just not taking the time to fully develop my character or my scene.
I didn’t realize that every adverb closes off an opportunity to write a great deal more of my story. That is, what was I trying to say or imply by the insertion of the adverb? I realized that instead of using the adverb, I should explain, ‘why’ the adverb, ‘what’ the adverb, or ‘who’ the adverb. One of two answers resulted from the question. One, if I couldn’t think of anything that had gone unsaid, I deleted the superfluous adverb. Two, if I could think of other things that I needed to say, I wrote them and then deleted the adverb. For example, if I wrote that the main character performed an act ‘quickly,’ I wondered why he needed to do it quickly. I looked for ways to show that it was quickly. Why did he do it quickly? What would have been the result if he hadn’t done it quickly? There emerged a whole new dynamic for the scene by not falling back on the adverb as a crutch.
I also realized that this didn’t stifle the reader’s imagination when reading the scene. No matter how much explanation I used, there was always room for the reader to imagine more. I found that when I gave the expanded section to my beta readers, they still imagined more in their own special way. The act of explaining more, showing more didn’t detract from their individual experiences.
The best example that I’ve found of this phenomenon was in E.L Irwin’s novel Lost and Found. In one passage, Irwin is describing a male character’s hands. I don’t have the exact wording available but this is a close approximation. She could have said that she admired his manly hands. She didn’t. She said that she admired his hands. She then spent two paragraphs describing what made the hands manly to her character. What did her character see in the traits of the man’s hands? What insights about the main character did her opinion of the hands reveal? Irwin revealed a great deal of the story and the main character just describing a man’s hands. It was superb.
Now, I used the term ‘reveal’ a moment ago. I view these extra descriptions used to replace adverbs as a great place to embed a story’s reveals. Reveals are something that the reader should know about a character before it becomes necessary for the reader to know it. Indiana Jones is afraid of the snake in the plane at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He says, ‘I hate snakes.’ Later in the movie, the director doesn’t have to break a fast moving scene to explain why Indiana Jones reacts the way he does wading through a sea of snakes to get to the ark.
These days, I have a writing policy about adverbs. I only allow them in a character dialog. In real life, we all use adverbs when we talk to convey those parts of our messages that are inherently understood by most people and don’t need more explanation. We talk that way. However, in telling my stories, I only allow three or fewer adverbs in a given manuscript. Even then, I have a solid reason for leaving the adverb in the passage. I sweat over it.
As a reader, see what adverbs seem to do in your readings. Imagine what more the author could have told instead of the using the adverb. For me, I have tried to eliminate adverbs in my writing. I even periodically perform a text search for the ‘ly ‘ structure and the word very. I want my stories to have the added definition.
My name is Jeff Bailey. I write nuclear thrillers for a reason, I’ve worked in nuclear related industries, from nuclear weapons to nuclear research, for fifty years. Deer Hawk Publications released my first book, The Defect in June of 2016. In The Defect, I tell the story of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant and why the government covered it up. The Defect is based on true events. Deer Hawk Publications is scheduled to release I’m a Marine in the summer of 2017. I’m a Marine is about a female aviation firefighter in the U.S. Marines who witnesses the murder of two M.P.s. She decides that it is her duty to stop them. Keep in mind that I write nuclear thrillers. The Chilcoat Project, to be released in spring of 2018, is about the theft of nuclear weapons secrets from a national laboratory. The Chilcoat Project is also based on true events. My current project, Wine Country, is based on the true story of the Radioactive Boy Scout, but with a more sinister twist.
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