Hehe, thanks guys for making me not feel too out of my league here.
I'm still trying to understand some of these rules. It's not okay to use adverbs? What? Maybe I'm more out of it than I thought I was. But yeah, I totally appreciate that Neil Gaiman quote, mostly because I love his works so much and I never got the sense from them that he had to follow any set rules of writing creatively.
Stacy, I also appreciate your WoW analogy.
WoW was fun until stupid guild politics ruined it. If writing becomes "work" like that, you definitely lose something.
Yay!
I got the guts to read this!
Thanks.
Oh, the thing about adverbs - a lot of people will tell you no adverbs ever. It's part of the whole trend in modern literature to cut out as many words as possible. Some people also don't like adjectives and metaphors and similes and anything that's not straight noun verb action sentences.
It was useful for me personally to look at my adverbs and take stock of them. I think my writing improved when I started deleting adverbs and looking for more concrete ways to express what I meant.
Oh, my worst example - in Daydream, (which I did a heavy edit on it and it's much better now) I said the child Bella's voice was "high and rattly". OMG.
Oh, I should note - in someone else's story I'd fly right by that and I wouldn't notice it. But I hold myself and my own writing to extremely high standards and I need every word to be perfect - I notice things that I don't expect any of my readers to notice.
So when I did the edit, I think I changed it to something like "with a high rattle", which isn't as perfect as I want but sounds much better and even looks better than "rattly". Geez - is that even a word?
But in more general terms - I think people mean something like "She smiled happily". An editor type person would look at that and probably think "Umm, if she's smiling she's probably happy and we don't need to be told that."
"She smiled sadly", though - I think that is a case where the adverb works, because it subverts the expectation of happiness going with the smile.
I saw this whole article about this once - its big example was the song "Killing Me Softly" and how that was a great use of an adverb.
Ah-ha! Found a blog post about it - don't think it's the one I read back in the day, but it's similar.
Elbow Room for VerbsOh. Wait. I didn't read a blog post about it back in the day - I read about it in that Writing Tools book mentioned in that post. I highly recommend that book, btw.
And actually - in the intro to 10.04 the adverbs work without subverting anything.
Oooh! I'm going to quote it here.
His mother had left for work hours ago. He had promised her that he wouldn’t mope, that he wouldn’t stay in bed, that he would get outside and get some sun.
So here he was. Outside and in the sun.
He had started the herb garden last year. Something to keep him busy, keep him out of trouble. That was what his mother said. She watched him sometimes, from the kitchen window.
He put his shears and the basket she had given him on the ground and surveyed his kingdom. Pennyroyal, lemon balm, rue. He wore his rue with a difference.
He knelt in front of the lemon balm.
Melissa officinalis. The flowers stood white and open. He reached out, touched one. His fingers closed and there was a slight pop. He drew his hand back.
The flower was soft and cool on his fingertips. He held it up, turned it back and forth, saw the tiny lines in the petals and felt them separate against his skin. He opened his fingers wide and the petals drifted down to earth.
Slowly,
carefully, he picked up the shears and cut the stems.
SEE? See? This is what I learned from Robert Bloch - he had a whole paragraph of actions taken by Norman Bates, and every sentence started with "slowly". And it really did a great job at building up the horror and suspense and showing the deliberation and carefulness of Bate's movements.
So I tried it out here, because Seth and Norman Bates - got some things in common.
And I really think it worked and it sounds good and it fits with the rhythm and everything.
So yeah - I'm definitely not hardcore anti-adverb.
