I really love Arthur's bloody jacket.
But I don't know what I think about the word really. I was talking about adverbs with a writer pal and it's true, they're troubling at times. The general consensus seems to be adverbs should be avoided. Stephen King, who actually gives a lot of practical advice in his book "On Writing," feels they're a sign of weakness. If a writer chooses a verb well enough, they're not needed.
(For anyone wondering, an adverb is like a wingman for an adjective or a verb. It brags about the word it's with. The monkey king shrieked loudly. Those fake tits are crazy big. There's a cult classic on adverbs. "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly get your Adverbs Here.")
In Willa Cather's great essay, The Novel Demeuble, she says, "How wonderful if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theater, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended, leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little - for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude."
Okay, but isn't a Greek stage built specifically for a Greek stage? Should we really be importing absolute aesthetics? Plus, you've got Capote and Faulkner and Liberace to factor in, who all used ample adjectives, adverbs and gold gilding to create their own brand of beauty. Is one style more beautiful than another or are they just different? Some people abhor flowery writing and others seek it out. Cather's idea of cutting back adverbs is poetic, but is it more poetic than her use of the adverb "grimly" here?
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his eyes.
- Willa Cather, "The Sculptors Funeral."I'm thinking that adverbs aren't clear-cut villains, but more like chili peppers. Handle them carefully. Use them sparingly. A few go a long way and too many make you sick. Some people prefer to avoid them altogether. Still, banning them altogether seems like you'd be throwing out a specific spice that works very well - when it works.
The problem lies perhaps in an adverbs sincerity. Maybe saying something is "really disgusting," seems like a sales pitch. As though the adverb is nodding it's head and pointing next door and saying, "you're gonna wanna listen to this." Most genuine reading experiences seem to occur when the reader is personally invested. they've made up their own mind about whats disgusting.
My greatest challenge in avoiding adverbs seems to come when I want to describe how someone "said" something. As in Cather's line "...said the lawyer grimly..." It's one of the greatest challenges of writing, conveying the delicate tone, the air, the facial expression that filters the whole experience. The difference between:
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer nervously, and closed his eyes.
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer angrily, and closed his eyes.
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer jokingly, and closed his eyes.
This has led me to research "speech qualifiers," or "speech tags." or "words to use instead of said." I keep a big Word document with lists of options like these. Do you guys use adverbs in your writing?
