Should You Really Cut Adverbs From Your Writing?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ari. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hi, Ari. Welcome.

Yeah, so my question is about adverbs.

So I started writing a little bit of fiction, mostly just out of a fun new hobby, and I’m kind of scouring the Internet a little bit.

And I keep coming across these do’s and don’ts of fiction writing, and most of them are pretty helpful.

But I keep finding one particular rule that kind of sticks out in a way that I wanted to seek your opinion on it.

It’s having to do with Stephen King’s advice that the road to hell is paved with adverbs.

And apparently adverbs are like this mortal sin in the fiction world.

And I wanted to know what you guys think about that.

Yeah, I’ve read that Stephen King advice about adverbs.

And he’s not the only one who says that adverbs should be avoided, right?

Oh, yeah.

A couple people are like really strong believers of it.

And, you know, I went back and I found a few that I had used and replaced them with maybe a different verb or maybe a metaphor, just rearranged the sentence a little bit.

And I did like it better.

But there’s a few that I look at and I go, well, what’s the harm in that?

But I just wanted to know what your take was on someone completely removing an entire literary device out of the writing arsenal.

Mark Twain said, I am dead to adverbs.

They cannot excite me.

Ari, I’ve seen that advice as well.

Boy, I have a lot of complicated feelings about this.

I will tell you, I have read books where it has seemed that the author took the advice to avoid adverbs and adjectives to heart.

And I got to tell you, it’s like reading a pile of cold oatmeal.

It is the worst.

Oh, you think?

Fiction, absent adjectives and adverbs, is a dreary, dry thing with no character, no voice, and no style.

No adjectives either.

Well, yeah, that’s the thing is sometimes people throw in adjectives as well as a thing to be avoided.

And here’s the problem that I have with most of this anti-adverb and adjective advice is that it overstates the problem with adverbs and adjectives.

When it should be saying use them carefully, use them sparingly, become a pro at using them.

Instead, they’re telling you don’t use them, avoid them completely, they’re bad for you.

And I think that kind of do or die, black or white injunction against adverbs and adjectives, which people also say, is making a lot of bad writers.

I think it is creating people who, instead of becoming experts in that part of the writing craft, experts in using adjectives and adverbs, they’re just like dispensing with it all together and saying, I don’t need it.

And I think that’s a mistake.

It’s like excluding the whole parts of the language.

How can that be right?

I know.

To me, it feels like in some cases it can make verbs feel sort of naked.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, okay, so a lot of the characters in the work I’m working on have wings.

There’s angels and demons, both of which fly.

I feel like there’s only so many aviary verbs I can use.

I can only use the word swoop or glide so many times before they just get kind of annoying.

So I try to substitute, maybe I’ll use an adjective or an adverb here and there.

I really like verbs like swoop and glide.

I think they’re pretty powerful, but how would you use an adverb to make that more powerful?

Maybe use swiftly or describe the movement as being rapid or just putting something else in there just so I don’t use it like maybe the fourth or fifth time in the same paragraph.

One of the problems that I have with his advice, and I love his writing.

I think he’s got a magical ear for language.

I think his book on writing is excellent.

I think this is one of the weak parts of it.

His example sentences would not pass muster with a dictionary editor like me because he’s invented them.

And this is the problem I find again and again when people rail against adverbs, that they have found the worst possible or invented the worst possible adverb uses instead of actually extracting them from the writing around them.

And they have not gone to the same trouble to find really good uses of adverbs to demonstrate what to model your own writing after.

And I think this is a failing of this particular part of his book and a lot of people who rail against adverbs.

You have to give me the positive examples as well as the negative ones and don’t invent them.

Yeah, well said.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it sounds like we’re all on the same page here.

Yeah, great.

Yeah.

Well, good.

By the way, if you want a little more about this, there’s a columnist for the London Times.

His name is Oliver Kam, K-A-M-M.

And he really spends a lot of time, he’s got a couple of great treats he’s put out too, about comparing the writing advice of writing experts to their actual own practice in their writing.

And again and again, you find, including people like Stephen King and Strunk and White, they will say not to do something and do it either in that exact sentence or in the next sentence.

And not ironically, just because they’re not noticing in their own writing that they’re committing the same supposed offense that they’re against.

Wow.

Yeah.

Hypocrites.

I will definitely look into that.

Anyway, again, I love Stephen King.

That book on writing is outstanding, but this particular part I don’t agree with.

Well, Ari, keep up the good work.

We look forward to hearing more about your writing someday.

Oh, thank you.

And I’ll keep listening to your show.

I listen to it just about every day.

Substitute music when I clean up the house.

Goes great with the vacuum.

Yes.

Thanks, Ari.

You got it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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