A case for adverbs

A couple of weeks ago, on Wed May 12 (okay, not quite a couple of weeks ago, but close enough) we talked about adverbs, those obnoxious words that tie-up language.

Generally (hey look, there's one!) adverbs clog up speech and don't allow for high-quality communication. But adverbs exist in the language, so surely there must be a case for them, right?

Just like any other writing axiom, the "rule" to never use adverbs is more of a suggestion. Sure, adverbs clog up language. And, yes, the English language demands the use of strong nouns and verbs. What if I had used "strongly requests" or "expertly asks for" instead of "demands" in that last sentence? There's something missing in the meaning of what's said.

But, what about verbs that don't have a replacement? "Swim," for example, doesn't have any replacements. When there's someone walking, I can decide to have the skulk, or wander, or stroll, or even run or job instead of walk. All of these verbs illicit a different sort of "walk," a different action unique and separate from walking.

I can't use the same bit of dictionary magic on the verb "swim." I have to use a modifier instead. I could have someone swim quick, or slow, or stealthily, or any number of ways.

What other words out there might not have a replacement with a better inherent definition; one that doesn't need a modifier?

Adverbs

Adverbs. What are they?

Strictly speaking, adverbs are words that modify verbs and adjectives. Verbs are action words – words like run, walk, pounce, shift, and hyperventilate. Adjectives are words that modify nouns. Nouns are things – you, me, Heather, the hole in the ground downtown. Adjectives describe these words – short, tall, angry, green, ugly. Adverbs modify everything that an adjective can't (verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs). They answer the question how. How big? How ugly?

Generally speaking, adverbs will clog up speech. “He ran quickly” can be shortened to “he skittered.” Incidentally, skittered almost certainly creates a better picture in your mind of what's actually happening. Think about the difference between “ran” and “skittered”. Define the two verbs in your mind. Let a picture form. Which one is stronger?

This is exactly why adverbs are almost always unnecessary and even confusing.

Look at the above paragraphs. I've used some adverbs up there that are completely unnecessary. Find them, and let's talk about why they make the writing weaker.

Cleaning up the mess

Adverbs are used for many reasons. Sometimes it's a form of laziness: the writer can't come up with a stronger verb or noun, or doesn't want to pull out a thesaurus or dictionary. Sometimes the writer thinks the word is strong; almost, very, and other such words seem like they ought to be strong, and that they make the sentence more specific. They don't. Here's a comparison, using the first sentence of this paragraph (what I tried to write when I started writing this paragraph):

Often, adverbs are used for many reasons; the word almost fits, so the writer chooses to use it. (compare this to the beginning of the above paragraph. Which is stronger?)

How about this: What I almost wrote when I first started writing this paragraph. (Again, compare. Which is stronger and why).

Why Blog?

The first blog from May's guest blogger, Chad Smith. Chad won the Bridges contest. His poem, "No Rocks on This End," can be found in Bites from the Orchard: Bridges. Happy reading!
Megan

First off let me say thanks to Megan and everyone in the writer's group for letting me hang out in the Novel Orchard. I am truly honored to have my poem in your book. Sorry I couldn't make it to the book's opening night, but alas I am in Portland and my private jet has been in the shop all week.

When Megan asked me to be a guest blogger here on Writing Through the Year I was frightened at first. Sure I would do it I guessed, but what in the world did I know about writing? Then I thought about some subjects to write about and calmed down a bit:

I was asked to write a blog post. I can totally do that.

I will have been writing blog posts for 9 years this August. My first post is dated August 18th 2001. Before that I had been keeping a creative journal in a spiral notebook for several years. I don't think everyone was calling it blogging yet back in 2001 (I'm definitely not the first person to have started a blog). I think of myself as a journal keeper. No, not a diary. A journal.

I started keeping a creative journal right after I graduated from high school when an instructor at Portland Community College suggested that everyone should keep one. A place to store all of your creative thoughts. Story ideas, plot lines, dialog. Ideas for drawings and graphics. Notes for your Great American Novel. As I started to get into it and get some words down on paper I found that my creative journal, along with the notes and ideas was turning into a diary. Keeping track of my daily activities was keeping more entertained than scribbling notes for graphic designs or movie scripts.

Around 1996 I came up with the name Jack Noodle. I was subscribed to AOL back then and I wanted a name for my AOL email that didn't have to have a number in it. Chad Smith was already taken (believe it or not). Jack Noodle was born. I was going to use the name Jack Noodle everywhere I went in cyberspace and all of my artworks and writings would be signed by Jack Noodle. Now days I don't try to push the pseudonym as much. Everyone knows that Jack Noodle is really Chad Smith. No mystery.

That takes us to right around 1999 - 2000. I had been reading and enjoying the musician Moby's daily journal that he had up on his website and was also reading a journal by a multimedia artist named Mumbleboy. I was constructing my jacknoodle.com website and graphic design portfolio around that time and thought it would be cool to have my creative journal, a daily posting area on the site as well. I didn't have Wordpress back then so my posts were entered using raw html. I switched over to Wordpress around 2003 - 2004 and slowly reloaded all of my old posts into the Wordpress database then.

So where is this rambling history taking us you ask?

Well for my guest blog post I am going to agree with your previous guest blogger, Margaret Ellsworth's post last month on Practice and maybe expand a bit on the idea that blogging and keeping a journal is a very important activity for writers to take part in these days.

I think that anyone who is an aspiring writer should get a blog going. It's a great tool in helping build your writing muscles. I liked what Margaret said about getting the sensations of writing imprinted into your muscle memory. Maintaining a blog helps you practice the writing you will do on other projects.

Writing the Jack Noodle Journal is something I do for myself. There are other bloggers out there in the blogosphere that really worry about their numbers and try to get as many page hits as possible using all kinds of tricks. It's really easy to get caught up in the schemes and wizardry of page hits and reader numbers. For me it's about the act of writing and I'm not so concerned about who is reading it. Sure it would be fun to be popular and have a million readers but I like to think that have an audience of twelve.

Well if I'm not concerned with generating an audience with my blog then why put it up on the internet at all? Why not just keep my writing in my spiral notebook?

Despite saying I'm not concerned with how many people read my posts there is a certain level of attention set to the writing style knowing even subconsciously that someone might read what one is writing. That is good to cultivate and is really is a better writing than something one would hide away in a closet and never show anyone. If you are going to be a professional writer you are going to have to show your wares to the public eventually right? Why not start now with your blog?

Another benefit of having a blog is that I have a nice history and artifact of the history of the last 9 years of my life. Oh yeah, and with a search function even! It has been fun going back and refreshing my memory concerning the big events that have taken place. Along with family stuff I have interesting (to me) posts on how I felt on 9-11, a couple of presidential elections and other World events. Oh yes and I do still have some notes on creative thoughts and the start of some ideas I wanted to do for a television show until I saw that LOST was covering all of the topics I had thought of.

I have been surprised a time or two by who has been reading my blog when I get comments or emails. The most resent surprise was when a reporter from the Oregonian contacted me and said she had been reading about the details of my wife's pregnancy and the birth of our son on my blog and wanted to interview me for a story on paternity leave. That was pretty fun. You never know who's tuning in and what kind of opportunities could arise from someone enjoying your writing.

So that's my advice to you fellow writers. If you don't have a blog now then add more time to your already hard to find time for writing schedule and write a blog!

Also Facebook and Twitter are pretty cool too. Probably stay away from Facebook though, as it is a massive, distracting time suck. My Twitter feed is filled with people who continually give excellent links to interesting items. I've found a lot of writers and poets on Twitter as well....

But Facebook and Twitter belong in a different post.

Wood for the Table

Sorry for the delay, here is the second blog from this month's guest blogger, Margaret Ellsworth. - S.




“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry… Both are very hard work. Writing is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez



As writers, we work with the material we have at hand—which is reality, and the words we use to describe that reality. Now, I’m a nonfiction writer, so reality is a bit more of an issue for me, since the reader expects my pieces to be fact-checkably “real.” But fiction and poetry have an equal responsibility to reality. Because unless the writer can create a world in her story that’s as detailed and rich as the world we inhabit, the reader’s not going to stick with it. We’re using reality, but we’re also competing with reality, which is already a sensory overload experience.



Which is why good writing draws from reality. The best dialogue has the same rhythms as conversations we’ve heard before. The best characters, while unique in their own ways, often share characteristics with people we recognize from our own lives. Even sci-fi and fantasy worlds may not correspond to “reality” as we know it, but a good writer can fill these worlds with so much realistic detail that we hardly notice.



It’s these details that can make or break a story. So where do we get these details from? The details that allow people to enter the worlds we create, and be able to see and smell and touch the world around them, clearly? How do we gather the wood for our table? Here are a few suggestions:



Get out in the world, and take notes. This is crucial for nonfiction writers—to get out there and experience the reality we’re trying to convey. We can actually go to the settings of our stories, and get details there. But this can be a useful tool for fiction writers too. If your characters happen to be musicians or doctors, see if you can find some musicians or doctors in the real world to shadow. If you’re writing a bustling town scene for your historical/fantasy book, head down to the farmer’s market and watch how people interact with each other there.



Take a notebook and a camera (or a cell phone camera if you’d rather be more inconspicuous) and watch what’s going on. Write down the little things: colors, sounds, smells. Notice the way people move and talk to each other. You could even try to scribble down snippets of conversation, to get a feel for the rhythms of dialogue. Try not to particularly think about your story at this point: if you focus on what you’re writing, you might miss something that’s happening around you. Afterwards, when you read your notes over, you can work the details into your story.



Follow your obsessions. Tamora Pierce (author of the popular Tortall teen fantasy series) said that she watched “The Three Musketeers” movie 17 times during her years at college. Did it have anything to do with her work at that point? Probably not. But it gave her material later on. This is one of the most fun parts about being a writer—the license to be obsessed with anything and everything. Read books, blogs, websites. Watch and re-watch movies. As Pierce says, “All creative people--not just writers!--expose themselves to as much information, in as many forms, as possible, in the hopes that it will be useful down the road, or even right now. You never know what will spark something new!”



Write what you know. I know, it’s an old cliché, something writing professors like to say… and then they end up with a stack of dorm-drama stories on their desk. You may think that “what you know” is too boring to ever interest anyone else. But I’m willing to bet you know some pretty odd things. Just through 20-odd years of life experience, I’ve become (perhaps too) familiar with church politics, long-distance relationships, and wasp-proofing my house. Just to name a few! Go ahead. Take ten minutes, and write down everything in the world you know about, everything you’re an expert on. Maybe one of your characters will love the same band you do. Maybe your summer job waiting tables at a resort will give you the idea for a story.



How about you? How do you come up with the details that bring your stories to life?

Transcendence

Peanut Satay sauce and coconut milk make some sense together. I say only some because Satay Sauce already has a fair bit of coconut milk. But what about adding some egg to the mix, a little bit more ginger, some chili paste, and cubes of bread?

Sounds crazy right? Not really. This is merely a modification of a basic bread pudding recipe. It'll be savory, and a bit spicy, and definitely not reminiscent of the European origins of a bread pudding. And I skipped the raisins. I hate raisins.

Did it come out any good? It's in the oven right now. I don't know if it's any good yet. I'll share if it's tasty though.

Now, why am I writing about my crazy adventures in food land? It's not because I have a masochistic tendency to invite criticism of what I think might taste good (usually though, it does). I'm writing about savory Thai bread pudding because it's relevant to writing.

To make this, I took just a few simple ingredients and combined them in a new and interesting way. I added a few other seasonings to taste, and stuck it in the oven. I don't know if it will be any good. I'm somewhat afraid of the outcome to be honest. But I tried it anyway. And I told someone else (you, you're reading this) about the experiment. And I'll make my husband eat it.

Why not do the same with your writing? Step out of the normal boundaries of what makes you comfortable. Push the envelope. Combine elements that aren't traditionally seen together, and force them to play nice. Hunter S. Thompson did it with creative non-fiction. Patrick Rothfuss did it with The Name of the Wind, combining fantasy with literary fiction (at least, from what I understand. I haven't read it yet.

This trend of combining, transcending, and flat-out ignoring rules of genre isn't one that's going to stop. Why not give it a try today. Something small. Something simple. 500 words?

Drawing Comparisons

April is in full swing now, and so is the celebration of National Poetry Month. Why not join in the fun by writing a poem?

For some, writing a poem is easy. They sit down, and write, and out comes something to work with, edit, revise, and shape into a masterpiece. For others (myself included) the word "poetry" brings on shivers of fear and dread.

The fear and loathing, however, does not mean writing a poem is impossible. Start with a simple comparison. What was your morning coffee like? Your breakfast? How much would you like to put sugar in the gasoline tank of the neighbor's monster truck? You see what I'm getting at here: start with something small.

Then let it grow. Compare that thing or desire to something else that's not like it. Is your object of description hard and cool? What else is hard and cool? Plates, DVD cases, and jewellery could stand in for an answer.

Now move on to an emotion. Does your coffee make you angry, happy, or something in between? How much is that emotion evoked? Explore it, and see where it takes you.

Even if poetry isn't your forte, drawing these comparisons is helpful. How else are you going to explain to your reader just how much the character hated sliding into the cool waters of the lake? Or show the reader just how bad that concept you're arguing against really is? It's all in the description. While poetry may be too flowery, too much for your specific situation, hyperbole can teach much about moderation.

-Megan

Capturing the Voice

Voice is what makes writing sound right. It's the narrator who's unreliable, but steps out of the narrative to give the reader information necessary to the story, but the characters don't know. It's the speaker in the poem who forces a rhythm to drive home an idea. It's an informed speaker in an article that takes command of the situation, and informs the reader of all the information the reader may want to know.

The words have to be just right, and they have to stay that way through the entire work. This is especially the case when the narrator is unusual, or has a very defined voice. In his latest novel Bite Me: A Love Story, Christopher Moore successfully inserts a teenager into the story, using the first person perspective as the girl writes her blog.

The vernacular and syntax is truly unique, fitting to a character who prefers to call herself Abby Normal. Though the enthusiasm is tiring, the perspective is used wisely, with the point of view switching throughout the story to tell all the different parts. And it never steps out of character, regardless of which voice tells the story.

It's Book Review Time

Megan and I have a substantial collection of books on writing. While we love most of them, some, are rare gems, shiny that we refuse to let them stray far from our desks. We thought we'd share some of these with you. Every Sunday you can look forward to a book review. We'll cover writing books we love, like, and hate. We'll also sneak in books and stories that have helped us in our writing somehow.

First up is a book we just picked up: The Writer's Little Helper written by James V. Smith, Jr.

The book is a jewel, containing over two hundred forty pages of Q&A, Tools, and checklists. In fact, that's partially how the book is organized. Amid the greater organization found in the table of contents, you'll find advice distilled down into these three categories.

An example: mine and Megan's favorite out of the book is a tool: "The Scene Card." It's small, designed to be taped to the manuscript, or the notebook, or the folder. The idea is to fill one card out for each scene in your story. It helps you figure out how the scene fits into the structure of the story.

What's on the card? Here's one of the elements. The purpose of the scene: Move the story, develop characters, introduce/worsen a problem? There are others, but, the list is general and comprehensive on what a scene should do. If it doesn't fit one of these? You should probably not have it in the story. Really, I mean it.

So, would I recommend buying it? Yes, to everyone! I intend to buy another one, so Megan will stop stealing this one from me.

- Sam

Reading

How do you read?

I don't mean "by picking up a book and looking at the marks and deciphering them into words and thoughts and ideas." I mean: "what do you do when you read?" Do you read the words on the page, and allow yourself to be transferred to another world? Do you look for and find hidden meanings and messages within the text? Do you question how the writer shaped the words into what you're seeing on the page?

Personally, I do all three. Though, more and more, I critique the writing that I see. I can't help it. I want to know how the writer made me laugh or smile; what made me have the reaction to the book that I had. How else can I do this if I don't look for it in the writing?

More importantly, how can I know what I'm doing right and wrong if I can't see it in someone else's writing? What better way to learn than from other writers?

There's a writing adage that you can't learn how to write, and you can't teach how to do it. I happen to disagree. Writing can be taught. The teaching just happens in somewhat less-than-traditional forms. The learning happens by the student, by reading, by asking questions, and by seeking answers.

So, I'll ask again: what do you do when you read? What do you do to better your own writing?

What Do You Need?

What do you need to write?

I know, there's the obvious. We need something to write with: pen, paper, pencil, computer, some even prefer a voice recorder to transcribe later.

But, what else do you need? For example, I just need my laptop and an open document. I'm really not even picky about what sort of document is open (though I do prefer software that features word-wrapping). I can be anywhere, there can be anything going on around me. It really doesn't matter. Just a keyboard and an idea, and I'm typing away.

Some people have to be in their writing corner. They go there, shut out the rest of the world, and write away. Some have an entire ritual that must happen before they can write a word. Some have special tools they need, some a tasty snack.

So, tell us. What allows you to be successful? What do you need to write?

Apocolypse Now (And Later)

Good morning Good Morning Five Hundredians. Awkward on the tongue, that. I'll have to think of something better. In the meantime, this is Sam finally chiming in. Those of you who know me know that I'm usually pretty quiet. When I do finally speak up, I usually don't shut up for a while, I tend to ramble and go on a lot of tangents; I'll try to keep tangents to a minimum this morning. Those are better for afternoon posts anyway.

So, how is everyone's 500 doing? Good? Bad? Somewhere in between? I've been working on a story lately, that takes place well after "The End Of The World", how far after isn't really important. But thinking about after the end of the world, makes you start thinking about the end of the world. Would you survive? Would you thrive? Are you one of the crazy people who has a miniature model of the modern world stored in your basement (a year plus of food for ten people, weapons, generators, fuel for same, etc you know the type).

As I was falling asleep last night, this is what I was thinking about. Both for my own interest and as research I picked up a book on surviving the end of the world as we know it. I got to thinking, in that hazy place between wake and sleep, that I would challenge all of you Five Hundredites (still awkward, oh well) to write about the end of the world this week. Specifically, to write a series of notes or letters or journal entries left behind by someone after the collapse of society.

Farewell for now Five Hundredese (nope, not that one either).