LOSE THE ADVERBS AND GAIN THE READER

This post is about using (overusing) adverbs in narrative not in dialogue.

While adverbs have their place, (even in narrative) beginners tend to use them to far to often, and established authors use them because they know they can get away with it. When it comes to adverb usage, the rules doe all should be:

1.) Omit the adverb if it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence.

2.) Adverb usage means you’re not using a strong enough verb.

3.) If the adverb passes these two tests, you should keep it

Fast food employees need rules to do their job, but we're writers, we aren’t flipping burgers. We need to know the "Why?" or we get cooked (Rejected).

　
Before you send those hard worked pages of your novel to an agent or publisher for consideration, follow the adverb rules listed above. If you do some soul searching and honest reflection you'll find 99% of adverbs (even the most judiciously (lol) place ones), to an editor sound like nails on a chalkboard. You've played by the rules, yet in all honesty your adverbs failed the test. There has to be more to this adverb thing.

Why, you ask? Why this unnecessary prejudice against the lowly adverb? After your adverb-soul-searching I just spoke of, you'll find these three reasons to avoid adverbs helpful.

Reason 1The use of any adverb may be a strong indicator of some contextual problems surrounding it, so it becomes a form of telling, not showing. Whether you’re writing in 1st person or 3rd person, at some point in your story you provide the reader with descriptive narrative. One example is in describing a setting the character is in, entering , or going to enter. Even if you have an adverb in the scene that passes all the rules, pull out from the sentence and ask yourself  "Am I doing a good enough job with the narration."  It’s possible you’re not painting the picture you want. What you need is a brush stroke, not a touch up. The adverb is a bandage for bad exposition.

Reason 2The adverb may be an indicator of a point of view issue. This was a problem for many scenes for my co-author me. Our first book, written twenty years ago and recently pick up by a publisher, had many weak passages. We were confused until we realized we needed a tighter POV. (Pounded into our head by our publisher Show - Don't tell.) Twenty years ago we felt the adverbs conveyed the feelings of the scenes central character. Once we understood the problem, the adverbs disappeared and our scenes are much better.

Reason 3 Once you see the difference you'll understand how adverbs distance the connection between the reader and your characters, not enhance it. As writers there's a tendency to use adverbs because we feel we're heightening the reader experience, but in fact, once you take an honest look, most of the time the opposite is true. 

(True Story) Take this excerpt from the first scene in a novel. The widower's young son wakes from a terrifying nightmare. The father enter the room and quiets him. 

He hugged his weeping son, kissed his forehead, then gently rocked him back to sleep.

The adverb "gently" sounds like a good adverb. You would think so. The editor struck down. Your first thought is, that would remove the meaning. But in fact, the loss of the adverb enhances the scene.

He hugged his weeping son, kissed his forehead, then rocked him back to sleep.

By omitting the adverb "gently", it forces the reader to imagine the scene. And this, my dear writer, is what you want the reader to do. You want them to engage, to empathize and imagine. You want them to become your character. If you modify your verbs to tell the reader exactly what is going on, you keep them arms length and they never become invested in the character or your story.

At the Las Vegas writers conference an agent told us "If I find more then three adverbs in three hundred words I stop and send it back". 

For you writers. Forget the editors and grammar

The hoax that backfired.

Everyone knows the adage, "You can’t judge a book by its cover." In 1969 that aphorism got an extra dose of validity when Penelope Ashe, a bored housewife from Long Island, NY, wrote the trashy sensation Naked Came the Stranger.

As part of her book tour, she appeared on talk shows and made the bookstore rounds. But the Long Island housewife was anything but. She certainly wasn't what her book jacket claimed. Penelope Ashe was as fictional as the novel she supposedly wrote. In reality, both were the work of Mike McGrady, a Newsday columnist disgusted with the lurid state of the modern bestseller. Instead of complaining, he decided to expose the problem by writing a book of zero redeeming social value and even less literary merit.

He enlisted the help of 24 Newsday colleagues, tasking each with a chapter, and instructed them that there should be “an unremitting emphasis on sex.” He also warned that “true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.” Once McGrady had the smutty chapters in hand (which included acrobatic trysts in tollbooths, encounters with progressive rabbis, and cameos by Shetland ponies), he painstakingly edited the prose to make it worse. In 1969, an independent publisher released the first edition of Naked Came the Stranger, with the part of Penelope Ashe played by McGrady’s sister-in-law.

To the McGrady's dismay, his cynical ploy worked. The media was all too fascinated with the salacious daydreams of the “demure housewife” turned author. And though The New York Times wrote, “In the category of erotic fantasy, this one rates about a C,” the public didn't mind. By the time the journalist revealed his hoax a few months later, the novel had already moved 20,000 copies. Far from sinking the book’s prospects, the negative press pushed sales even higher. By the end of the year, there were more than 100,000 copies in print, and the novel had spent 13 weeks on the Times’s bestseller list. As of 2012, the tome had sold nearly 400,000 copies, mostly to readers who were in on the joke. But in 1990, McGrady told Newsday he couldn't stop thinking about those first sales: “What has always worried me are the 20,000 people who bought it before the hoax was exposed.”

 

Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/49674/14-greatest-hoaxes-all-time#ixzz2VkhJIaoN

--brought to you by mental floss

Show, Don't Tell (Richard Draude)

Speech and Thought Through Personality .

The fiction-writing dictum for both publisher & editor is, “Show, don’t tell.”

How do you apply that in practical terms when it comes to communicating characterization without exposition?

People in different eras have unique speech and speech patterns, but restrain yourself from indulging in periodization in your historical novel; if your Elizabethan-era characters talk like Shakespeare’s, people:

1) won’t understand much of what they say and

2) will be distracted by your forced — and fatally flawed — attempt at authenticity.

Do immerse yourself in that period’s society: What did people know about history and sociology and psychology and spirituality (even if they never used those terms to identify them)? What were prevailing political and social and religious viewpoints? How open were the people of then day, about expressing themselves? Do not to let modern sensibilities intrude on the way your characters speak and think. Do, however, permit them and their speeches and thoughts to be accessible to modern readers.

The extent to which characters will express their ideas and opinions, or ruminate about them, and the language with which they will do so, depends on a few other factors:

People of different generations and different social backgrounds generally speak differently. Geriatric characters should exhibit speech and speech patterns distinct from juvenile ones and consistent with norms unless an exception is a deliberate dramatic point — for instance, if a teenager who has switched bodies with an elderly person is trying to pass vocally as well as visually as a senior citizen.

Likewise, the speech and thoughts of well-educated characters will usually be distinguishable from that of those of others with less formal schooling. Of course, no one should assume that a person with only a high school education is less intelligent than a college graduate, or the reverse, but their vocabulary and the level of sophistication of their thoughts will, unless they are self-educated, likely differ.

Further individualization of characters makes fiction writing more vivid. How does one’s personality affect words and thoughts? A repressed person’s speech patterns will differ significantly from an extrovert’s. A tense, angry character will exhibit different rhythms of speech and thought than a carefree individual.

Length of speeches and thoughts is also a consideration: Philosophically minded people do not tend to make snap judgments. Children do not soliloquize. Match the extent to which people speak and think to their personalities. Keep in mind that various sentence lengths and paragraph lengths have differing dramatic values, too — long passages tend to be soothing (but, when too long, are sleep-inducing), while short bursts create or maintain tension (though,done to excess, can be as wearying as extensive paragraphs).

In essence, capitalize on your knowledge of individual characters to establish vocabulary and modes of speech and thought, as well as on familiarity with societal norms for speaking and thinking appropriate to the era in which your characters live.

First Sentences by Denice Whitmore

First Sentences by Denice Whitmore 

In fiction writing, a good first sentence pulls the reader into the story. It makes them want to keep reading. The reader forms his first impression of you as a writer, your characters, and your writing style and then makes a decision whether they want to spend their time and invest emotionally in your book, all from the first sentence. No pressure. Right?

 

I have attended first page reads at the Las Vegas Writer’s Conference where the panel of agents and publishers (who are supposed to raise their hand when they would stop reading) shot their hands up during the first sentence and no one heard the rest of the page because the first sentence was weak and didn't spark their interest.

Personally, I struggle with the first sentence of every chapter. I want the beginning of each chapter to grab my readers. When they feel like putting the book down at the end of the chapter and they turn the page just to take a peek(you know you have done this) they get hooked in and read just one more chapter(who cares if it’s one am).

Think of the first sentence as an invitation. You, the writer, are inviting the reader to join you on a journey. Will it be a fun journey? A perilous journey? A heart wrenching journey? Or maybe a combination. Find the spot where the journey begins—that point where the character jumps off the cliff, straight into the conflict that will propel the story forward.

So how do we hook the reader right off the bat? Here are few examples from some of my favorite books.

One of my favorite authors is Maggie Stiefvater. The first book I read by her was Shiver. It’s the first in her series about the Wolves of Mercy Falls. Here is the first sentence of that book.

 

I remember lying in the snow, a small red spot of warm going cold, surrounded by wolves.

 

What a great opening. She uses the white of the snow and the red spot to paint a visual. She uses warm and cold to awaken other senses. And just for the kicker she adds in ‘surrounded by wolves.’ Now I have to know what will happen. I am worried for this person lying in the cold snow with warm red, and wolves. How did they get there? But more importantly, how do they get out of there? She found the spot where her character is smack in the middle of it and starts her story there.

I read a lot of books with my four boys. Our copy of The Lighting Thief by Rick Riordan is a dog-eared, yellow-paged, crumpled, well-read paperback (and I still have two, not old enough to read it yet). Here is the first line. 

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

 

Riordan immediately sets up the voice of Percy Jackson as the main character. He introduces the problem facing Percy and how he feels about it right from the start. He doesn’t give away all the details leaving the reader wondering—half-blood what? And, what’s so bad about being a half-blood? What kind of adventure will this be? We were hooked right away.

I often browse the book section at Costco. One day I found a book by Brandon Sanderson. As it turns out, it was his debut novel for young-adult audiences called, The Rithmatist. I had recently been introduced to him by my nephew and enjoy watching his lecture series on his website www.writeaboutdragons.com but had not yet read any of his books. I am an avid young adult reader so I bought it (loved it by the way). Here is the first line of the prologue.

Lilly’s lamp blew out as she bolted down the hallway.

He lets us know from the get go that we are not in our modern world. This girl carries a lamp with a flame not a flash light or a cell phone with a flash light app. She is running from something and now she is in the dark as well. It gives a feeling of foreboding for Lilly and we need to find out what will happen to her.

So remember to invite your readers into your world, where the action starts, giving a sense of the characters voice and introducing a question to their mind (Oh. Is that all?). Sounds daunting when you put it like that. But you don’t have to write your first sentence first. Complete your first draft and you will intimately know your characters, their quirks, voice and all the wonderful attributes that you wrote into them. Sometimes knowing how the story ends will help you find the perfect beginning.

            Keep writing.