Of the great wholesome pleasures in life (puppy nuzzles, free ice cream, panda hugs, and the like), I would have to rank effortless transition between projects pretty high. I suspect it’s not pleasure per se, but the alleviation of that pang of panic that accompanies the conclusion of a project always feels mighty good. I often fear that the next notion will be slow in coming, that I’ll find myself struggling with stray lines in search of a theme or connection. Yesterday, however, I moved almost immediately from the completion of one project to the beginning of the next, and the next was unquestionably ready for me. Between that, my imminent trip to see Hellboy, and the promise of ice cream late in the day, I’m feeling mighty chipper. I am, as you might have guessed, not a terribly sophisticated man.
Despite those doses of happy, however, I find myself feeling just crotchety enough to pick a bone with some folks in the know. The subject: adverbs, and eradication thereof.
I did a bit of surfing yesterday to look for counsel on the assembly of a poetry manuscript. The advice out there in the aether is a little hit or miss—quite a few columnists assume that the reader a) has never picked up a pen or b) could never imagine revising—yet I did find some fine resources to work with. Jeffrey Levine’s AWP article in particular is exceedingly valuable, yet I was surprised to see him echo a sentiment I’ve seen voiced in Stephen King’s On Writing and a few other places: murder your adverbs.
I suspect that the authors who advocate the eradication of adverbs probably offer the policy in a limited sense (cutting out the –ly cheapies, at least), but since Levine doesn’t qualify the statement—“ye shall consider the adverb a bleepin’ abomination,” he says—I’ll wax literalistic for a bit.
In good sooth, I know that adverb use often leads to abuse. I’ve seen quite a few writers use adverbs wantonly in dialogue tags, and I’ve seen even more instances in which adverbs were only used to zazz an inexact verb—a verb already floating out there in the lexicon, waiting to be recruited. I confess that when I’m writing (especially in the case of fiction), I devote one revision sweep exclusively to weeding out needless adverbs, ones that aren’t pulling real weight. In this sentence, for example, “exclusively” would not normally make the cut; nor would “normally,” for that matter. When I’m writing off the cuff, as I am right now, I don’t fret about it much, but in poetry, fiction, and critical writing I tend to be much more scrupulous.
As Levine himself demonstrates, writers can wrangle some mighty fine verse without leaning on adverbs much, if at all. Quite a few writers I admire tend to dispense with them. At the same time, however, I have seen some writers torture their verbs in order to avoid lapsing into adverbs. When an odd, off-brand verb is used once or twice in the course of a poem, it seems like the fruit of aesthetic technique, the best kind of calculation, and demands close attention. When a writer does so as a matter of course, hammering square verbs into round holes, one begins to suspect he has instead misapplied a prescription.
The reverse is also true: when one knows a writer eschews adverbs most of the time, their use can seem almost momentous, possessed of far greater significance than they are really meant to bear. At the very least one assumes that the writer must have a compelling motive to bend her rule, and I think that leads to a different kind of reading.
I just scanned the draft of my most recent bit, and it includes three cheapies (adverbs that flex the –ly affix) over the course of 35 lines. To my thinking, all three are indispensable: they each do several kinds of needful work (rhythmic, sonic, tropic, semantic, or connotative) that the poem squeezes juice from. Did I excise others? To be sure. In doing so, however, I adhered to the same general principles that apply to all the words I choose. I tend to worry about adjectives far more than I worry about adverbs nowadays.
I balk at most rules, prohibitions in particular, yet I take for granted that a long chain of thought or experience has led some practitioner to that pass. I’m sure that’s true of Levine and King’s advice on the matter of adverbs. Most of the time, however, I would prefer to infer a rule from the course of my own practice rather than accept it from the outset and spend my days searching for exceptions.
Then again, I got a terribly late start, which is why all of my writerly advice comes with a complimentary asterisk. This post, however, comes with a free dose of awesome.
