De-vilifying the Adverb

Adverbs get a bad rap. Don’t use them, we hear. They’ll make you look like a novice. If your first page has an adverb, an agent will never request more material. And so on, and so on. But the truth is, there’s more to the no-adverb rule than just, “Don’t use them, ever.”

First off, what IS an adverb? That telltale “ly” ending is (usually) a dead giveaway, but there's more to it than that. According to the good book (also known as the dictionary), an adverb is--get ready--“a word belonging to one of the major form classes in any of numerous languages, typically serving as a modifier of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, a sentence, expressing some relation of manner or quality, place, time, degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation, or denial, and in English also serving to connect and to express comment on clause content.”

Phew. So, to sum up, an adverb is a word that modifies another word. (As I used to tell my middle school students, if the word modifies a noun, it’s an adjective. If it modifies any other kind of word, it’s an adverb.)

Well, that’s great, right? Adverbs modify other words, so they provide more information and add dimension…right? So what the heck is so wrong with them?

What’s wrong with them is that they often add unnecessary dimension--that is, the adverb is a weaker word than an alternative, or it’s redundant. Consider the following examples:

“Hurry up,” he said quietly.
She really liked corndogs.
He walked carefully past the principal’s office.

In the first sentence, “said quietly” is weaker than “whispered” or “hissed.” Same thing with the other sentences: Instead of saying “really liked,” why not say “loved”? Instead of “walked carefully,” why not “tiptoed” or “crept”?

As for redundant, check out this example (which could be a direct quote from SEE THE SAMELINGS’s first draft, I might add):

“Hurry up,” he whispered softly.

“Softly” adds absolutely nothing to this sentence, as a whisper is soft by definition. (Yeah, it took me a whole draft to figure that out.) You can ax it without losing any of the sentence’s meaning.

And that’s the litmus test for deciding whether an adverb is worthwhile: Does it add unique meaning to the sentence, meaning you can’t get from any other word (or from any fewer words)?

Consider this passage:

Daniel shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, uh, thanks for coming.”

Clara couldn’t meet his gaze. “I had a nice time.”

He kicked the porch step. “Guess I’ll see you on Monday?”

“Yeah, sure. Monday. Mr. Monte’s class.”

“Mr. Monotony, you mean.”

She giggled, too loudly. “See you on Monday, then.”

“Bye.”

Horror of horrors! TWO adverbs in a four-word sentence, “She giggled, too loudly,” and right in a row. At first glance, you might be tempted to give both “too” and “loudly” a good slash with your red pen. But look again. If you take away “too loudly,” the sentence’s meaning changes. And the whole passage loses some of its awkward giddiness.

So adverbs themselves aren’t the villains, but (some of) the situations in which we use them are. The trick is to figure out which situations are adverb-approved, and which aren’t. And nobody--nobody--can decide that but you.

On Dialogue ('Cause Everybody's Talking About It)

Excuse me while I wipe the single teardrop from my eye. Puns will get me every time:)

My husband and I recently had a conversation. It went something like this:

“My children are killing my muse!” I screeched.

To which my husband replied, “Don’t ever show your face on this mews again!”

“What?” I asked.

“You know,” he said. “From THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE.”

Oh, look, another pun. And there goes another teardrop. But muse/mews aside, this sort of exchange happens often in our home. He says something, I say something, he says something back, and I think, “Wow, that’s good enough to be in a book. We’re like two regular Jane Austens--minus the accent and, you know, those little feather hats.”

But then I sit down to write and this comes tumbling out:

“It’s not going to turn out to be something salacious, is it?”

“Salacious?”

“Sleazy.”

“Mom!” I exclaimed, genuinely disgusted.

“Well?” she pressed, still looking stern.

“No, of course not!” I took a step back. “Gosh, what do you think I am, some kind of--harlot?”

Harlot? Are you (am I) kidding me (myself)? What person under the age of sixty-eight (let alone a teenager) uses the word harlot anymore? Now, in my defense, this was only the first draft of a novel I had the good sense to scrap, so that ought to count for something. But still. I should have known better.

Why is dialogue so difficult to write convincingly? We only use it every single day. I really don’t have the answer to that. I was just proofreading a few things from Bob, my current work-in-progress, yesterday and was struck by how awful some of my dialogue sounded. Maybe it’s because I’m still in the early chapters and the characters’ voices are still settling. Or maybe it’s because I still have some things to learn.

Imagine that: I haven’t attained perfection yet. But I’m pretty sure I’m on the verge. And when it happens, I’m sure you all will be the first to know:)

Any of you have any good (or bad) lines of dialogue you'd like to share? Or any advice for me on how to write it?