Unload Those Adjectives!

Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” We’re rightly admonished not to use adverbs. But what about adjectives?

I’d argue that adjectives are also there in the mix that makes up the road to hell. In fact, Mark Twain wrote to student D. W. Bowser (3/20/1880) “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.” Twain’s advice, along with King’s, is a good to keep in mind.

Unfortunately, many beginning poets think that adjectives give strength to their poems because they are writing something that relies heavily upon human senses. Sights/smells/tastes/sounds etc. are difficult to communicate. How do you get a flash of light, a whiff of lily, or the exact taste of your grandmother’s holiday cake in a poem? It’s understandable that we would lean upon adjectives to get more specific about our subjects. However, loading the poem with adjectives is not the way to go about  it.

What happens when we load lines up with adjectives?

Lines/sentences with lots of adjectives get heavier—they bog the reader  down—rather than flowing easily to the heart or the mind. It also blocks your reader from entering your poem and experiencing it in his/her/their own way. It says this is the way it is—and the only way it is. Or the adjective is so overused—like pretty, big, ugly, old, little, blue, green, etc.—that the word has lost any specificity. And when many adjectives are squeezed together a reader’s attention is scattered. Which ones should they linger over? Which ones are the most important?  But wait … the writer’s moved on and I’m still trying to savor that previous line.

Unload some of those adjectives, otherwise you risk:

• the line slowing down
• the writing not being clear when adjectives are open to a wide range of interpretations (overused adjectives)
• falling back on weak nouns like car and dog, instead of stronger specific nouns like Camaro, or dachshund.
• scattering the attention of the reader with so much description that he/she/they are unsure which adjectival moments are the important moments
• not giving the reader time to pause and savor one good description, before rushing onward

A case in point:

“She was utterly lost in her strong, heartfelt longing to clearly understand.” Written thusly, I’m not sure where the emphasis in the sentence is. Is the important bit the lost bit? The longing? The understanding? Where do I center my concentration before the story moves on? And the line feels heavy—my feet are sinking into all that verbiage.

Here’s the actual quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “She was lost in her longing to understand.”  (Love in the Time of Cholera).  It uses understatement and flows. We hear the alliteration of lost and longing which are now closer together. And we feel those three anapests in a row he so poetically gave us. (she was LOST in her LONG   ing to UN …) The line feels like a tasteful nugget. We want to move forward into more of that sensuality. Masterful!  (Notice in this paragraph I used the adjective tasteful before the noun nugget. It’s okay to use some judicious adjectives—such as judicious—especially if you’ve linked them to stronger nouns and aren’t piling them up.)

Which brings up the question: is there a time when it’s preferable to use strong adjectives and weak nouns? Of course, there is! We writers break rules/guidelines all the time. But that’s a subject for another post, I think. Until then, check out the links below.  The link to the Simple Writing site is interesting in its discussion of interpretive adjectives (those that are overused and can be interpreted many ways such as any color, or words like cute) vs descriptive adjectives (facts and other statements that aren’t likely to be misinterpreted, such as oxblood-red or flirtatious).

To wrap it up, remember that adage variously attributed to Twain. “Writing is easy, all you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” Or, as he wrote in Pudd’nhead Wilson, “As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.”

Further Reading

• https://simplewriting.org/kill-your-adjectives/
• https://nybookeditors.com/2013/05/editing-tip-1/
• https://www.writerswrite.co.za/15-adjectives-to-delete-to-strengthen-your-writing-immediately/