If not examples of overwriting, then at least some explanation of how adjectives and 'description' differ? Pretty please? I am so mystified by this. It's been bugging me!

Rosy x

frazzled by her flash of fury

hands up, i actually wrote this the other day. I love onomatapoeia but even this made me cringe. But then i've always been aware that overwriting is a fault of mine, it's just something i can't help. I have learnt, fortunately, to murder my darlings.

Still, as i said before, it depends on genre and i could imagine a line like the one above in some fantasy (that's it, i'm in the wrong genre)

Naomi, which thread of that was mine, might take a squiz...

I have read examples of writing where the beginner writer felt obliged to qualify every noun with an adjective (or two) and every action and speech tag with an adverb to the point that the relevant descriptions are lost in the bulk. I think this might come from a lack of confidence by the writer in their ability or even a lack of confidence in their readers' ability to imagine the scenes/characters they describe.
In order to counter this, creative writing gurus have tended to ban the use of adverbs/ adjectives because it's a lot easier to present as a rule than 'only use the relevant adverbs/adjectives'. But IMO, judicious use of them makes for much better writing than eliminating them altogether.

OK, Ashlinn, I can undestand how a description can be too flowery because you overload it with unnecessary adjectives. I just don't get how you can have any description which doesn't involve them at all, which Naomi seemed to be saying. Or maybe I missed the point? (Probably!)

And what's wrong with 'frazzled by her flash of fury'? Is it the alliteration you're embarrassed by, Casey? I like the sound of the phrase - I love all the fffs. I'm suppose not sure about 'frazzled by' (can you be frazzled by something?) But otherwise I liked it. Oh dear, I absolutely don't get this whole 'overwriting' thing.

Rosy x

I have read examples of writing where the beginner writer felt obliged to qualify every noun with an adjective (or two) and every action and speech tag with an adverb to the point that the relevant descriptions are lost in the bulk.

Yes, this is where they get really irritating, and the law of diminishing returns sets in as well. It's still an adjective, but how much weaker it is to say 'I picked up the heavy bag' than 'The strap cut into my hand,'. Equally 'He ran quickly' is much weaker than 'He raced', but it's harder perhaps for a beginner or someone with a small vocabulary to bring up the right verb.

I'm sure Ashlinn, you're right that what started as a sensible observation turned into a rule by doctrinaire teachers and the hints-and-tips brigade. And of course what they don't say is that they're only fussing about adverbs of quality anyway.

There's a classic beginner's writing exercise, where you write a piece without any adverbs or adjectives, (which is really hard to do if you're not used to it) and when it's just right, you're allowed to put in just one adverb or adjective. That's where you learn the power of the right one, and how unnecessary many are.

Emma

There's a classic beginner's writing exercise, where you write a piece without any adverbs or adjectives

- I presume you mean without any descriptive adverbs? Because I don't see there's anything to be gained from cutting out adverbs like 'first' and 'then' and 'next' and 'often' and 'today' and 'soon' etc?

Equally 'He ran quickly' is much weaker than 'He raced'
- 'ran quickly' is tautology anyway. But, on a related note, I've never been convinced by the 'substitute a strong verb for a verb plus adverb' argument. Sometimes a verb + adverb is what your sentence needs, either for precision, or for rhythmic qualities.

Re describing without adverbs and adjectives, Jeremy Sheldon ran an exercise at Arvon where he got students to describe an object that way. What everyone did was reach for metaphors and similes - there's nowhere else to go. And nowt wrong with the odd metaphor or simile, of course, though they are a great deal more visible in your writing than adjectives or adverbs.

Yes, I meant descriptive adverbs.

I'm not sure 'ran quickly' is a tautology, because it could be 'ran slowly', after all, or 'ran awkwardly'. I think I would say 'run' of itself doesn't imply quickly. I would always say that whether you use a descriptive verb or a plain verb + adjective depends hugely on the voice, and also on the balance and rhythm of the sentence. It's the automatic tagging-on that Ashlinn highlights which is something that beginners need to be freed-up from, because there are so many other and better ways of doing the job.

I agree about reaching for similes and metaphors. I was once set to write a story without them, in a workshop, and it was surprisingly hard, if you were strict and excluded the buried metaphors you get with some verbs, and so on. Maybe it was a bit of a cheat, but I decided to write the whole thing from the point of view of a dog, since I don't think dogs use imagery, and of course he could only describe things in terms of what he had already experienced. Very restricting, but in a good way. I was pleased with the result, considering I wrote it in twenty minutes.

Emma

Hmm. The vanilla 'Ran' on its own does imply speed, imo. If you need to adjust that, then you'll reach for a qualifier, I'd say.

Automatic tagging-on, automatic exclusion of certain word groups - automatic anything needs to be got round!

<Added>

(I mean with regard to stylistics. Obviously, automatically remembering to start sentences with capitals, mark in your possessive apostrophes etc is always desirable.)

Automatically starting at the top left-hand corner of the page and working across is quite a good habit too.

Emma

Urrgghh. This one could run and run!

Is it the alliteration you're embarrassed by, Casey?

oh, God, i meant alliteration - why do i alway let myself down like that?

Yeh, i think it's a tad too much, Rosy, even though i like it, i can imagine someone else (like an agent!) reading it and their toes curling...and it's on the very first page of the novel which is why i'm probably going to play it safe and cut it.

I remember the first time Cornerstones read my work (a small taster to see if they thought i was suitable to have a report done) and they said i over wrote - the example they gave was me describing champagne as 'effervescent froth' - i think they said everyone knows what champagne is like, you don't need to describe it. It really made me think about the times i use description where it is not really needed and doesn't add much to the experience for the reader.

how much weaker it is to say 'I picked up the heavy bag' than 'The strap cut into my hand,'. Equally 'He ran quickly' is much weaker than 'He raced'

OK, thanks, these are great examples, Emma - I think I get it now.

Bugger, I think I do the heavy bag thing all the time, though. Oh dear, another technical thing to fret about when I'm writing - urgh.

Rosy x

I'm not a fan of this 'strong, specific verb is better than verb plus adverb' thing either. Or this notion of practicing writing with no adjectives or adverbs. I refuse to consider any of the words in the English language as second-class citizens. IMO each one has its place and the aim of the game is to find just the right one each time. One thing I really like about well-used adjectives and adverbs is that they signal the importance of that point better than a simple verb could. THe author is drawing my attention to that characteristic rather than another.

An example taken at random from a John McGahern short story:
'So what will you do now?' he asked fearfully.

He doesn't use an adverb on all speech tags, far from it, so that when he does I know it's because he wants me to know how the man spoke in this specific instance because it's relevant to the story.

Personally, I don't have a problem with 'frazzled by her flash of fury' either. It's all to do with context. I don't think you should 'play it safe', Casey. I think you should be true to your own voice while striving to communicate as best you can with your reader. If you imagine a sneery, cynical agent looking over your shoulder judging your prose then I don't think it'll help but that's just my opinion.

<Added>

describing champagne as 'effervescent froth' - i think they said everyone knows what champagne is like, you don't need to describe it

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. The point is not that the readers know what champagne is like, the point is what does your character know/think about champagne. If she has never drunk champagne in her life before and this is her first time at some special occasion then she might describe it in some detail using words appropriate to her personality, her mood, the circumstances etc. But I agree that it might be inappropriate for a social butterfly who drinks buckets of champagne every weekend to go into a lengthy description.

Ashlinn, I also almost picked Casey up on 'play it safe'. That sounds a very sad way to go about writing. As Ashlinn says, be yourself!

Rosy x

He doesn't use an adverb on all speech tags,

That's the point. The thing to be avoided is automatically tagging an adjective on, when the first thing to do is to get the speech sounding right, and only then to consider whether it needs the extra element of the adverb.

I agree that there's a time and a place for every word ever used in the English language. But I've now worked on enough aspiring writers' manuscripts to know that one of the most frequent (which means very frequent indeed) reasons they don't manage to convey what they're trying - the reason it's so un-compelling that no one would turn more than a few pages if they weren't being paid to - is auto-adjectives.

Playing it safe is disastrous. I would always want to understand more rather than less about what techniques I'm using in any given piece, and what are available to me, but I do understand that not all writers feel like that. There is the ugly-duckling stage with any writer, when you're moving up a step in understanding of technique, and challenging yourself beyond what you know you can do: sometimes it doesn't work. But playing safe by sticking to what you know does work isn't an option.

I came across this quote the other day, from the great pianist Clifford Curzon:

"If you don't dare risk a wrong note, your right ones are likely to mean a little bit less."

Emma