Even bad writing works.

"He walked slowly to the door."

How about 'crept'

"Each word was enunciated slowly and distinctly, each one calculated to be a blow to bludgeon hope to death.”

Though, yes, this works for me way better than the alternative sentence - but you did consider an alternative, and leave this one in because it was better, most adverbs could be culled for something sounding better, but I doubt if all could in every sentence they're used in.

Crept implies that he was trying to hide or sneak out. I didn't want to say that, just that he walked the way you would if you were thinking deeply about something.

And my point is that while yes, adverbs are often badly used, so are lots of words that aren't adverbs so why get the shotgun out for adverbs. Take any badly written piece from WW archives and, IMO, you will find poor word selection everywhere, not just on adverbs.

And, Colin, my definition of bad writing is that it doesn't work.

I think there are no rules you have to stick to in writing, once you know what you're doing, except possibly the one that says that you start at the top left-hand corner of the page and read right and then down.

Rules are what is acknowledged to work at a basic level: the things that help your meaning get across, either in making sense (which is where punctuation and spelling and a non-Humpty Dumpty use of language come in), or in making it believable and lively enough to keep the reader going. As always, once you know them, AND WHY THEY'RE THERE, you can break them to creative purpose.

Emma


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'He walked slowly to the door' seems to me a good example of the proper use of an adverb. The other possible verbs (on a quick think - strolled, crept, tottered, ambled, crawled, inched [towards], pottered ) may all have overtones the writer doesn't want. With dialogue, the spoken words should show how they're said, but you can't always do that with movement, though sometimes it's possible to build in another action (or bit of dialogue) that shows the delay, without telling it directly.

Emma

Rules are what is acknowledged to work at a basic level: the things that help your meaning get across, either in making sense (which is where punctuation and spelling and a non-Humpty Dumpty use of language come in)

These are English grammar rules.

or in making it believable and lively enough to keep the reader going.

These are creative writing rules.

What I would like to know, Emma, is who made up the latter and when?

Ashlinn

This is one of those arguments that pops up again and again. In a nutshell:

There are guides to help you write good english.
There are guides to help you write creative fiction.

These guides are there because good writers, or editors, have learned what has a better impact on the page, and they come back to tell us. There's nothing to say that you can't come up with something better, but chances are probably slim.

Colin M

Colin,

Obviously nobody told Scott Fitzgerald what the rules were. He used abverbs like they were going out of fashion (which they probably were). I counted 11 adverbs in one random page of The Great Gatsby, most of them speech attributions.

I wonder if these rules/guides are so recent that they have not stood the test of time like the rules of English grammar have. I don't believe in deliberately breaking the rules of grammar (I have to have a good discussion with myself before allowing myself to use a sentence fragment) but the rules of creative writing are far from clear-cut which is probably why they keep coming up for discussion.

That's why I use the term "guides", because that's all they are. However, I think it's probably worth keeping to them while you're learning the craft.

Why?

Because in order to learn any craft, technique or skill, it pays to complete an apprenticeship, and learn from those who can teach. Thinking you can run before you can walk is blind naivety.

Yes, 'guides' is a better word. You're pretty foolish not to take advice from a guide when you're in unknown territory, but later will want to explore on your own. You should have heard me spit - then argue - when each of my children came home aged around 7, saying 'Miss X says you should never start a sentence with 'and'.

Faced with writing which breaks either a grammar rule or a creative writing guide, I think one's entitled to ask the writer 'why?', mentally at least. There may well be an obvious answer, in that the sentence is both comprehensible and effective. If there isn't an answer - the sentence is either incomprehensible, or doesn't do anything worth doing, that suggests that the writer's broken the rule through ignorance (fair enough if they're a beginner) or simply because it's a rule, which is childish and suggests they're not really interested in good writing, just in showing off.

Emma

Great contributions to a fascinating subject.

May I just say that the expression 'You can't be serious' is far less powerful than the original from the mouth of McEnroe... 'You can not be serious' with an emphasis on the 'not'.

Len

Emma,

You said a a few postings back that it's always better to let the reader know how a bit of dialogue was said within the dialogue, rather than using an adverb to modify it (paraphrasing, but I think this was the gist). I buy the argument that overuse of adverbs is to be avoided, but why is it always bad to use an adverb as a dialogue modifier? Using Ashlinn's toolkit notion, there are some tools that are used frequently and others that are used rarely. I often need a screwdriver, so I keep it handy. I rarely need a gimlet, but I don't throw it away.

Just because adverbs are currently unfashionable doesn't mean that they always were and that they might not be rehabilitated in the future. At one time you could find lots of music tutors who would tell you to avoid distant harmonies, then along came jazz and now they sound conventional

smudger

No, I don't at all think it's always bad to use an adverb to modify 'said' or whatever, as part of dialogue. What I think is that we all need is to be alert to what we're doing when we do that, and why. It's automatically using an adjective and an adverb every time that makes everything read flat. Assuming that what we want our writing to be is alive, immediate and therefore convincing (in an emotional sense) to the reader, I would say that using the right verb, rather than a neutral-ish verb plus adverb, does that better, most of the time. And I'm not sure that excising one's adverbs is merely a current fashion. Shakespeare is the arch coiner of words, and many that he invented are verbs made from nouns or adjectives or adverbs. He preferred to make up a whole new verb, risking his audience not understanding it, than to use a dull one with a modifier.

As Colin says, what we call 'rules' are more like guides, and as such, they're the product of collective experience, and worth examining before discarding them. I would never say never, for how to write. But so often it seems less daunting to try to learn and follow rules than to clear one's own path through the jungle of possibilities. That's why the 'how to write' books that give sets of rules (nicely bullet-pointed, no doubt, and summarised in a pretty box at the end of the chapter) sell so well. And why they're the books that don't have much to do with writing that's worth reading. It's better training to read writing that's worth reading, and then go to Dorothea Brande or someone like her, who helps to find the mainspring of one's own writing. Then a writer is fitted, with both the toolkit and the judgement, to make his/her own decisions about what and how to write.

Breaking all sorts of rules in the above - not least pronouns. Ah well, it's late.

Emma

I think it was me that spoke up against using an adverb modifier to follow dialogue. My only reason is personal taste, because I find it more difficult to read.

If you have the modifier following the dialogue, or action for that matter, you have to hold the scene in your mind until you complete the sentence. Once you've got all of the information in your head, your brain swaps it over and put the modifier in front of the action anyway. Oh, hell, this is getting all complicated and I'm full of cold. Let's try:

"put that down," he said quietly.

Because of the nature of the command, I would read this in my head as being quite brash, but when I hit the modifier I rejig the sentence in my head. The result is a bit of a hiccup. I wouldn't get this if the sentence had been:

quietly, he said, "put that down."

But, within dialogue I think it works the other way, because in speech, we use adverb modifiers to follow an action all of the time.

"And he said, 'put that down,' but he said it quietly"

And just for the hell of it, I think "he walked slowly to the door" is a fine example of an adverb used effectively. The action and modifier are so close together that it doesn't cause a mental jog.

Again, this is based on personal preference for how I read, and I'm not the best reader in the world anyway. (which makes me wonder what qualifies me to lecture on the subject)

Great debate, though. Time for paracetamol and coffee.

Colin M