by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

It’s almost a commandment among fiction writers: Cut the adverbs!

Sol Stein called adverbs a form of “flab” and advised cutting them all in a manuscript, then readmitting only “the necessary few after careful testing.”

Mr. King famously wrote: The road to hell is paved with adverbs. He did, however, add this:

I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I must insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special occasions … and not even then, if you can avoid it.

I’m all for active verbs doing the work. Instead of He walked angrily out of the office the better choice is He stormed out of the office. 

I am also hostile to adverbs in dialogue attributions. An action beat or the context should show (not tell) how something is said.

Not:

“I’m going to rip your lungs out,” he said threateningly.

This:

He got in my face. “I’m going to rip your lungs out.”

All well and good. The other day, however, I wrote this in my WIP:

He nodded. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

I stopped, because what I saw in my mind wasn’t a mere nod. It was one of those exaggerated head bobs you do when you really (adverb!) agree with somebody. I paused and thought about how to “show” rather than “tell” this. But it seemed like overkill, as in:

His head bobbed up and down like an oil rig. 

This was not a moment “big” enough for something like that.

Finally, my fingers fighting me somewhat, I wrote:

He nodded heartily. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

This triggered my adverb alarm. I was about to change things again, but started asking some of the essential questions of our trade: Is this going to bother the reader? Is this a “speed bump” or “flab”? Or is it a simple and efficient way to paint the picture I saw in my head and give that to the reader without muss or fuss?

Such are the little things we writers brood about. (Note: I’m not of the ilk that believes the first way you write something is always the best way, the purest way, the way that should never be trifled with. That is an exceedingly misguided view, alarmingly facile, and I mean that most earnestly.)

My advice then is simply, engagingly, and precisely this: Use an adverb only when it does the job faster and more efficiently than any alternative.

Also: Give your readers the respect of a little brooding about your prose.

Do you think readers care? Or is all this talk about “brooding” just a waste of time?