Midnights, March: 27

Coupla tired eyes here, reporting for duty. 

I've been thinking, what if I took the advice of so many of our best writers and knocked out all adjectives in my prose (to say nothing of the adverbs!)?

How grim that sounds. How dreadful and stifling. For I dearly love an adverb, and the adjective is my delight. 

Granted, this advice is often directed toward novice writers, one of those Rules of Writing meant to solidify a strong foundation before a writer begins to break the rules to achieve specific effects. Instead of she said pleadingly, try she pleaded. Don’t depend on modifiers, the rule says, when a good, strong, toothsome verb will do the trick (see what I did there?).

[I get it. Rules are important. But they’re not infallible. For instance, ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he chuckled contains no descriptors. And yet.]

Without the descriptors, we still need to set a scene and communicate the manner of action. A writer may use vivid verbs, but if she wants to do more than that, she must fall back on metaphor. This can be wonderfully resonant and artful. But you can’t stack them endlessly, lest they bog down the narrative. Are metaphors always better? More efficient? More elegant?

Sometimes, yes. My thesis advisor in college had to straight-up tell me to add more metaphors to my writing, so maybe there’s something to it. They can be puh-retty effective.

Still, I like adjectives. Maybe my writing can veer into the florid because of it; maybe it verges on purple at times. I just want a little more room to play with sounds sometimes, or I want what I communicate to be precise. All art is limited to begin with; why eliminate one set of tools out of mere prejudice? 

Likely it is better writing to thin out the crowd of adjectives and adverbs. But it is not me, and that matters, too.