October Novel Prep Challenge

Hello ember_rain,

I wanted to put forward the following:

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be” ~ Mark Twain

“Now I have certain instincts, and I wholly lack certain others. (Is that "wholly" in the right place?) For instance, I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. . . . There are subtleties which I cannot master at all--they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me--and this adverb plague is one of them.”
(Mark Twain, "The Contributors' Club." The Atlantic Monthly, June 1880)

“How well [Evelyn Waugh] faces the problem of linking passages between the scenes. There is almost a complete absence of the beastly adverb--far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.”
(Graham Greene, Ways of Escape. Simon & Schuster, 1980)

“Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost"; safe men begin, "it may be advanced"; you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.”
(Walter Bagehot, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers," 1855, in Literary Studies)

“In order to write good stuff you have to hate adverbs.”
(Theodore Roethke, quoted in The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, by Allan Seager. McGraw-Hill, 1968)


The war against adverbs didn't begin with King, nor will it end with him. One of the reasons it's talked about so often, is because adverbs can be dangerous to writing.

It's not that we should never use an adverb, or shun them entirely; it's that they have a nasty habit of breeding in our work and making it unreadable.

Adverbs are a lot like dandelions. One on a lawn, even two or three adds a splash of color, but twenty overwhelms the grass.

Consider the following:

"James," Mary hissed menacingly. Her chest heaved alarmingly with her fury. It seemed to snap around her shockingly.

James stumbled abruptly, trying to escape her unbearably wrathful form as she dove abruptly at him.

I don't know about you, but that's not so great. The adverbs don't add anything, and all the ly's clutter the writing and make it sound bland to the ear. All of them could be cut without losing an ounce of meaning.

"James," Mary hissed. Her chest heaved with fury. It snapped around her like lightning.

James stumbled back, trying to escape her wrathful lunge.

To me, the second example is far more engaging.

Either way, I believe this forum is the best place to share writing advice. Even if the piece of advice in question goes against what works best for us, it might be just the thing to get another writer out of a rut.

I would rather have every bit of advice thrown at the wall, and take what sticks, then to have none .