The more I write, the more I am taken with it, the magic of the word. Turn the wrist, hold out a balm. Flick, and you have a blade. To be able to put out one, two, three words for a title and draw people in; convince them to pause in their hurried steps and step inside, there is a power in that. They pull up a seat, and some linger and chat. Some cry a little; other times they walk out still laughing because it was the room of your childhood they had entered, and they remembered. The window to your marriage you’d opened, and they know. They inhabited your messy soul for a moment, and they blushed a little. It was their one-minute confessional before they drew the door back out to the light.
There is something religious about writing for me, an act that calls for devotion, affection, discipline, even bloody sacrifice. I find writing redemptive, every word sacred. If you pile on the descriptors, especially those adjectives and adverbs you are so fond of, you reveal a lack of faith in the rest of your words, either in the potency of language or your own ability to cherry-pick its offerings. Your line must not be vivid enough, else why do you need four modifiers in a breath? Could you find one or two that do the job? I am full of faith. Let’s try this together.
The mountains were draped by black curtains of ominous storm clouds, portentous of trouble over marshy waters.
Sorry, this is not sexy. But I am so grateful for the mercy of the missing adverb I want to cry.
For starters, we have the imagery of darkness replaying itself in the draped black curtains. Then the picture of something brewing duplicated in ominous, storm, portentous, trouble. As if the two ideas weren’t redundant enough, they feed each other (black and storm, for instance, serving both the gloom and imminence).
Let me illustrate how I see the writing process with a metaphor, a religion all its own for many. We have the three-pointer in basketball, made farthest from the basket. The ball, which we can liken to the word, spurns distance, flying with grace, muscle, surety. This is writing, the art of nailing it. Interestingly, the three-pointer holds a success rate of about 35% in the NBA. The best players in America make it only a third of the time.
So an autopsy of our overclouded sentence reveals the problem wasn’t so much a superfluity of adjectives or even of ideas. That was merely the symptom of either a lack of clear purpose or mistrust in the authority of the word. I say it was a spiritual death. I usually build from the bone of meaning with nouns and verbs I hope are crisp rather than reach for fat and spice. If a noun is picturesque or compelling enough, I hold back the adjective. When I want more, I go with the least possible number of modifiers while staying mindful of other elements of communication (tone, for instance). So in rationing my words as I would my lunch in wartime, it isn’t just economy I’m after but also meaning, style, tone, and depth. I look to convey all these elements as efficiently as I can. I am not saying you can’t describe the morning in three adjectives. Sharon Olds with her trippy, hypothermic descriptives has me in knots over her pain-saturated poems. But let’s respect this thing we call language. That is the sacred.
Of course, I am talking to those who want to raise the bar on their writing. We have a huge pet aisle here on WordPress, and if you mean only to keep up the anecdotes about your dog, there’s no need to hamstring yourself. But if you want to be writing better, cut sharper on the page than you did four years ago, don’t give yourself cheap praise. Question your choices and their motives. Whether you’re writing a travel journal, essay, fiction, or poetry, ask yourself if every word is necessary. Is each one doing its thing, contributing something fresh to the picture? Fancy dribbling isn’t what scores your game.
If you have a better way — and the shelves are lined with authors who do — by all means have at it. But first, ask any man. A hint of perfume, and he leans in. Assault me with it in the elevator, and uh, I think I’ll take the stairs. The sin of gluttony abounds in all the arts. There is such a thing as too much salt in your sauce, too much red on the canvas, too much bling with that outfit.
Black clouds sat over the mountain.
Oh, but what’s that? You think me a blogging Grinch who’s out to steal your Christmas or keep you from your ebook sell-out. You think I didn’t catch the adverb in your clutch. Friend, Faulkner enjoins us to kill our darlings, and all I can say is when you are ready, I can point you to the altar of beauty.
[Poetry] is for me Eucharistic. You take somebody else’s suffering, their passion into your body and…you’re transformed by it, you’re made more tender, or more human. You’re more alive to your fellow human beings. I could literally read a poem and lift my head from the page and look out and my heart would just be softer. I think it kept me alive for a long time.
~ Mary Karr, 2011 Writers’ Symposium by the Sea
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