Adversity to adverbs

Earlier this week when I posted the paragraph about overused words in a commercially published book that sounds just like all fanfic, there were some interesting responses, one of which tripped a major, major fuse wire for me: not to use adverbs in creative writing. When people began requesting that I take some of the professional knowledge I used on the few occasions I get to beta edit for people and use it to explain writing and grammar, I wasn't terrifically interested -- except when I could either demythologize some of this stuff, blow up some of the commonly held misconceptions, or just plain set right all the bad information we've received as some kind of inherited wisdom all our lives. There are a million tutorials on how to write splattered over the Internet and pounds' worth of books in bookstores, there are pages of instructive (though far too often wrong) how-to's for fanfic, and I don't see any value in telling people the same old crap. What I do think I can bring to the table is 20+ years of experience in learning just how little I really know and what I've learned along the way, and can thus get medieval on the asses of all the pompous blowhards trying to convince people that pet peeves are correct rules, or would-be know-it-alls who think they've got a right to dictate what proper language is. I like getting medieval on people's asses when it comes to this stuff. Pedantic Mr. Peabody types annoy me and make me ashamed of my profession, especially those like the woman yesterday who wrote to us with this condescending, snotty letter about incorrect usage of some minor stupid point by a writer filing a story at the 11th hour from the floor of the Democratic national convention (and of course, she spelled his name wrong). I mostly just want to call in the Gimp for people like that.

And one of these opportunities for getting medieval would be, if I could, to take nice hefty stick to Mr. Stephen King's now-skinny ass for this absurd proscription against using adverbs. I swear, if I hear one more time how we shouldn't use adverbs because Stephen King says they're bad for writing, I will blow a gasket. (Full disclaimer: I used to love his books until about after Dead Zone; to me he turned into a hack who was telling the same stories over and over and using the same time-worn phrases and cliches, and also, his ego and the not being edited were just too much to bear, because he damn well needed to have someone weed-whack his prose in a huge way. By the time he published that awful, awful director's cut version of The Stand, he lost me, because it was a much better book edited.) Unfortunately, because of the weight he carries, everyone believes that what he says is gospel, and now people are decrying the overuse of adverbs and trying to randomly excise them from prose without any regard to their function.

There's nothing inherently wrong with adverbs. They add zest and color to the language in the same way adjectives do, by modifying simple, boring, everyday nouns in a way that lends a clearer, more alive-like feeling to words. In fiction, these words provide sensations: where we are, what it looks and feels like, color, and so on. They change a boring white rice dish into a colorful, spicy curry. So the idea that because people tend to overuse them means we should cut them out just frosts my flakes in a big way. I think it's some of the dumbest advice I've ever seen in a life of dumb advice, especially since it's been given by a guy who uses tons of adverbs rather liberally. Anything is bad when it's overused; that doesn't mean we should stop using things just because some people overuse them. If that were the case, no one could drink wine because some people are alcoholics. Remember how well that worked out in the 1920s?

So what is an adverb? An adverb is a word used to modify a verb, an adjective (a word that modifies a noun!), or another adverb. It will usually answer one of these questions: When, where, how, why, under what conditions, to what degree? Adverbs that modify adjectives or other adverbs will usually intensify or limit the intensity of the word they modify (two negative words, not and never, are adverbs, for instance).

Spike gleefully broke the teacher's neck. (how did he do it?)
Angel got in the car first. (when did he do it?)
Willow asked him to put the spell book there. (where is it going?)
Oz was extremely laid back most of the time. (just how much and how often?)

Many adverbs are formed by adding -ly to adjectives -- formal, formally; gentle, gently, etc. These are the ones most of us are familiar with and can easily identify as adverbs -- we see the -ly and go, hey, adverb! Mr. King says I should eradicate them from my writing! Bye now! But not all adverbs end in -ly, and not all -ly words are adverbs (some adjectives end in -ly, such as lovely and friendly). If you're in doubt, btw, most dictionaries will tell you what classification a word falls into. As always, I recommend www.bartleby.com's American Heritage 4 if you don't have one physically at your home.

Now, overuse is going to make people get their panties in a wad about everything. But what's possibly compounding this anti-adverb movement is also the difficulty many of us face in using them correctly. Because many of us get confused -- do I feel badly, or do I feel bad? It depends -- if you're doing a really crummy job of feeling something (maybe you're a clumsy, groping guy trying to fondle some girl's boob), then you're feeling badly. If you're under the weather, you're feeling bad. This is the kind of thing that can be really hard to understand for most of us, so misuse is possibly contributing to this adverbs suck issue. Most of the time, it would go like this:
Harry's new wand functions smooth smoothly and efficient efficiently.
Starsky performed very good well on the annual shooting evaluation.

There are tons of caveats about using adverbs, such as linking verbs, whether something suggests a state of being, and on and on -- these are often the determining factor of how you use adverbs. But for most of us, those problems aren't what's causing the panty-wadding about using adverbs at all. What all these Stephen King types are griping about is that adverbs weaken prose, and we use too many of them, and we can write a nice, clean sentence without them. True. And we can write nice, clean sentences without adjectives and commas and clauses and anything else -- a subject, verb, object, noun... hey, we're open for business. The problem is that without them, it's all kind of zzzzzz. I want to know that Angelus laughed wickedly as he taunted Wesley. Having him merely laugh doesn't carry nearly the same weight. I want to know that Bodie spoke haltingly when he confessed his feelings to Doyle (or that he spoke in a halting voice if you're scared you have too many -ly words already). Dom looking at Brian? Zzzzzzzzzz. Dom looks longingly at Brian? Yeah, baby! These things help us achieve a more life-like picture of what's happening, how people do things.

And of course they can be overused. No one wants to read an entire paragraph like this: "He stepped haltingly into the cruelly hot afternoon sun. Knowingly heading to his fiery doom, he willingly took the gem of Amara into the dark blue ocean, running as fast as he could, blindly stumbling under the coat he'd thrown over his head. All around him, people fearfully stepped back..." and so on. But that's just purpley overuse, not because any of those adverbs are necessarily bad. Used judiciously, they add oomph, but like anything in the world of writing, overused or used badly by hacks, they become annoying and simplistic. So I would say to those of you who think adverbs automatically make your prose weak and you should eradicate them at all costs: think again. By all means, use Mr. King's advice as a reason to doublecheck your work, keeping a wary eye peeled for the times you're overindulging. But don't just hack and slash because advebs are bad.

A word about a commonly misunderstood adverb, hopefully. Pompous, pedantic asshats will tell you that it cannot be used the way 99.9 percent of the population uses it -- as a kind of introductory statement: Hopefully, Fraser will not lick anything this time and we won't call attention to ourselves. The snobs will tell you that you must say something like "it's hoped that..." or "we hope Fraser will not..." But I leave you with this nice piece of advice from the Columbia Guide to Standard Usage:

Hopefully is a sentence adverb that has raised the hackles of some conservatives, but probably its overuse has made most of the trouble; it had been a perfectly good sentence adverb for generations before the recent objections were heard. Those who don’t like it usually urge that "I hope that" or "It is hoped that" be used instead, but hopefully is in fact Standard, just as are most other sentence adverbs.

So it functions not unlike thankfully and words like that, where we'd say, "Thankfully, the handsome Mountie came and saved us, or we'd have been eaten by a bear!" or "Unfortunately, the Ferrari died just as Sonny was gaining on the drug dealer." Next time someone tries to whack you with that one, pull this out and whack them back.

'Cause that's what I'm here for.