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Every Word’s a Choice – Part 8: Adverbs – Do you Need Them?

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“Adverbs are the tool of the lazy writer.”                                                                        Mark Twain

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” 
Stephen King            

The liberal use of adverbs, the telltale “-ly” words, especially has drifted out of fashion, in favor of more direct prose. It’s obvious what King and Twain thought of them. The death knell may have come some decades ago with the Tom Swifty. You may remember these awful puns: “I’ll have a martini,” Tom said drily. Or “I know who turned off the lights,” Tom said darkly. Or “I always eat at McDonald’s,” Tom said archly. At the height of their popularity, it was hard to hear an -ly adverb without thinking of the line that could introduce it, she wrote promptly. An occasional adverb, like an occasional pun is fine, it’s overuse that you want to avoid.

Many times, you can avoid the adverb problem by selecting a more robust verb, as in these pairs of examples. The first uses an adverb, the second a more colorful verb.

“Get off your duff and bring me that report,” the captain said angrily.
“Get off your duff and bring me that report,” the captain growled.

“Come over here and sit by me,” she said flirtatiously.
“Come over here and sit by me,” she flirted.

Which approach you use depends on your writing style and voice, but if you find yourself falling back on them to make your meaning clear, give your verbs a hard look.

Order, Please!

The previous post in this series talked about the little known yet widely followed English-language rule about the order in which adjectives are presented. Where to put adverbs in a sentence is a little trickier. Their position is less fixed. Adverbs are usually but not always put near the verb (or before the adjective) they modify.

For example, in these sentences, the adverbs barely, terribly, and wildly modify—that is, they change and in this case make more precise or intensify—the adjectives “plausible, hot, and inappropriate.”

Barely plausible alibi
Terribly hot day
Wildly inappropriate behavior

Careful placement of adverbs avoids vagueness in your writing. Some modifiers—“only” and “just” are prime examples—can function as either adverbs or adjectives and, as adverbs, they are often rather haphazardly placed. Keep in mind that they are modifiers, and need to be near whatever they are modifying. When you change their position, the literal meaning of your sentences actually slightly shifts. To avoid ambiguity, these words must be in the position that most accurately conveys your intention. You know what you mean, so you have to be extra-conscious of what you’re actually saying. It’s a habit worth developing.

A careful writer pays attention to these tiny differences in meaning. Here’s another example where moving the adverb affects the meaning

“Heck, I don’t even know the backstory.” (It’s a mystery to me)
“Heck, even I don’t know the backstory.” (And I’m usually in-the-know)
“Heck, I don’t know even the backstory.” (And there’s so much more to it)

The emphasis in the first version is on know. In the second example, the emphasis is on I, and in the third example, it’s on backstory.

“Just” And “Only” Trip Everyone Up

Sometimes placement is critical. Here’s an example from a literary magazine request for submissions (and tut-tut to them):

“We are only open in March for underrepresented voices; the window for general submissions (from all writers) is closed.”

What the editors probably mean is that they want submissions from authors who are members of underrepresented groups and no one else in March, but what they are saying is that those groups are welcome to submit in March and not at other times. The sentence probably should have read:

“We are open in March only for underrepresented voices; the window for general submissions (from all writers) is closed.”

More examples. Note the differences. What the sentence is implying is in italics.

She watched to make sure he only delivered the salad (and didn’t spill it in the customer’s lap or make disparaging comments about it. He only delivered it.).
He just wanted her to pay the check (not lecture him about his love life)

In conversation, this last kind of construction is used when the speaker is sort of apologetic about the ask. Kind of a “Gee I didn’t think this would be such a big deal. All I wanted was for her to pick up the check.” But it is ambiguous when we are reading and not hearing the speaker’s tone of voice.

What is the proper place for “only”  in this sentence? “I believed he was innocent of the burglary.”

Ahhh. Trick question. You cannot answer it unless you know what the sentence is intended to mean. Think about the differences:

Only I believed Jake was innocent of the burglary (everyone else believed he was guilty)
I only believed Jake was innocent of the burglary (I couldn’t prove it)
I believed only Jake was innocent of the burglary (and the rest were guilty)
I believed Jake was only innocent of the burglary (but not the b&e)

While a few of the differences in meaning might appear a bit subtle, and while you may think they don’t much matter, rest assured, they matter a great deal to Jake.

Part 9: Have some style!

For previous posts in this series, check the “Writers’ First Draft” tab on my website home page: www.vweisfeld.com.

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 7 — Word Order

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A famous story about James Joyce recounts how, after a day’s work, he told a friend he’d produced two sentences. The friend asked, “You’ve been seeking the right words?”
“No,” replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I’m seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”

This series of posts is about how to choose the most effective words to tell your story, and what to keep in mind as you make those choices.

Now we’ll talk about how you arrange those word—the order you put them in. The technical term for word order is syntax. English (and many other languages) usually organize the parts of a sentence with subject first, then verb, then object. No matter how baroquely convoluted a sentence becomes, how many phrases and predicates it includes, it usually follows a subject-verb-object order, as follows.
Jack ate the chicken (SVO)–not
The chicken ate Jack (OVS)
Ate Jack the chicken (VSO)
Jack the chicken ate (SOV)

This conventional order of sentence parts is something we absorb without thinking about it. Disrupting that order stands out and is called hyperbaton. It can give a pleasing break in the rhythm of the prose. Or it can be confusing. Sometimes, verb and subject are switched for poetic effect. For example: “Softly blows the nighttime breeze.” And, you can occasionally present words out of their accustomed order, for emphasis. Shakespeare did. You may have guessed that hyperbaton is a device to be used sparingly—and carefully. Where you’re likely to encounter it is in dialog for characters who are not native English speakers. In that usage, it immediately signals the person’s foreign origins. But, for most of my writing, as my Lithuanian manicurist would say, “I was not there going.”

Like subjects, verbs, and objects, when you use a string of adjectives, they have a conventional order too. When we violate that convention we may change the meaning or at the very least prompt a “Huh?” on the part of our reader. We don’t usually think about this. We don’t need to. The right order is ingrained.

Test yourself. Here’s a list of adjectives to modify the word “truck”:

big pickup American white disgraceful old

Quickly jot them down or number them in the order that feels right. Don’t struggle. Just write down what comes naturally. Was your order of adjectives more or less like this? Disgraceful big old white American pickup truck?

Here’s another try. These words modify the word “shirt”:

silk black long-sleeved Italian new overpriced

Was your order similar to this? overpriced new long-sleeved black Italian silk shirt?

There are 720 possible word orders for the set of truck adjectives and 5040 for the shirt set. I’m guessing the word order you chose is quite similar to mine. Why is that?

Obviously, there’s a reason. Adjectives in English almost always MUST be in this order: opinion first, then size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose NOUN. Opinion can be anything, even something you initially think of as factual. Thus, “beautiful blonde detective” versus “blonde beautiful detective.”

Who knew? As you’re reading, you may be surprised how often this adjective word-order rule is followed. Mostly unconsciously, on the author’s part. After writing this exercise I did run into a sentence that violated the rule. It wasn’t a catastrophe, but it did muddle the meaning. It mentioned a “comfortable old wingback red chair.”

Now if the world were full of red chairs, or they were some special category of chairs—a type of Chippendale, say—then “wingback” would distinguish this red chair from, say, a beanbag style red chair and might precede “red,” as the author had it. But neither of those conditions applies. To achieve a more precise phrase we’re left with following the rule: “comfortable (opinion) old red wingback chair.” Wingback chair being a specific type of chair, like dining room chair. You’d stumble over “dining room” if it appeared anywhere else in that phrase, as I did with “wingback.” For situations that aren’t so clear-cut, the rule is a handy thing to have.

Next Week: Those pesky adverbs!

To see previous posts in this series, covering nouns, verbs, and modifiers, click the “Writer’s First Draft” tab on my website home page (www.vweisfeld.com).

Every Word’s a Choice: Part 6 — More on Modifiers

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In the last post of this series, the emphasis was on modifiers, adjectives specifically. It talked about three keys to choosing a adjectives that will help your readers create the story picture you want to paint: they must be significant, sensory details are powerful, avoid overload.

Here are a few more attributes of adjectives to be alert to.

Precision
Some adjectives are so overused and vague they’ve become meaningless. What does it mean when you read that someone received “a big check” or “a little diamond,” that a new co-worker is pretty or beautiful or handsome? These judgments totally depend on the reader’s perspective and provide remarkably little information. They’ve become empty calories on the adjective buffet.

You might think it’s descriptive to say a dress is blue. But how many shades of blue are there? A website for designers shows 144. How descriptive is it, really, to say “blue”? Or green? There are 50 of them above. How different are Army green (maybe you’d choose it for the clothes of an ex-military character), fungal green (for a house in disrepair), Kelly green (for a patriotic Irishman), or teal (for a fashionista)?

The point is to make your descriptions as vivid as possible, which may mean going beyond the first adjective that comes to mind.

Surroundings
You know the old saying, “clothes make the man.” How you describe what characters wear, their living accommodations, their cars, the foods they eat—all should be selected based on who they are. A Buick is an American car manufactured by General Motors, as we all know. But if you write that your character is a Buick owner or a Lamborghini owner, your readers will surmise more about him than that he has a vehicle to get around in.

In other words, as in our discussion of verbs, the descriptive words you use have not only a literal, everyday meaning, they also carry connotations. If you say your protagonist is a Harvard graduate, that’s different than sending him to Michigan or Baylor. Different schools convey different impressions about the graduate, his family, his connections, and his attainments beyond the seal on the diploma. Make these choices mindfully.

Cliches
A word of caution: You don’t want to describe a character by drawing on all the clichés of status, high or low. People are more complicated than that, and such descriptions don’t ring true. I’ve received dozens of Facebook friend requests—you probably have too—from “retired Navy Seals” who live in Hawai`i, whose photos include friendly-looking dogs and adoring grandkids. And, oh, they’re all widowers. And handsome! Lucky me! These are clichés meant to make the guy seem manly, upstanding, and really OK. They make me laugh.

Once you settle on which details you need, you also have to find a fresh way to express them, avoiding clichés and overused phrases. Publishers don’t like them. Readers roll their eyes. Five years from now, your text may seem dated. Some clichés are so common, they can slip into our prose without our even noticing them. It takes a good ear to tune them in. One I read frequently is: “She let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.” Have read this a dozen times, most recently last week (in Yellowface), where it was used to demonstrate use of a cliché–an archetype of the trite. How do you know what’s tired and what’s fresh? This is one more reason writers have to READ.

Here are two descriptions, one of a city scene, the other of two sisters. These are the kinds of topics authors write about every day. They can be banal. But these authors dug in and their descriptions are memorable.
“We stopped in the shadows of decrepit wooden structures leaning toward one another over the cobbled pavement as though telling secrets.”(The Railway Conspiracy, SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee)
“Mandy’s clothes are smooth and sharp, Tia’s are rumpled and faded. Mandy’s hair is always pulled back. Tia’s is a mess of tangles. In short, Mandy is pressed. Tia is line dried.”(The Final Episode, Lori Roy)

Dialog is Different
As always, dialog is different than narrative. Trite phrases you wouldn’t consider including in your narration may be perfectly acceptable in dialog. In fact, I’ve read stories in which a character speaks almost exclusively in clichés. It says a lot about them, too. It’s as if they only know what someone else has told them—or have absorbed only tired, worn-out ideas. Author J.P. Rieger has created a wily Baltimore police detective who spouts business jargon whenever he doesn’t want his bosses to know what he’s up to. It’s meaningless—and hilarious—but it reassures the bosses every time. (A recent review of the new biography of Elmore Leonard talks about his stellar dialog: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/elmore-leonards-perfect-pitch .)

Next Installment: Part 7: Word Order Mayhem (A family emergency has slowed the posting of these articles. Expect Part 7 in early October.)

Find past articles in this series in the Writer’s First Draft tab on the home page.

“The Power of Titles”

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By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to a good title for the work. Sometimes too much knowing just confuses things. As frustrating, a title that would fit perfectly might be overused. Another one doesn’t convey much of a first impression. Still another might cross genre boundaries and provide little clue to the content. AI advocates suggest letting the machine review the story to come up with a title. (Didn’t work for me, even after several prompts.) “My Book” isn’t much of a title, even with (Finally!) added.

Last week, Author’s Publish hosted a webinar, “The Power of Titles,” in which author Emily Harstone addressed this problem. The most common type of title is what she calls the “placeholder” or “license plate” title. It conveys the work’s core idea or theme, but not much more. It’s often the most obvious choice, one anyone might pick if asked to suggest two or three possibilities.

A disadvantage of generic placeholder titles is they may be forgettable, so when your cousin who reads and loves your book talks about it with her friends, and they ask, “what’s the title?” she gives them a blank look. But placeholder titles can work. Harstone suggests The Hunger Games as one that manages to be specific and intriguing. The DaVinci Code is another.

Many books may share a one-word title like Witness. A quick Amazon search brings up multiple books with just the one word title, an added “The,” or close variants. John Sandford, though, has taken the one word “Prey” and tacked it onto various other words for a whole series of books, even when the combination doesn’t exactly make sense (coming next April, Book #36, Revenge Prey). Doesn‘t matter—you see that word “Prey” in big type and you know instantly what you’re looking at.

Harstone suggests reviewing titles in your genre (Amazon makes this easy if you search for, say, “best-selling thrillers”) and seeing whether your prospective title fits in with current trends, since a good title supports marketing. She says titles generally have to: convey a unique aspect of your book, convey the genre (in partnership with the cover art), and/or “communicate an idea you want readers thinking about.” Good examples of this last would be All the Light We Cannot See or We Begin at the End.

Titles that suggest the book itself will plow overworked ground are generally not of interest to me. That would include any starting with “The Woman Who . . .” or, worse, “The Girl Who . . .” They make me think (possibly unfairly) that the authors are trying to ride the wave of other books’ popularity, rather than coming up with their own ideas. Well, there are lot of books out there, and I need to make choices based on some criteria, even flawed ones. A trend possibly near its tail-end that Harstone notes is the use of numbers in titles. Examples are 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or 2018’s The Seven 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (another Evelyn with same last initial). One such book I read at the outset of this trend, which I recommend highly, is 2017’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti.

Having so many words, these titles risk violating Harstone’s advice that a title should look good on a cover, that is, not too long. Yet, we can all think of successful books that do have lengthy titles. I’m thinking of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Both memorable. At the other extreme was the brilliant Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2016), about young men on a cross-country criminal mission (dodging the law) who were massive fans of the LA Dodgers. When I see that title, the whole book comes back to me. Harstone might consider Dodgers a “helium title,” one that adds another layer, making it more than it first appears. They are more common in short stories (and poems) because shorter works are more focused. Novels do a lot of things, and a title generally picks only one of them.

Another example is Exposure by Ramona Emerson about a Diné crime photographer and a series of deaths, out of doors in the wintertime. Exposure clearly has two meanings here. My short story “The Queen’s Line,” set in 1884, might make you think of the London Underground (the Circle Line was completed that year), but no, it’s about the death of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold from hemophilia and the rumors about her genetic line that ensued. So, the title not only gets at the essence of the story, it conjures an era. At least to me.

If you have any tips based on how you develop titles for your own work, please share!

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 5 — How Adjectives Sharpen Definitions

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Whether you’re describing a person, a location, or a bit of action, details help readers envision it. Adjectives and adverbs provide many of these details. They help readers draw a mental picture of what your characters are experiencing. But adding details doesn’t mean piling on any old modifiers. Details, first of all, must be significant.

Here’s an example: “The entire palette was muted, faded, earthen . . . save for a lone splotch of brilliant, hysterical red on the dress of the peasant girl . . .” This quote is from the 2025 gothic thriller Victorian Psycho, which I reviewed yesterday. A key detail is that “splotch of brilliant, hysterical red.” Not only will the reader encounter quite a few splotches of red before the book’s last page, the most interesting aspect of the description is the unexpected word “hysterical.” They’ll run up on that one too.

Here’s another example: In my novel set in Rome, the blond hair of one gangster is mentioned several times the first time the reader “meets” him. Being white-blond, his hair sets him apart from other members of his gang and Italians in general. It’s a marker. When the blond hair is mentioned afterwards, most readers (those paying attention) will know exactly which gang member I’m writing about. A visual cue, like that blond hair, is sometimes more memorable than a character’s name.

That goes for sensory details in general—our descriptions can include more than what we see in our imaginations. They can include what we hear, feel, smell—even taste. A woman who always wears lilac perfume, a man whose voice has a growl underneath it, air so thick with pollution you can taste it. Or what our senses can’t perceive: sudden silences, the emptiness in a room, as in this example: “Robert switches off the ignition. The engine shuts down. The air-conditioning and radio turn off. Inside the car, it’s suddenly quiet.” (Lori Roy, The Final Episode, 2025) The sudden quiet is a significant detail.

The corollary to choosing significant details is to avoid using too many of them. If a barista who’s an “extra” in your story hands over a cup of coffee, readers don’t need an inventory of her bleached-blonde hair and low-cut shirt. Readers work hard to assemble a mental picture of what you describe, and then try to keep track of it. It’s annoying to go to that effort for unnecessary facts. Plus, too many details slow the story.

Master story-writer Anton Chekov once cautioned a young author about overloading the details: “You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time figuring out what deserves his attention, and it tires him out.” The key here again, is significant details

If you’ve done a great deal of research on some technical topic, and you believe it’s important to convey it, try weaving it in like you would backstory. Information dumps of any kind are tedious. Still, as I remember the late Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, he spends a considerable number of words describing the gun the Jackal selects for his assassination attempt and the modifications he wants made to it. It’s techy-stuff, but Forsyth’s character explains the purpose of each feature and change he wants. He made these details significant. He gathered me in, making me an accomplice to the crime he was planning.

Next Tuesday: More modifiers

Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484

Part 2: Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501

Part 3: A strong verb can do a lot for your story.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 3

Part 4: More about the importance of colorful verbs.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 4

Treating Themes Like Shy Forest Animals

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So many thought-provoking insights were in the George Saunders interview I wrote about last week, I saved a few for today. One issue he talks about is how politics and themes enter his writing. Not deliberately. He calls the writer mind the one “that wants to pull the big manure truck with your politics and your thematics in it and dump it on the reader.” We’ve all read novels like that, that hammer home their point again and again, as if the reader is too dim to get it.

If you can keep that conceptualizing mind quiet, Saunders believes, your themes and politics will behave “almost like really shy animals.” He recommends simply ignoring them, pretending you’re not interested in them when they come out of the woods. If you instead concentrate on the story you’re telling, these ideas/themes/whatnot will be there. They’ll leach in, coming in “so honestly, and they won’t be abstract, but intimately linked to action and character.”

Maybe that’s why, not deliberately, but completely subconsciously, I didn’t even recognize how much the theme of prejudice (and its ill effects) had seeped into my novel, Architect of Courage. I hadn’t set out to write a book about prejudice; in fact, I hadn’t even realized so much of it was there, in one way or another, until after the book was finished and I was working on blurbs and synopses. You can’t hide who you are, I suppose.

This topic reminds me of how much I admired Brad Parks’s crime novel, The Last Act, which he wrote in furious response to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Banks’ laundering of drug cartel money (which I learned about only because he included an incendiary author’s note). The book itself says nothing to convey his outrage; on the surface it’s an entertaining crime story, with nice twists, but it lays up next to that theme.

Saunders believes it’s a matter of being patient with the writing and letting the story go where it wants to go (the idea of a story having its own wants is a little hard for me; it’s easier to think of letting your subconscious mind work hard), and not forcing it. When an author pushes a story in a particular direction you can run into the problem of, “Oh, she did that goofy thing for plot reasons, not because it makes any sense.” Saunder would probably disagree, but in mysteries, sometimes the plot does need to go in a certain direction, yet it cannot seem that the author is steering it that way. If it’s too blatant, readers feel manipulated.

Television shows, working against constraints of time and possibly imagination, make transparent plot-driven choices all the time. Why do tv police officers always decide not to call back-up? Why do young women wearing long nightgowns and carrying a candle that will inevitably blow out go down in the basement at night to investigate a mysterious noise? These are plot-driven actions that are character-driven only for people who are irresponsibly reckless. We watched two different Scandinavian tv mysteries in a row where a woman officer decided to trail a dangerous suspect in her car at night in bad weather despite her colleagues on the radio saying, “Wait for back-up!” Since one of the main reasons people enjoy reading fiction is finding out “what happens next,” the more the what’s next isn’t obvious, the better off the author is.

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 4 — Verbs (Still) Do the Heavy Lifting

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Here’s more on how choosing strong verbs can bring your story alive.

Does your character merely walk into a room? How does he walk in? You can make his style of entry specific and more visual by adding an adverb:
            He walked slowly into the room.
            She walked briskly into the room.
Better yet, choose a strong verb—one that works harder for you.
            He can stroll, sashay, amble, stagger, or trudge into the room.
            She can stride, race, march, skip, or strut.

Characters can hike, parade, saunter, shuffle, step, skip, wander, lope, meander, plod, shamble, hustle, and on and on. It all depends on who they are and what they may expect to find in that room. A teenage boy about to be called to task for denting the family Buick will enter the living room where his father waits very differently than would his sister who just won the school spelling bee. Personally, I’d like to see a character who scuttles into a room, but I haven’t yet written about a scuttler.

Try this
Think about how you might replace the pedestrian verbs in the following sentences with something more interesting. In some cases, tighten up the wording or remove unnecessary filter verbs (like “see,” “hear,” etc.). These sentences aren’t wrong. They’re just not as interesting as they might be. And a whole book of not very interesting sentences ends up being a not very interesting book. Here’s an example of verb replacement: The cat was in a square of bright light. You might replace “was” with “sunned.”

Your turn:
He said that was great. (Hint: take out a couple of words.)
That bullet was much too close for comfort.
From the living room, I heard a great crash.
My glasses, broken in the fall, were in my jacket pocket.
I saw she was much too sunburned to have spent the day at the library.

Let’s look at a few of the verbs in our song (discussed in Part 2 of this series and linked again here). Right away, in the first line you’ll see a “was,” but there’s also a “carried,” which is an action you can picture and a “lived,” (a verb full of life). Strong and evocative verbs in the song include: “stopped rambling,” “marched me away,” “sailed off”—sounds like a lark, doesn’t it?—“stained,” “butchered,” “corpses piled” (no burial niceties). The Australian soldiers “sailed off” but, once wounded, were “shipped” back home, like cargo.

One thought to bear in mind. Words have their usual, literal meaning, but they also carry secondary meanings. “Stained” is a good example. You can understand this verb as merely discoloration of the sand and water, but it also carries—maybe even subconsciously—the implication of shame or something dishonorable: “a stain on one’s reputation.” A stain is almost never a good thing. “Butchered” is another example. While it could just mean killed, in this context, it conjures up another, more powerful meaning—that of “indiscriminate slaughter.” Especially the choice of “like lambs to the slaughter,” with lambs being a symbol of “innocence.”

And, of course, readers bring their own context to a story and the words in it. While we all can be moved by the “lambs to the slaughter” image, the mother or brother of someone slain in war would hear it quite differently.

Like everyone, I have a few writing pet peeves, nails on the blackboard kind-of-things. They include the verbs “get” and “got.” I eliminate them as relentlessly as I chase down a wasp in the house. They’re perfectly fine words, but they mean so many things! Scroll down the list of definitions [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/get], and see for yourself. When you find one of them in your story, it’s an opportunity to identify a more precise verb!

Next Tuesday: Adjective and Adverbs
Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484
Part 2:  Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501
Part 3: A strong verb can do a lot for your story. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11536

“Swing for the Fences”

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George Saunders,

Having a Marie Kondo moment, I’ve been clearing out old magazines, giving one last nostalgic look-through. We’re talking copies of Gourmet that go back over 50 years (before food processors, anyway), a magazine that ceased publication 16 years ago. There’s a stab of pleasure in seeing my notes written alongside recipes I cannot recall ever preparing (“good!” “this process works!” “too salty” “not as good as it should have been”).

I have a long shelf full of the short story magazine Glimmer Train too (1990-2019). At one point, every quarterly issue. It was hard to get through them, and I tended to read the stories and skip the interviews. I wasn’t writing my own fiction then, so they didn’t necessarily land with me. Now they do.

Winter 2015, the interview was with the wonderful George Saunders, lecturer and author, who won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and wrote the absolutely-worth-reading-again A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, which dissects short stories of four Russian masters and why they work.

Glimmer Train interviewer David Naimon asked Saunders how he achieves his remarkable fictional “voice.” It was hard, Saunders answered, until he decided to loosen up and “just be funny, a little pop culture-ish, to be sci-fi.” While the stories may be dark, he’s trying to put his fictional world into some extreme circumstance “where things are going really badly, and then just see how people behave.” Not that well, as you’d guess.

His stories are infused with verbal energy, pizzazz. If you’ve read Bardo, you’ll remember how the multiple conversations among the dead are lively and often hilarious. It’s a performance, and a high-wire one at that. He believes that resorting to “extraordinary means” of entertainment are necessary to get readers beyond the surface, down to some truth about life.

There are certainly tropes in every genre—romance, mystery, etc. Some readers may find them comforting—they know how a story is likely to develop (and end); others grow to find them boring. For my taste, the domestic thriller/untrustworthy spouse tropes have become tired, as has the “collection of old friends who meet up in a place where they are cut off by weather or whatever, secrets come out, and people start dying.”

Saunders is often accused of being experimental, which we can think of as “not ordinary and trope-stuffed,” and he cites his teacher Tobias Wolfe as believing “all good writing is experimental, because, if not, why would you do it? If you aren’t venturing into something new, why bother?”

In other words, a good writer would not ride the trends, attempting to suss out the “next big thing” that will be the key to getting published. (Teenage vampires—I’ll do that!) These days, the chances are so low that a new writer or even a mid-list writer will get or keep a major publisher, and so low that a self-published book will become a best-seller, why not just swing for the fences? Figure out what you’re good at, says Saunders, whether it’s creating physical detail, plotting, creating characters, or whatever you do that has some energy behind it and play to your strength

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 3 — Verbs Do the Heavy Lifting

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Some languages get their power from colorful imagery (Arabic, for example). Others—like Chinese and English—offer strong verbs. Are the verbs in your stories doing all the work you want them to do? Weak verbs produce flabby prose.

Avoiding Weak Verbs

The various forms of the verb “to be” are weak verbs. “To be” verbs—is, are, was, were, and so on—do only one thing, they establish that something or somebody exists, they do not tell us anything more. They embody no action. Other weak verbs include forms of have and do, as well as shall, will, should, would, may, might, must, can, and could. As an editor, I like sentences that get to the point. “There is” and “there are” are weak ways to start a sentence. Instead of plunging readers into the action, they put distance between you and your reader.

“To be” verbs slip into our writing in other roles too. You use them when you want to suggest a continuing action, one that takes place over time, like “She was eating a sandwich while he talked,” though you could just as well say the more direct “She ate a sandwich while he talked.” Compare this pair of sentences. Which arouses more interest?

He was driving erratically. versus
The car veered over the center line and back right, nearly clipping the curb.

“To be” verbs also appear in passive voice constructions. Editors constantly tell writers to “avoid the passive.” Passive constructions hide the responsible actor (like the famous “Mistakes were made.” By whom?). Of course, if you’re writing a mystery, you may want to obscure the guilty party! The passive does work occasionally, but, as a general rule, steer clear. (Find some passive voice myths punctured here.)

Sensory Verbs—Do You Need Them?

Verbs related to one of the senses—heard, saw, smelled, tasted, felt—often end up being filter verbs. They put distance—a filter—between you as the author and your readers. If you write, “Jack heard the front door slam,” you tell readers three things: the door slammed, and Jack heard it, and some unseen narrator is telling them so. You’ve put a little narrative gap in there. If you simply write “the front door slammed,” the reader hears it too. Directly. Much more engaging. Another comparison:

She saw a man’s shadow on the bedroom wall. versus
A man’s shadow inched across her bedroom wall.

Your Prose Isn’t a Movie

As you picture the action of a story in your mind, you may be tempted to describe all your characters’ movements for clarity. But readers easily follow everyday actions involving sitting, standing, turning, walking, etc. without having them spelled out. There’s no one right choice in handling everyday actions. The important thing is to think about it. Make your choice consciously. For example:

He stood up from the chair and walked through the door, out into the hall. versus
He left the room.

No one will think he dragged the chair out of the room with him. Of course he got up. And he couldn’t have left the room without walking through the door. You can cut to the chase unless there’s a reason not to. Another one:

She rose from the kitchen table, shuffled to the stove and picked up the coffeepot, turned back to me at the table, and filled my cup. versus
She poured me another cup of coffee.

If she poured the cup of coffee, all the other actions are implied, and you can move along, unless there’s a compelling reason for all the detail. Maybe she is very weak or infirm, and doing all that is a Big Deal. Maybe the reader knows she’s put something harmful in the coffee, so the minute attention to the action is deliberately dragging out the suspense.

More on verbs next Tuesday.

Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484
Part 2:  Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501

The HEAT is On!

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Last month at the annual conference of the Public Safety Writers Association, which comprises police, fire, federal law enforcement, emergency services and other professionals—mostly retired, because when else would they have the time and energy—and people like me who write about them. I’m on the Board of the organization because I do the newsletter.

The conference itself was preceded by a day-long workshop on the craft and business side of writing. Treasurer Kelli Peacock gave a nice presentation on subplots.

I liked the way she explained it, and will admit to not necessarily planning particular subplots, but ending up with them anyway. Kelli said that, just as in real life, the characters in our stories—even short stories—generally have a lot going on in their lives. Subplots complicate their lives and your store and put situational pressure on a character.

As an example, she cited the movie Titanic, where the doomed romance between wealthy Rose (Kate Winslet) and steerage passenger Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) was the main plot, but the subplot revolved around the class differences aboard ship, which created extra situational pressure. A good subplot is “always in the room,” even when characters are doing and talking about something else. SA Cosby’s wonderful novel Razorblade Tears is always about interracial relations, even when Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are busy tracking down their sons’ killers.

In that way, subplot is similar to subtext, which is what is really being said. I had a friend whose mother was super-critical and always hated whatever she wore. One say, her mom looked her up and down and said, “Now that’s a nice outfit!” No simple compliment, that, but rather a critique of every other outfit she’d ever worn. Subtext can be subtle (unlike my friend’s mom), but subplot involves obvious thought and and action by the story’s characters.

While subplots can meander along, seemingly unconnected to the main story, often they eventually converge to muddy up the main action, or somehow reinforce the theme of the main story. To me, there’s a big difference between plot (what happens in a story) and theme (what it means). If you’re puzzled about what the significance of a story is, the subplot may reveal it. There’s the famous dictum by E.M. Forster that a plot is a narrative of events that emphasizes causality, whereas a story is just the sequence of events. I and others believe he got it exactly backwards. A plot is merely a sequence of events; a story contains the understanding of those events. Subplots and subtext, then, are powerful contributors to story.

Kelli advises wrapping up the subplot after the drama of the main plot is resolved, to give readers “a place to collect themselves after the emotional high of the climax and to savor the fact that order has been restored.” Resolution of the subplot is an extra treat, she says.

Subplots must have been on the conference-goers minds as a result, because twice someone mentioned what a great movie Heat was for subplots. (That’s the Michael Mann film starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and the late Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore, and many other.)

Coincidentally, our local movie theater was playing it last night, and I went. And, yes, it was full of subplots–the personal lives of the gangsters and the principal cop that run in parallel with the criminal activities and the revenge the gangsters take for stuff that went badly wrong, which are corollary to the main plot. All these story lines enrich what would have otherwise been a rather typical heist film and make the audience (me, at least) root for both sides. See it if you can.

Further Reading
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter. Highly recommended.