Should You Use Adverbs in Fiction?

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 11. On today's show, to adverb or not to adverb, what they are, what they do, and why some writers are so passionate about banishing them.

OK, welcome back again to another episode of Inside Creative Writing. My name is Brad Reed, and I want to give a special thanks to those people who have submitted some of their writing to me over this last week. I mentioned at the end of the last episode that I'm thinking about doing some workshop episodes where we take an episode to talk about some of your writing, examine it for things that you're doing well and maybe some of the things that you can improve on. I've had an overwhelming response to that. There's a lot of brave writers out there that want to take that opportunity. And I'm hoping that I can get to some of them.

Unfortunately, there's just no way I'm going to be able to get to everybody's. But I do want to thank you for being interested in being involved in the show in that way. I'm honestly not sure how it's going to work. As I play around with attempting to produce that type of show, I'm realizing that it's tough to do in just the audio version. It's really something that might be better for a video podcast so that we can be looking at the actual words on the page.

But that's not something I'm ready to take on. So I'm going to play with the format a little bit and stay tuned. Hopefully I'll figure out the best way to approach that because it is something I'm excited about trying. I also wanted to let you know, too, that there may be a week or two coming up here in the next month or two where I'm just not going to be able to get a show produced. I've got a few things coming up ahead in my life that are going to occupy a significant chunk of time for a week or two here and there.

So I apologize if we do have a week or two off. Don't worry if I'm gone for a week. It's not a sign of pod fade, which if you're unfamiliar with podcasts, it's kind of that the process of a show coming out less and less often until it just disappears. I don't intend to quit, so at least not for the foreseeable future. I still have a lot of things that I want to talk about.

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Introduction to Adverbs

So in a lot of the episodes so far, I've asked people to share with me some of the topics that they'd like us to talk about on the show. And if I had sat down before I started the show and guessed what the top 10 or 20 or even 50 things are that people would want me to talk about, today's topic would not have been on my list of what I expected people to want to hear about. But it's one of those things that I'm getting a lot of feedback on. A lot of people want to talk about adverbs, which I find really interesting. It's one of the most often requested topics for the show.

So we're going to talk about them today. I think adverbs have gotten a bit of a bad rap from oversimplifying what they are. I mean, we've probably all heard the advice, never use adverbs. Stephen King famously said, the road to hell is paved with adverbs. You may have had writing teachers or read books on writing that tell you adverbs are always a bad thing.

Now here's where I have a little bit of a problem with that. Adverbs wouldn't be part of the language if they didn't do something that no other part of speech could do. Now are they overused in writing? Without a doubt. Is our writing better without them? Almost always.

I got a really interesting email a few weeks ago from a listener named Carol. Carol, thanks for getting in touch with me. And she sent me this email after my interview with Pam Houston. It really got me thinking about this issue of adverbs. A part of Carol's message said this, one of the so-called rules that supposedly separates good fiction from schlock is don't use adverbs. Yet Pam Houston, a noted published writer, educator, and winner of many prestigious awards, used the following words in the first few sentences of her story, gradually, perceptively, barely, fully, and strenuously.

She goes on to ask, you know, if Pam is this great writer, which she, of course, admits that she is, and obviously she is, but if Pam is this very accomplished writer, uses these adverbs so freely in the opening to her story, then why this advice all the time to get rid of adverbs? I want to go ahead and read to you just that first opening paragraph of Pam Houston's story that she shared on our show so we can hear it in context. And it goes like this. This is from her book, Contents May Have Shifted, and it's the chapter called Delta 55. It starts like this. The plane is gradually, but perceptively, descending.

It is barely light outside, and we aren't due at Orly until nearly noon. There is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing outside my window. I come fully awake and realize that we are listing strenuously to the right.

Now, in this very short opening paragraph, Carol's right. It's littered with adverbs, gradually, perceptively, barely, nearly, fully, strenuously, an amazing litany of adverbs there. But what's really interesting, as I thought about Carol's email and went back to reread this story, is that in the rest of that story, I could only find one really obvious use of an adverb.

In other words, there's something about this opening paragraph that she has intentionally, on purpose, just filled with all of these adverbs. Now, I'd love to have Pam here to ask specifically about why she did that, but it's obviously intentional. So I'm kind of just left to make a guess as to why. And for me, as I read the story and I look at all the use of adverbs, it really gives the opening this sense of, boy, how am I going to say this? This sense of uncertainty, this sense of being in between, of liminality, if I'm using that word right. Nothing is quite anything in this moment.

And I think it really fits, really fits this story. I mean, she's up in this airplane. She's not really anywhere. She's leading into a story about uncertainty.

And so I think she's really intentionally choosing these adverbs almost in a poetic style in this opening to do something, to do something on purpose, especially when we see that the rest of the story isn't written that way at all. So that just really got me thinking about adverbs and how the advice just to always rid our writing of all of them, it just never felt right to me because they do have a purpose. They can accomplish things that no other form of speech can accomplish.

Understanding Adverbs

So let's get into adverbs and talk about why, well, first, what they are. For some of us, it's been a long time since maybe that junior high grammar class. So we'll review what they are. And then we're going to talk about why they are so harmful to our writing, but also the places where they might be beneficial to our writing.

So before we get into a deep discussion, I want to make sure we're all on the same page with what adverbs are. Now, it's a little bit more complex than this, but for now, I want us to think of adverbs as words that end in L-Y that modify the verb. So let's take a simple sentence here. We'll use the sentence, I walked slowly.

So we've got a subject, a verb, and an adverb. I is the subject, I walked, so walked is the verb, and then the adverb is slowly. It's modifying the verb. I used to think of adverbs as kind of a short way to say adding to the verb. An adverb adds something to the verb. I think an even better way to think of it, though, is ad as short for adjust.

So maybe we can think of adverbs as words that add just the verb. We'll take that same sentence and listen to different ways that different adverbs adjust the same verb. I walked quickly. I walked lackadaisically. I walked drunkenly. We see how these adverbs adjust the verbs in the sentence.

They nuance and they give that verb a little bit different meaning. So I hope we're all kind of on board with what we're talking about when we're talking about adverbs in today's discussion. They're words that adjust the meaning of the verb.

Okay, I'm going to use an analogy here that might be a little bit of a stretch, but I really hope that you'll follow me. If you're anything like me, I remember things a whole lot better through analogies than by simply memorizing a definition. So I want to use an analogy for how we should think about what adverbs kind of one of my things.

So I'm going to use an old 63 bug I used to have as my example. And I don't want you to turn off at the mention of auto mechanics here. I understand it's not everybody's world and it's kind of a mystery, but I'm going to make, I'm going to make it really simple, a simple analogy here.

So, so try to stay with me on this. I want you to think of your sentence as an engine. It's what makes your writing go somewhere. It's what makes your writing do something.

So your sentence is an engine. Now a carburetor does a very simple job for an engine. It mixes the gasoline with air so that it can be burned in the engine. That's all it does. It's just mixing the right amount of gasoline with the right amount of air so that your engine runs the way it should run. That's it.

That's all a carburetor is. So you don't need to be intimidated, intimidated by that. So in other words, if your carburetor isn't adjusted right, your engine doesn't run right.

So in this analogy, your verb is the carburetor that makes your sentence run right, that makes your sentence do what you want it to do. Okay, so I hope you're with me on that. Some examples here.

Let's take our example of I walked and we're just going to add to it. So our, our engine here, our sentence is going to be, I walked to the store. Now our verb works for the sentence.

In other words, our carburetor, which is our verb, is making this engine work. I walk to the store. The verb works in the sentence. The carburetor is working for the engine.

Okay, but what if that's not quite going where we want? In other words, I walked to the store doesn't quite capture what we want it to capture. Well, on the carburetor for my 63 bug, there's this little screw that slightly adjusts the fuel mixture. And that little adjustment in our sentence is the adverb.

So if our I walk to the store sentence isn't quite doing what we want it to do, we just, we tweak it a little tiny bit with an adverb. And we make it something like, I walked slowly to the store. So in our analogy here, I'm taking a screwdriver and I'm just tweaking that carburetor a little tiny bit. I'm just changing that verb a little tiny bit to make it do what I want it to do. To go from I walked to the store to I walked slowly to the store. I kind of hope, I hope you see, see what I'm, what I mean by this.

Weak Verbs and Adverbs

I know it's a little abstract. But here's the thing about adverbs and the thing that makes them so harmful to our writing. While they are incredibly useful, they're also way too easy to use. We don't have to find a better verb for our sentence when we use an adverb. I mean, think of all of the better verbs that we could have used in this simple sentence, I walked to the store. I sauntered to the store.

I strolled to the store. I ambled or I marched or I paced or I hiked or I staggered to the store. All these very highly nuanced verbs that could have given more power and more interest to our sentence. And yet all we did is take this very generic verb of walk and tweaked a little bit with an adverb. We plug in a generic verb and then have to tweak it to get the nuance we want rather than do the work of finding the best verb or the right carburetor that doesn't need to be adjusted. And even more, even more than that is adverbs make themselves way too easy to just plunk anywhere into our sentences.

I mean, in our in our short little sentence, I walked to the store. Listen to how many places an adverb can fit in that sentence. Slowly I walked to the store. I slowly walked to the store. I walked slowly to the store or I walked to the store slowly. That's what, five different places that that adverb fits into that sentence in a grammatically correct way for just a what a five word sentence.

It's amazing how versatile adverbs are. It'll fit almost anywhere. And this is why we have such trouble with adverbs finding their way into our writing. I mean, they're they're great and really easy to drop in almost anywhere and tweak a verb that might not be the exact right fit for our sentence. In fact, and this is a little nuts here. I picture that little L Y hanging off the end of an adverb, almost like a waving arm.

I mean that that Y, it's all curvy and bent, kind of like a waving arm, at least to me. I know this is a little crazy, but that's kind of the image that I have in my mind every time I come across one in writing that little Y is just hanging off there waving at me. And it's like it's trying to get my attention, like it's trying to say, Look, I might have a weak verb right here. And the thing is, I almost always do when I've got one of those little adverbs in there with that L Y waving at me from the page. I find that nearly every time I've chosen a vague verb that I've had to tweak with an adverb to get the sentence to do what I wanted it to do.

So it's not that adverbs are evil and never have a place. It's really that they're just easy and usually used to shore up a weak verb. So if you've got adverbs in your writing, it's actually not a problem with adverbs. It's actually a problem with weak verbs.

Now, going back to our carburetor example here, if you're constantly having to adjust your carburetor to make your engine run right, you've got a problem with the carburetor, with your verb, not the little adjustment screw, which is your adverb. It's time to replace the carburetor. It's time to replace the verb so that you don't have to tweak it.

Now here's how I do that. Here's how that process looks for me. I write in a Word document, so I don't know if this works the same on a Mac computer. I use a PC. My guess is it's probably the same since it's Word.

But this is the way it works in Microsoft Word. Open up your document and I hit Control F and I just search for L Y. What that's going to do is highlight all over your work, all these little words that might be adverbs.

Now, not every word that ends in L Y is an adverb. I mean, take a word like family. You know, that's not an adverb.

But most of what you're going to find are all these little highlighted L Ys, which are these little waving arms saying, you might have a weak verb in this sentence. They're waving me down at that point, so I go in. And what I do is I take a look at the verb. I'm going to ignore that adverb for a minute because it's a symptom. It's not the cause. And I'm going to look at my verb and ask myself, is there a better verb that will capture the action of the sentence?

Now, I'm going to use an example from a piece of writing that one of the listeners sent in, hoping to get it workshopped. I'm just going to use your first name. This comes in from Carrie. Carrie, I appreciate your submission. And this isn't the kind of workshop I'm imagining with these. This is just a sentence I grabbed as a good example to use in this discussion.

And he's got this one sentence in the story that he sent me. And the sentence reads like this. As he leapt toward the closed door, he could hear his mama frantically screaming his name.

Okay, so we've got that adverb, right? If I had that in my Word document and searched for L-Y, it's going to highlight that word frantically. And I'm going to see that little L-Y waving at me on the page to say, wait a second, come in here and look at this verb.

Now, the verb in the sentence is actually pretty good. It's screaming. Again, the sentence is, as he leapt towards the closed door, he could hear his mama frantically screaming his name.

So I'll take this sentence and I'll just say, okay, can I improve that verb? First of all, in this sentence, you can just lose the adverb and you're still pretty well off. A lot of times that's the case. You can improve the sentence dramatically just by losing the adverb. I mean, when somebody, when this character hears his mama screaming, the frantically is kind of assumed in there. I'm not sure that the sentence gains anything by the addition of that.

But what else could we use besides screaming in that sentence? Is that still, even though it's pretty good, is that still a weak verb? Well, what if we put in a word like shrieking? To me, that implies a little bit more of that frantically screaming.

So I just wanted to use that as an example of how I go in and analyze a sentence for a weak verb. Now when I find a weak verb, sometimes the verb that I need to replace it with is obvious. I mean, it's right there on the tip of my tongue, you know, right there at the tip of my fingers to, to replace and then suddenly I don't need that adverb. It becomes obviously imbued into the meaning of the verb.

But if I don't know what it is, then I'll use often the synonym function on my Word document. On a PC, you can right click on the word. In fact, I'm just going to do that right here. I'm going to right click and drop down to synonyms and I get words like loud, blaring, ear piercing, ear splitting, high pitched vocabulary so you can begin to grasp its nuances, its shades of meaning, before that word ever shows up in your writing. I mean, nothing comes off more pretentious or distracting than a thesaurus word that you've used incorrectly because it's not something that you're comfortable with using every day in context.

So that's our little side note on how to go about finding replacement verbs. Make sure it's a word that you're already comfortable and familiar with. Okay, so where were we? Yes, back to using our synonym function or the good old-fashioned thesaurus. We're going to use that to see if there's a better verb before we go reaching for an adverb. Almost always the right verb will eliminate the need for that pesky little adverb waving at you from the page.

Criteria for Using Adverbs

Now, while I don't think that we need to completely eliminate all adverbs from our writing, I do think that they should be made to fight for their lives to remain on the page. Adverbs survive in my writing only when they meet one of the three following criteria, and I'd love to hear if you have other criteria for yours, but these are the three things that would allow an adverb to stay on my page. The first thing is if I've found the most specific, most effective verb I can find, but it still needs, and I mean really needs, to be nuanced just a little bit more, then I'll use an adverb.

Now, this almost never happens. Usually if I try a sentence that I think really needs an adverb, if I try it without that adverb, the sentence is almost always better without it, even if the effective verb doesn't quite capture the nuance I'm looking for. Even then, it's usually better without that adverb.

The second criteria is that it nuances the verb in a way that undercuts the verb's meaning. Let me think of an example here. You know, maybe something like, he chuckled derisively. You know, we've got this verb chuckled that in its normal meaning, in its normal kind of nuances, it doesn't carry with it this element of derision. And as I'm sitting here now, I can't think of another verb that would capture chuckled, that would bring in this nuanced meaning of kind of a sense of derision in the chuckle.

So if it's an adverb that undercuts a verb's meaning or nuances it in a way, then sometimes I'll use it. I don't even like he chuckled derisively. I'd lose that.

But that's the closest example I could come up with. And the third way is really what we saw, I think, in Pam Houston's writing that we talked about at the opening. Sometimes I'll use adverbs if I'm going for that kind of passive, uncertain, mushy feeling to my writing for whatever particular reason. Adverbs are a good way to create that feeling in our writing. It's almost like a poetic technique. And the other place I'm just thinking of now that kind of goes along with that is I'll often use them in dialogue.

If I've got a character who I want to be kind of mushy or uncertain or passive, then a lot of times I'll have them speak with a lot of adverbs because they do come across that way. I think they're effective in carrying that tone. So those for me are the only three reasons that an adverb will survive on my page. Otherwise, they're gone. They drive me crazy.

Sneaky Adverbs

But you know what? I'm not done. Even then, after I've put my LY words on trial and made them kind of justify their existence and sent almost all of them packing, because some of the most often used adverbs are the sneaky ones, the ones that don't have that little LY waving at you off the end of the words, because an adverb is any word that modifies or describes a verb and is an adverb and needs the same scrutiny. Listen to just a couple of these sneaky adverbs so you can get an idea of what I mean. Listen to this sentence. The boy ran very fast.

Now, there's no LY words in there, but we've got words that are modifying our verb. The boy ran. How did he run? Very fast. Those are adverbs. Maybe a better sentence is the boy sprinted, maybe.

Now, we can lose those adverbs. Or the man almost fell overboard. So he didn't actually fall. He almost fell. Almost modifies the verb. It's an adverb.

And there's a better way to say that. So watch for those sneaky adverbs that are propping up weak verbs, whether they have that pesky LY ending or not. I thought about including a list here of the most common adverbs that don't end in LY, but there's just simply too many of them. And you don't want me to sit here and read off a list to you.

So what I hope you'll do is spend some time examining your writing really closely and see which adverbs you fall back on. And then identify them in your writing and make sure they justify themselves on the page. Make them really put them on trial. I mean, make them prove their case for having to be there. This makes me think back to my interview with Alan Heathcock. He talked about his tenets of fiction writing.

And on that list, he has as number 16, don't overwrite. Don't make a reader read a single word more than they need. If you make a reader read a single word more than they need, then you've given them permission to skim.

Now, that's a great tenet. And adverbs are almost always words that our readers don't need if we had simply chosen better verbs. So that's kind of my take on adverbs. I'd love to hear your comments about them. You can chime in over at the show's website is the specific page for this episode. I'd love to hear how you approach adverbs and kind of what your rules are for them.

Do they do they ever get in your writing if they do under what criteria? So I'd love to hear from you on that. Our weekly challenge. You probably guessed it. Open up your current project and search for those L. Y.

Weekly Writing Challenge

words. See if they are flagging you down to point out weak verbs in your sentences. But here's a side note. Don't get hung up on adverbs while you're drafting. When you're drafting, just get the words down, weak verbs and all propped up with all the adverbs that you want to use just to get your ideas down.

But then in revision, go back and root them out. Make them make them justify their space on the page. Our wise word this week. I guess I already mentioned Stephen King's famously famous quote on adverbs. He said the road to hell is paved with adverbs. I also like one by Mark Twain.

This one's a little bit dated, but it still gets the idea across. Mark Twain said 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. I'm not sure how many editors would take out the word damn anymore, but it goes to that same point. Very is another adverb. Often it modifies an adverb, but we're going to throw it in there with with adverbs for our purposes.

But it's another one of those words that should be flagging us down on our page to examine the verbs that we're using to make sure that they're strong. For next week, I realized that I've been doing this alternating thing with the show. I've kind of done an interview one week and then my own insights the next week and an interview the next week and then back to my own insights. I haven't done that intentionally. Believe it or not, that's just kind of the way the schedule has worked out for the availability of the people that I wanted to interview.

But I might end up sticking to that again next week and going back to an interview. I've got a couple that I'm trying to arrange right now, and if I can get them to happen over this next week, we'll have another great interview for you next week. If not, then I think I'm going to keep my topic to myself for now. It's one I've really been giving a lot of thought to and one that is a little outside the bounds of most kind of writing advice approaches.

So I'm still kind of mulling over how we're going to approach it. So I hope you'll tune in next week. Either way, I think it's going to be really, really an interesting discussion.

So that's all I'm going to give you about next week. And do keep in mind that we may again have a week or two every now and again where I'm just not able to get a show produced. So if that happens to be next week, which it may be, I apologize for that and I hope you'll tune back in soon.

So until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.