Flogging the Quill

Writing for Effect: throw out the adverbage

Many beginning storytellers who contact me fall short of doing much more than putting information on the page with their narrative. In storytelling, you’re not writing to inform the reader—you deliver information, of course, but that’s not the purpose—you’re writing to affect the reader. To craft words that create an effect in the reader’s mind.

Maybe it’s the psychology major in me, but I can’t help but think of the stimulus/response paradigm. You, the writer, produce a stimulus. The reader provides the response. The nature of your stimulus determines the reader’s response. What could be more simple? It may not be simple, but it is the key to writing for effect, and that’s what opens the door to successful storytelling.

Here’s the effect I want your writing to have on me—I want it to trigger in me the sights and sounds and smells of what’s happening. I don’t want approximations, I want that reality. And I want it to be effortless—I should react without thought to the stimuli you put down on a piece of paper and get it. I want to experience the story, not just learn about what happens.

You begin a story with a single stimulus— a sentence formed with a string of words. Your sentences accrue and, with luck, congeal into a larger stimulus that affects your reader: the story. Drilling down, it begins with the word choices you make in each sentence—especially verbs and their hangers-on, adverbs. Have you chosen for effect?

Here’s a simple-minded example (and one of the reasons adverbs are the bane of writing for effect). This is fundamental stuff, and I don’t mean to insult you…I just want to contrast effect to info. A story starts with this:

Jimmy walked slowly across the cluttered room.

Simple information. I see, fuzzily, a guy walking. Not very fast (but I can’t really picture it). There’s stuff in the room (but who knows what).

The effect? Not much. No clear picture comes to mind. First thing to do: ditch the verb/adverb combo and choose a verb that evokes a picture, at the least, and at best characterizes the action. If, for example, your story is suspense, then how about…

Jimmy crept across the cluttered room.

Better. Here are other possibilities, depending on the nature of the story:

· In a fight scene, it might be “Jimmy lunged across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is a dancer, then he “glided across the cluttered room.”

· Make Jimmy a burglar and he “skulked across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is in no hurry, then he “ambled across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy is in a hurry, then he “dashed across the cluttered room.”

· If Jimmy has been over-served at a bar, then “Jimmy weaved across the cluttered room.” Or maybe he tottered, or staggered, or, my personal favorite, sloshed.

Each of those verbs evokes a picture of Jimmy’s body moving in specific ways. They are “visual” verbs that created a specific effect in your mind. Stimulus > response.

There’s a reason adverbs rob you of effect—they are abstractions of actions, pallid substitutes for the real thing. They can’t have much of an effect. For example, one of my clients wrote,

She grinned mischievously.

Now, the average reader would take that in, plug in some sort of vague image, keep on rolling and never realize she was cheated—but she was. There’s a much more lively and concrete picture to create in the reader’s mind. For example:

She grinned, mischief sparking in her eyes.

Or, hey, what about something like this…

She grinned like a fox that had just found the keys to the henhouse.

In the first example, because you have to interpret “mischievously” (what, exactly, is that?) the effect is to evoke an unsure image of a grin. In the second, you see a face in action: lips curve, you see a grin, you see eyes, you see playful activity behind those eyes. All that from three extra little words chosen for effect. The third example goes beyond word choice to tap into meanings beyond the simple visual.

Check out your current project. Go on an adverb hunt and replace them with the action they only hint at and you’ll be writing for effect.

Next post: what about that “cluttered” room? Coming soon: Scene-setting for Effect.

Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.” (“Writing for Effect” ™ Ray Rhamey)

Computer tip: Make writing time more productive with bookmarks

First, keep the entire book manuscript in one electronic file. I know writers who use a separate file for each chapter of their novel on their computer. Each of my novels is in one file—the whole thing. It would drive me nuts to have to open up, let’s say, a file for chapter 9 in order to check on information I needed for chapter 22—for example, maybe I need to make sure where I stashed a clue that now needs to be discovered.

A file-per-chapter writer friend didn’t see how I could do it. The key is using bookmarks to navigate quickly and easily around a complete novel manuscript.

With the Microsoft Word and WordPerfect Bookmark tool, wherever you are in a manuscript you can insert a bookmark and easily come back to it from any other place in the manuscript. One obvious use is when you’re somewhere deep in your book, rewriting, and it’s time to hang up your brain for the night, your eyes having become loose in their sockets. Just insert a bookmark (I usually use the word “here”), save the file, and shut down. Next day, you’re at the exact spot you left off with a couple of keystrokes.

Here’s how to do it in Word: click Insert in your top toolbar; click Bookmark; type in a letter or word in the Bookmark name box, then click the Add button. For some reason, you can’t use words separated by spaces—which leads me to sometimes insert bookmarks such as “describebarn” or “describe-barn” so I’ll know what it’s about. In WordPerfect, you click Tools, then Bookmark, then Create, which lets you type in a name and say OK.

When you next open your document, to go to a bookmark you type control+g (PC) or, for MACs, apple+g, select Bookmark in the dialogue box that pops up, select the bookmark you want (there’s a little arrow button to show a list of all bookmarks), click okay and you’re there.

Other uses: you’re really struggling with a passage or maybe just chugging through the narrative, laying track, and you know it’ll need more thought. You can bookmark it and move on, knowing you can return with ease. Using bookmarks, I will revisit material that needs honing a number of times until I’m satisfied with it. With a bookmark, it’s easy to go back and keep at it; without a bookmark, I suspect it would get far fewer visits and less thought.

Here’s another one: deep into the umpteenth rewrite of a novel, it came to me that I needed to add a key visual and emotional element to a character’s scenes in several places in the story. When I did, I inserted bookmarks at each scene (Jake1, Jake2, Jake3, etc.). Later, I jumped easily from one spot to another to make sure I had kept things consistent yet varied and had done all I needed to make the new material blend with the old. Because my first drafts tend to be on the lean side, bookmarking those additional bits of narrative enabled me to visit them after they’d cooled a little to see if they needed more work.

Because you can give each bookmark a different handle, another handy use is the ability to check back to important passages. This is especially useful for continuity checks. Let’s say that early in the novel you created a detailed description of a room, and the things in that room are important to your story, and they come up again. Put a bookmark there (“the-murder” or “crimescene” or some such) and it’s easy to refer back and keep later references to that place accurate. This could be darned handy for clues in a mystery novel.

How about bookmarking the first page of each chapter to hop to one instantly? If you know you had Heather shoot the green bunny in chapter 4 but can’t quite remember the sequence of events when you’re referring to the shooting in chapter 16, it’s easy to check.

Marking a passage for later use or change is another bookmark use. In one of my novels, I planned to move the description I’d written for a character to an earlier chapter during the rewrite. I bookmarked that passage so that, when I got to the new description point in the rewrite, I could jump there, cut the description from its page, then jump back to where I was (because I inserted a “here” bookmark before I left that point) and paste it in. No hunting, no searching for keyword strings, etc.

I’m sure you’ll find, or already have, many creative uses for bookmarks. In fact, if you have some, how about sharing them—or other computer tips—with me. I’ll pass ‘em on. Later, I plan to do some posts on using Search to upgrade the quality of your narrative.

Inhabit characters to hook readers

When I story-tell well, a reader will come to inhabit a character, seeing and feeling as the character does—identifying. This is a good thing because, as discussed in a previous post, if a reader cares about what happens to a character, they are compelled to read more (as long as interesting things happen, of course). This includes agents and acquisition editors.

For this writer, to generate narrative that draws a reader into a character I have to go there first, although it’s not easy for me to do. During the first draft I tend to be a camera recording what happens. True, a great deal of character is revealed by action and dialogue—but that’s because action and dialogue derive from what’s happening inside the character (at least it does in the good stuff).

To get at that, I have to shoehorn myself into a character’s head to truly “see” so actions and reactions correspond to that reality. I first learned to apply this technique when I needed to introduce a new character and setting in my current novel-in-progress.

Going into that scene, all I knew was plot material: the character’s name and role as an antagonist, but not much more about him; and that he was inside a vehicle in which he traveled and lived. I knew the outside of the vehicle was wooden, and that he was in a forest preserve outside of Chicago in wintertime. That was about it.

When I inserted myself into my character’s head and looked around, the first thing that I discovered was that the vehicle interior was paneled with oak, and that Oriental rugs covered the floor. Why? Because that's the way this character would want his living space—rich and opulent. As I looked more closely, I saw that the oak paneling bore carved scenes from the history of the character's people. And that led me to how to describe the setting and character in ways that helped the reader feel something.

Drago slides a curtain aside and peers out his quarterdeck cabin porthole at barren trees and snow-covered forest floor. He would rather be far to the south, basking in the sun like two thirds of his clan, not skulking in a forest preserve on the outskirts of Chicago. But his task demands access to university research libraries, so there is little choice. It has been worth it, though; he is near a solution, he feels it. Perhaps this day.

Within view are the tall, curved hulls of three of his clan’s twelve galleons, those willing to stay with him rather than cruise south for the winter. Sixteenth-century Spanish ships gone badly astray, their glossy wooden flanks are a warm contrast to the dull, gray-brown bark of the trees that surround the snow-bound meadow. Like the legs of a daddy longlegs spider, long supports angle out from lower decks to hold them upright while their keels rest on the forest floor.

Drago shivers and closes the curtain against the draft. Warm light from kerosene lamps gives the impression of comfort but, despite woolen oriental carpets insulating the hardwood floor and the heavy oaken planks that panel the walls, the cabin is unpleasantly chilly.

He applies his palm to a wall panel to test its coldness. A master craftsman has carved each with a scene from elven history. Drago traces his favorite with his fingertips, a portrait of his direct ancestor, Merlin, deep in conversation with King Arthur. The artist portrayed Merlin as tall and lean, with a handsome beard that reaches his chest. Drago sometimes wishes he looked like that instead of sporting the short, balding, plump appearance he associates with a ruddy-cheeked butcher in a small-town grocery store. He suspects, though, that the real Merlin looked much like he does, and the majesty portrayed on the panel is no more than imagination at work.

The one thing he has in common with the carving is a full moustache, still dark brown, as is what remains of his hair. He strokes his moustache, wishing he had found his key to renewal before he had reached his thirties and his scalp had become a pink dome rising above a low hedge of hair, as barren as a mountain’s snowcap above its forests.

Drago shakes his head; Merlin’s was one of many brave but hopeless attempts to guide people to a rational civilization. Merlin’s blood runs true, though; Drago is close to creating his own cure for a sick world, if he can just breach the last barrier...a shiver again shakes him. He looks wistfully at the cast-iron stove in the corner. He longs for a fire, but a column of smoke couldn’t be hidden, and the danger of discovery is too great this deep into a city, all acrawl with people like maggots on a carcass.

None of this detail and cognition existed before I started to write the scene from within the character’s head (some has been added in subsequent polishing, but the meat of this is what came to me then). This character has become very human, with strong desires and a wistful wish that he still had his hair.

I believe that, from this point on, the reader will want to know more about what happens to Drago. I plan to create within the reader empathy for him even though he does nasty things. A tough task, but I think it’s possible if I can get the reader to inhabit Drago and view the world as he does.

Inhabit your characters so I can too.

For what it’s worth.