An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Five -- I quickly stopped using adverbs

If you've been in the writing game for any period of time, you'll have heard that piece of advice about adverbs. Never use them, they will mutter. Steven King said so, they will murmur. They are bad, they will whisper. Bad, bad, bad...

And when you round on them, screaming, why? They will slink away, shaking their heads. And you will be left standing with nothing but a feather boa and a half-eaten tub of cream cheese. Which I mean, hey, good night in right there.

So let's figure out what's going on here.

Before we get in too deep, let's remind ourselves what adverbs actually are. An adverb is a word that modifies a non-noun, by describing it. We're actually going to only talk about the adverbs that modify verbs in this chapter; adverbs that modify adjectives can get a shout out in the adjective chapter. As always, it's easier to show then tell, so I'll do that, and I'll also use this chapter to workshop my Steven King fanfic with you. Let's start with this.

Steven King sat down heavily in the chair. His mechanical legs twitched suddenly, and his cat quickly moved from under him. 'I'm sorry, Clovis,' he hissed, dangerously. 'There's a zombie in the building.'

Oh, in my fanfic Steven King is the CEO of the Happy Pencil Corp by day, and a vampire robot that hunts zombies by night. Pretty cool, right?

The classic advice about identifying adverbs is that they end in 'ly'. This is wrong, but as we shall see, for practical purposes it's quite useful. However, my superior way of deciding if something is an adverb is to ask, will Steven King eat it? If he does, then it's an adverb. If he doesn't, it's not! This doesn't catch them all, but it's good, as you'll see.

Let's apply the rule, and the hungry Mr King will get to work for us. In my fanfic above, there are four words that end in 'ly', and Steven King will eat it heavily, suddenly, quickly and dangerously. So, yes, those are all adverbs. Sometimes it might work but sound a bit weird; in which case, try putting the potential adverb before the 'eat it'. For example, 'Steven King will definitely eat it' shows that 'definitely' is an adverb.

We now have excellent adverb detector, which means we can root them out wherever they hide. So what is it that people hate about adverbs?

It's that maddening thing, 'show, don't tell'. When you use an adverb, you're telling us what's happening. You're not immersing us in the world: you're not making it real by showing us the action and the consequences of the action. Now, most writing guides stop at this point. Don't use adverbs, they say! If you read such a guide, a fun thing to do is to see how many adverbs the writer has written up to this point. And you can do that by understanding that the rule of adverbs ending in 'ly' is, well, it's not very good.

For example, did you know that 'inside' is an adverb? It's a so-called adverb of place. 'His space axe glittered from inside the King-mobile.' The verb is 'glittered', and everything after the verb is part of an adverbial phrase, a fragment which is acting as an adverb. And to test it: will Steven King eat it? Yes, Steven King will eat it from inside the King-mobile.

Adverbs of time are even crazier. 'Tomorrow', 'before, and 'then' are adverbs. 'Then'! 'Steven King will eat it then.' Yep. Checks out. So if we banish adverbs completely, we make it very difficult to describe the relationships between things in time and space. Yes, show don't tell, but also, sometimes, tell us that the zombie is on the car ('Steven King will eat it on the car'), otherwise what the heck is happening when the green hands smash through the sunroof? ('Steven King will eat it through the sunroof.')

All this is a long way of demonstrating that the rules governing adverbs are more complicated and nuanced than just saying 'don't use them'. As a result, In this chapter I've tried to give you guidance on times to definitely not use them, and why, and how to fix it; and then to talk about times when adverbs are fine, but that then still leaves a huge grey zone in between where you (yes, you) need to use your skill and judgement to decide what to do with them.