New Year Writing Workout #1: Adjectives and Adverbs

Happy New Year everyone. If your resolution (made in the wee hours of last night and fuelled by the optimism of Vodka) was to get fit this year, I can help you out. That is, of course, you mean exercising your writing muscle.

For the next few days, I’ll be posting some of my favourite writing exercises from 2008. I encourage you to take the time (Don’t cheat! Some of them can be really telling and helpful.) to try the exercises. There’s always something that can be improved, tweaked or strengthened. Sometimes, you only need your eyes opened.

Without further ado, here’s the first one (borrowed from Noah Lukeman):

1) Take your first page and remove every adjective and adverb, listing them separately.

2) Look at your first page without all these adjectives and adverbs. Does it read faster? Are your major ideas still being conveyed?

3) Look at your removed adjectives and adverbs lists. How many are boring, commonplace, cliche? Try and find a stronger replacement. (Get out the thesaurus!) If you have two or three clumped together, see if you can find one strong adjective/adverb that could replace the two or three. The idea is to aim for stronger imagery and a faster, cleaner read.

4) Try placing your replacements in your story. How does it read now?

This exercise really opened my eyes in terms of adjectives that I overused–I still find myself falling into overuse from time to time. In fact, I went and did a ‘find’ for words like ‘look’ in my ms and tried to find other ways to convey the same idea without ‘look’ or in some cases, remove the whole sentence, creating a better flow.

Good luck and see you tomorrow.

Dreams

I had a dream last night.

I had a dream that when I woke up this morning my hubby had found something on the Internet. It was an agent I had queried who put part of my first page on a website. Sort of a ‘how not to’ sort of a site. It had my title and everything. She had taken the first few sentences and put them in poem format and in that format it was this hideous string of adjectives and adverbs that went on and on. I was embarassed as it was a ‘before’ version of my first page that she had posted and there it was for all to see.

I guess all that talk about adjectives and adverbs on AgentQuery did me in. Or the fact that I got a rejection email from an agent I had almost forgotten I’d queried a few months back. And yes, I had sent her a ‘before’ query with my old first page that I now know wasn’t up to par.

It reminds me of the time in university English when the prof used an example of something I had written on the overhead. And not a good example. After trying so hard, it was very humiliating. (At least he didn’t use my name and had another student’s work up there as well.) So after that I said to hell with it and you know what happened? He thought I was plagarizing because suddenly my writing improved so much and so suddenly.

Moral of the story? Well, I guess it would be just let it flow when you write and don’t get your work put up on the Internet or an overhead as a ‘poor’ example if you can help it.

Look, Stare, Peer, Gaze, Gape. Turn Those Eyes.

I am working through my 110,000 word manuscript, trying to beef up my verbs and eliminate excess adjectives and adverbs like I did with the first page after reading the adjective/adverb chapter in “The First Five Pages” by Lukeman. It feels like this edit is taking forever–but that could be because I keep letting my mind wander off to check email, poke friends on Facebook and make some more tea.

Or it could be that I have to use my thesaurus a lot more. One of the exercises that Lukeman suggested was to take all the verbs out of your first page. Then look at your list and replace some of them with stronger ones and that sort of thing. And I noticed that I use the word ‘look’ an awful lot. Okay, not an awful lot, but maybe over the whole manuscript, a bit excessively.

Therefore, I am spending my time finding synonyms for ‘look’ as well as ways to work around everyone looking at each other all the time. It’s kind of fun. But then again, I am only halfway through the manuscript. I may think differently in a day or two.