I may do a daily change for a week or so, then put up a poll, so make sure you check in everyday so that you can vote.
Now, on to the gist of this post. A couple of you mentioned after yesterday's post your undying love for adverbs. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. Let me make myself perfectly clear here...I love rule breakers. Mark Twain just happens to be one of my favorite writers because he broke the rules (frequently), but he did it right. A lot of writers, new and old, don't know what they're doing when it comes to the rules. They break them, but it's not for stylistic reasons. Instead, they just don't know what they're doing.
Let's start with the adverb. It's a pesky little thing that gets a lot of writers into trouble. Like a siren's call, it lures us with its perfect simplicity. But if we're not careful, we can become overzealous and saturate our works with those nasty "ly"s.
Why should they be avoided? Two reasons. One, they are typically found in dialogue tags. And as everyone knows, dialogue tags can slow a work down. Second, there's a 98% chance that you can find a much better, much more powerful verb to get your point across. We may think that when we write "forcefully," "slowly," "pathetically," etc. that we're being very strong with our word usage, but that's just not the case. And quite often, adverbs can shackle us with lazy writing. Think about what those three examples mean. How does someone do something forcefully, slowly, or pathetically? Show what this looks like rather than just telling us it happened.
That being said, this post is about breaking the rules, and I am an advocate of using the proper adverb at the proper time in the proper work. First, know your audience. If you're writing an adult book, keep the usage light (and only after you've considered all other descriptions, and have decided this is best). If you're writing at a lower reading level, you have to keep it simple. That means adverbs are allowed to come out and play a bit more often.
Run-on sentences, flowery prose that compares two separate things, a plethora of commas, etc. are equally shunned by many a writing community, but I say study them and use them when you're ready.
How do you know when you're ready? Well, if you have a run-on sentence because it's in keeping with your narrator's voice, this is good. If you have it because you didn't know how to shut up, this is bad. If your prose is flowery during a particularly intense scene where you want your reader to fall head-long into your world and never surface, this is good. If you have multiple paragraphs where you're trying to get the reader to understand what you're talking about by using comparisons, but never getting to the darn point, this is bad. And so on and so forth.
The best way to know you're ready to break the rules is when you know how to argue your point, rather than just saying, "but I like it. I think it's pretty." I was there for the longest time and I'm just now starting to grasp the art behind writing. It is an art, and there have been many beloved books that didn't stray from the rules, but they never really challenged future writers, either.
Compare writing to painting. For years, portraits centered around the hard and fast physical rules of reality. If you painted a person, it had to look like its subject when you were done. If artists had always clung to those rules, we would never have been able to enjoy Picasso's or Dali's works. Sadly, some artists have forgotten that you should never completely disregard the rules and we have entire paintings in museums that consist of one color (apparently, they're supposed to convey an emotion). My two year old could have painted those.
No, rules must never be completely ignored, but they should be played with, and bent when the situation calls for it. So study them, know them inside and out, and when you're ready, bend them to your will. Mwahahahaha! (just had to add that in there :) )
~Emily White
