Don’t Make it Pretty

    I followed a conversation online a few weeks back. The topic: adverbs. Say that word in any gathering of writers and you'll get the hornets buzzing. The debate took on the tenor of do or die: either adverbs are an important and invaluable part of the writing process, or anyone who uses them should be hung by their little toes. Middle ground didn't make much of a showing.

    One thing that caught me was an author who was very much in the pro-adverb camp. She argued that adverbs, adjectives, and other modifiers to the English language are what add "sparkle" to writing. The frosting on the cake. The sprinkles on the donut.

    I disagreed not as much in sentiment as in the absoluteness with which she believed this. But, it felt familiar.

    I remember when I first started writing and my definition of "good" writing was very different than what it is today. Yes, I've learned a lot through experience. But I also think I went through a kind of natural evolution. When made my first novel attempt, I tried to write grandiose. Long, sweeping descriptions. Vivid metaphors. Clever turns of phrase.

    In other words, the heftier, the thicker I made my writing with every possible tool at my disposal, the better.

    What I've learned since then is simple. Efficiency rules. If I can, it's better to say with one word what I just said with three.

    We often muse so much on the "artistic" side of writing that we forget there's a hardscrabble nuts-and-bolts practice to it. And like any job, whatever can do the same amount of work for less effort is a boon. Think of an architect. An architect is that rare profession that can be considered both artistic and practical at the same time. An architect can design a building that looks gorgeous, but if the rivets don't hold and the hallways are impassable, it's all for nothing.

    What I discovered in those years when I was coming into my own was this: when I tried my hardest to be eloquent, witty, or adroit, that's when I was at my lamest. So what did I decide to do? I decided I'd never actually write a story, or at least write a good one, if I was worrying about making it pretty. Instead, I just needed to make it work. Character. Story. Tension. I could write prose that would put a thesaurus to shame and it wouldn't mean diddly if I couldn't hold fast to the most basic tenets of storytelling, then what was I really accomplishing?

    This may sound like embracing "dumbing down" or a form of minimalism. I'm not. This isn't a zero-sum game where you make trade-offs of style for substance. Take this situation: you're writing a scene in which the reader focuses in on a woman walking her dog through Times Square. I could make this description go on for a good page. I could spend a couple of sentences on how her hair is teased and swept like a golden wave my the early winter breezes. I could devote a share of space to her erect, confident, and unarrested gait. I could even delve into paragraphs about what she's wearing, dropping clothing labels like so much confetti.

    Or, I could chose to describe her in two sentences or less. The challenge of doing that is monument: I can't be as liberal with my words. My word choice has to be well thought-out and I have to be exacting with the images I wish to reveal, since my new goal is going to be describing the woman up to a point, at which I hope the reader's imagination will fill in the rest of the blanks. And that's the hardest, and most inspiring, thing to learn: like an engineer who will always search for a way to make a tool do more work from less effort, the best writers are ones who find a way to dump some of their visionary work on the shoulders of the unsuspecting reader. This isn't the practice of a writer who doesn't care about language- in fact it's the exact opposite. It's a practice that requires forethought, reflection, and always looking for a simpler and better way to say one thing or another.

    And what does it produce? I titled this blog post "Don't Make it Pretty" not because I don't believe in the value of good wordsmithing, only that it means little when it's the only thing a writer relies on. But if a writer worries about making their writing "work," making it believable, compact, impacting, well-paced, they'll find the "pretty" comes to it naturally. It'll have had to because the writer has had much more practice in choosing his or her words carefully. Form follows function, but not the other way around. It's not a two-way street.

    So what about the poor adverb? Eh, no point in opening up that again. But it lead me to think about this: if there was one thing I could ever say to someone who is trying fiction writing for the first time, it's this. Don't break your back putting us "in the moment." Don't double down your chances on connecting to readers on how much flourish or wit you think you can possess. Good stories live forever in libraries. Witty lines live forever at the bottom of emails.