by Robin Black
And that is how novels are made.
Except it is not.
The next novelist to tell you the conception story of her book is unlikely to recount immersing herself in Ovid’s Metamorphosis for five days. She may talk about the bad marriage it was necessary she end. Or writing longhand. Or traveling for research. Or doing yoga. Or she may stare blankly at the suggestion that writing a novel requires anything more than a disciplined six hours a day at her desk. All of these are important stories to hear—as I hope this one is, too. If only so that when you are stuck—if you ever are stuck—you will know that there is no one way to make a book. And you will know too that, as we stumble through this work, we are sometimes both intuitive and blind in helpful, uncontrollable ways.
Or, to tell this story a little differently, when I was on retreat in January of 2012, I thought I might write something about Galatea and Medusa, but I started to write my novel instead. And on the day that I finished it—only then—I realized that I had done both.
In Defense of Adverbs,
Guardians of the Human Condition
I want people to love adverbs. More than that, I want them to believe, as I do, that adverbs are the part of speech that best captures the human condition.
But first, let’s review what we’ve all been told: Adverbs are bad. Adverbs should be excised from our prose. I love this advice, not because it’s right (it’s wrong) but because of how ludicrous the idea is that a part of speech could be bad. What are the odds? I’m no expert in the development of languages, but this seems like a bizarre notion to me. Like saying, pronouns are silly. Or, verbs are so annoying. Presumably adverbs exist for a legitimate purpose, evolved to fulfill a communicative need—or they wouldn’t exist.
So why this bad rap? My theory is that it’s not because we overuse adverbs, but because we have lost the sense of their actual potential and purpose. Language does indeed evolve, and for stodgy people like me who are attached to the grammar they were taught when young, it can seem to devolve.
As often used, adverbs are expendable. In the sentence, “She shouted loudly,” the adverb adds nothing—which is commonly the complaint, the advice often something like: “Your verb can do the work. You don’t need the extra word.” And here, your verb is doing the work—if the work is only to communicate the volume at which this person spoke. The meaning of “she shouted loudly” is essentially identical to the meaning of “she shouted.”
But adverbs are modifiers—not handy tools for reiteration. To modify means to change, alter, amend. Adverbs modify the part of speech to which they are subordinate. In other words, they are not unnecessary emphasizers as in the previous example. They don’t exist to pad our writings with redundancy but to shade and even alter the verb’s meaning in a particular sentence. She shouted reluctantly. She shouted, predictably. She shouted unceasingly. She shouted hopelessly. She shouted victoriously. She shouted wistfully—somehow, despite the power of her voice.
Which of these adverbs is unnecessary? Which merely compounds the meaning of the verb? These sentences may not be brilliant, but they are not “flabby” as so many claim that sentences with adverbs are doomed to be. Not a one of them could be replaced with the sentence, “She shouted” and still mean the same thing. And that is a useful test of an adverb’s worth: would the verb (or adjective) it modifies be essentially identical without the adverb? If so, then the conclusion should not be that adverbs are bad, but that the writer is bad at using them. (How strange that when writers fail in other ways, we blame them and not the instrument of their failure. When people write bad dialogue, we don’t declare that all dialogue is bad…)
At their most evocative, adverbs provide something like the opportunity that metaphors do, though in a less elaborate, less overt way. Metaphors, to be more than a bit reductive, “work” not because the two things being compared are identical, but because they share some characteristics, and, just as importantly, do not share others. “Her glove, multicolored, its fingers barely spread, could have been some exotic bird about to take flight.” There’s just enough there—the many colors, the fingers reminiscent of feathers—to make the introduction of the notion of flight, via the comparison to a bird, seem natural. But what makes the notion revelatory is that gloves do not fly. A simple description of the glove, “The glove was multi-colored and its fingers were somewhat spread,” also tells you what the glove looks like, but doesn’t modify its essential gloveness with any other notions—notions of flight in this case.
“She shouted wistfully” is not a metaphor, but it functions in similar ways. Wistfulness does not contradict the fact of shouting, but introduces an element, a tone, that is not inherent to shouting. It changes the essential shoutingness of the shout, in a way that the word “loudly” does not.
Adverbs, because they alter the presumed or “regular” meaning of another word, are uniquely suited to bringing freshness to our language, and to shaking us up. They are unsettling in all the best ways. We think we know how people shout: loudly. We hear the word “shout,” and that is the one thing we know. But we also learn a new way that a shout might emerge; and adverbs shoulder the task of surprising us with that.
I learned pretty much everything I know about adverbs reading Nabokov. Nabokov not only uses adverbs freely, he uses tricks to get the most out of them. He very often places the adverb—or adverbs—before the verb, so as you read, you have the modifier which supplies the mood, the atmosphere, the manner of an action, and then you have the action. From Pnin: “Untenderly she cradled the receiver.”
This reversal creates a suspense composed of ignorance and curiosity both. The reader is engaged, active in the sentence, at least in part because of an awareness that she doesn’t know how it will be resolved. While it’s true that one often doesn’t know how a sentence will be resolved, Nabokov’s manipulation of the modifier, deploying it ahead of that which it modifies, brings the mystery of the sentence into high relief.
And the adverb, rather than being an afterthought, swallowed by dominance of the verb and its power to determine event, sets the tone so the verb never exists in its most usual form, later to be changed or modified. When the action occurs, we already know in what manner it does so, making the verb itself both more eloquent and less of a bully. That’s not an effect that every sentence requires or from which they would all even benefit, but it’s a tool, a trick well worth trying.
Similarly, while it might grow tiresome to read sentence after sentence containing contradictions of the sort found between “untenderly” and “cradled,” there’s a lot to be said for exploring the use of such internal tensions in a single description.
Nabokov frequently piles adverbs on, long strings of them, introducing into the sentence something like the effect of a collage. Again, from Pnin: “Nowadays, at fifty-two, he was crazy about sun-bathing, wore sport shirts and slacks, and when crossing his legs would carefully, deliberately, brazenly display a tremendous stretch of bare shin.” The adverbs not only modify the verb, they modify one another, doing a lot of work along the way. Before the reader even knows what verb is to come, the adverbs have painted a portrait of the character—while somehow also mocking him. And in fact, though the verb “displays” matters to the sentence, completing the picture, it seems to be subservient to the adverbs there, rather than the other way around.
Nabokov also uses adverbs for more than their descriptive powers: He harnesses their sound. Also from Pnin: “Gravely, comfortably, the gray-headed conductor sank into the opposite seat...” That interlocking alliteration, that chugging rhythm, it all evokes the turn and lull of train wheels.
That’s an awful lot for a part of speech to do. Especially a bad part of speech.
Which brings me to the human condition, mysterious, ambiguous, in flux. This is not a state best represented by verbs, with their defining decisiveness; nor adjectives, like darts, pinpointing specific qualities. Nor is human life a noun—not as lived. Conjunctions don’t quite do it
either. Articles, obviously not. But adverbs! With their dedicated, infinite flexibility, their ability to speak among themselves, to disagree yet never negate, to surprise; to hold one’s attention with their resistance to what is assumed, with their beauty. Is it too fanciful to say that life itself is an adverb, the modification of those two inevitable verbs—to be born, to die?
Perhaps it is. That may be a stretch. But this is the glory of language, after all. That it allows for these stretches, these leaps, some profound, others less so. But all of them results of our attempts to communicate, to understand, to understand more, to communicate more fully. And there is no part of speech better able to assist than that much maligned, underworked, ugly duckling: the adverb. Humbly, eloquently, sneakily, daintily, elegantly. Yes. All of that, and more.
Line Edits II
Her date was boring.
Her date was spectacularly boring.
The Subject is Subjectivity
I had been writing off and on for many years, been through endless (some feeling literally endless) workshop experiences, and had an MFA before I understood that taste in literature is subjective. I mean, I knew that, in some way—but not in any particularly helpful way. The realization came at the second meeting of the first writing course I ever taught. I was in the middle of a discussion of Grace Paley’s story “Conversations With My Father,” a story I love, a story it never occurred to me anyone else wouldn’t love (a story that in my heart of hearts I still believe everyone should love) and it became clear to me that not everyone in the room loved it.
“How many of you liked this story?” I asked. Two-thirds of the hands went up.
I resisted the impulse to argue with the remaining third, and asked a series of simple questions instead. How many people liked Faulkner? A third or so. How many liked Woolf? Around half.
“I hope you’ll all remember this when your work is being workshopped,” I said. “If half the folks in here think you’re on the right track, you’re even with Virginia Woolf and ahead of William Faulkner.”
Soon after that night, an editor with whom I had worked several times rejected a story of mine—in no uncertain terms. She was kind, but there was none of that “oh, this was close” stuff. It was an unambiguous no, and it hit me hard. I fell into one of those I probably shouldn’t even try to be a writer patches, until, a week later, another editor called me up, whispering in shaky, anxious tones that he had just read the same story and was hoping, hoping (hoping!) that it was still available for publication.
“Why yes, I believe it is.”
I allowed myself a certain sense of vindication as I hung up the phone, but what I eventually faced is that neither of them was right. The accepting editor wasn’t a winning argument against the rejecting one. As much as it can be tempting to believe otherwise, the illusion of objectivity in response to art is an illusion indeed. For better and worse, when you decide to write, you hurl yourself and your cherished work product into a world ruled by individual taste. The only way in which either editor was right is that both were right. The story was wrong for the first journal and a good fit for the second—but not for any reason beyond their subjective responses to the piece. Writing is not a fixed currency.
There are always more ways to learn this lesson. In 2007 an essay of mine appeared in the book The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume I. The anthology was published by Norton, the selection made by the editors of Creative Nonfiction magazine. I was thrilled to have the piece included—and I was also amused, because a couple of years before, Creative Nonfiction magazine had rejected the same piece. A sad little D-list Xeroxed rejection slip. And again, that isn’t a matter of self-correction on their part. It’s almost certainly a question of whose desk it crossed the first time, and whose desk it crossed the second time. No one right; no one wrong.
Am I saying there’s no such thing as bad writing or good writing? I am saying that long, long before the question of inherent quality can be addressed, the dominance of subjective response has so trampled the conceit that it’s a question barely worth asking. And it’s a question I particularly dislike because in the asking lies the implication that some of us are more entitled to write than others, because some of us are “good” and others of us are “bad.” I would far rather err in the direction of inclusion than risk endorsing that scheme.
Much of this, the simple fact of subjective responses, should be obvious. It should be a fact we carry in our heads at all times. But it is difficult, if illogically so, for many of us to remember, as the rejections pile up, that each one is only the subjective response of an individual reader and not a judgment from on high about the worth of that piece or about our right to write. Whatever we know to be true, some of us cannot move past the fantasy that if we are just good enough, then everyone will love our work—a fantasy with a pretty tough downside since it follows that if not everyone loves our work, we must not be good enough.
Over the course of many years, during more and less successful attempts to start writing again, I would join writing workshops—some teacher-led, some not. There were a lot of valuable aspects to those experiences, even the ones that were brief, but there were also downsides, some of which speak directly to the subject of subjectivity.
I observed—and sometimes participated in—a pull toward reaching a consensus about both the quality of the presented work and what steps the author might take in revision. This may grow out of a desire to offer the author a clear perspective and clear plan, but, laudable a desire as that may be, agreement among eight or ten readers is unlikely to reflect accurately what each individual feels. Those colleagues who might have uniquely helpful suggestions, perhaps ones that can’t be so easily absorbed into group advice, may go unheard. In workshop settings, it’s crucial that authors locate those participants who will be their best readers—and if everyone’s voice is blended into one, that can’t take place.
Of course there are workshops that do the opposite, workshops where the variety of reactions is dizzying, subjectivity on full display, every voice, every opinion given equal time. This too is problematic, because not all readers are created equal. There is a difference between one who sees room for improving your work, but likes the basic idea, and a reader who just hates what you are doing. The latter may be voluble, but is unlikely to offer much useful advice. (Had I asked the editor who rejected my story for help improving it, I can’t imagine what she could have told me. She so disliked the premise of the thing. Really, she could only have said what she did say: “I’d like to see something different.”)
In my experience, workshops rarely make those distinctions, rarely suggest that people who thoroughly dislike a piece might want to hold their counsel, allowing the people who support the author’s intent to do most of the talking. But doing so might not only max out the chances that the writer will receive productive advice. It might also normalize the fact that there are always likely to be people who don’t connect to any given work, that detractors are not a sign of anything—except that you have written a piece and shown it to enough people to provoke a typical range of responses.
It doesn’t get any easier to welcome subjective responses to one’s work with book publication, in part because of the love-fest that precedes a book’s launch. Before my collection of stories came out, I spent eighteen months in a lovely bubble in which resided my editors (who love my book), my agent (who loves my book), my publicist (who loves my book), my husband (who loves my book), and so on. With publication, the bubble burst. Suddenly I heard from reviewers and readers who didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, people with absolutely no interest in reassuring me—or themselves—that my work is great.
It is painful when those first negative comments roll in. There are ways to soothe yourself—like comparing notes with other authors; like drafting letters of protest that you never send. I went online and read bad reviews of classic books. Okay, there are people who hate Dickens too. And Jane Austen! And Goodnight Moon!! Subjectivity
applies to us all! I can’t pretend my euphoria lasted long, but it bought me a few good moments.
Subjectivity isn’t only important though because its prevalence means that you have opportunities to learn how to take criticism in stride. There is one huge benefit to knowing that you can’t please all of the people any of the time: You might as well stop trying. And what liberation there is in that! A writer’s job, it turns out, is to write what she believes is her best work, and then hope that it will find the readers to whom it speaks; not to try to write the first book in the history of the world that everybody loves. And what wonderful news that is!
Of course, like my joy at Jane Austen’s critical pans, that is a state of mental purity difficult to maintain. But I have a mantra now for when I catch myself longing for universal adoration: Fifty percent gets you to Virginia Woolf.
Tales of Sorrow, Tales of Woe
The story is about loss. For me, it seems, the story is often about loss. In the stories in my first book there are at least a half-dozen deaths and some comparable number of physical ailments, chronic conditions, and disabilities. My novel, too, begins with the disclosure of a loss and then moves into the worlds of infertility and dementia. And though I may be an extreme case, I’m hardly alone in my choice of saddening subject matter.
Many writers gravitate toward the depiction of tragic events. It’s almost de rigueur in a writing class that there will be a hefty helping of cancer tales and a smattering—at least—of fatal car accidents. Equally inevitable: There will be people who feel that those subjects have been, well, done to death. Tales of sorrow can be a tough sell—literally. I once attended a panel discussion at which an editor of a prestigious magazine asked, in tones of great contempt: “Do we really need another story about somebody’s sister dying of cancer?”