badverbs

[spectre]

I agree with Trick and great post T. Allen Smith and Scribal Lord. I have a tendency to write, and not research writing. Some people might say that's a bad practice, but I feel like if I go through the trouble to research every aspect of my novel from the ground up and forget the colorful language I learned in school, I'd be writing backwards and so my viewpoint is that adverbs are just another part of the language, but I also agree Xitra_Blud, make sure you're telling the story events and not describing them in single words too.

I fell like adverbs are ok to use though, because in my writings, action is not all the time. I tend to use adverbs I noticed looking back for this article, in describing things parallel to the story like backdrop.

Feo perfectly describes my viewpoint on adverbs in this post.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Part of developing an authorial voice and style, is learning what works to achieve your vision as a writer. In my opinion, that's best accomplished by exposing yourself to a lot of techniques and methods, even rules which are particular to specific writers. Somewhere along the path of experimentation, we discover techniques which get us closer to our goal, and even that will grow and continue to develop the more we write.

What Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, or any other successful author does, may not work for you through and through, but there are likely kernels in those personal rule sets that will apply to your art, making you better.

In the words of Bruce Lee, "Absorb what is useful."