Do you agree with Stephen King that using adverbs is lazy writing?

Definitely not. Sounds like a OCD-ish trick to not let tell get in the way of show, as much as I hate that principle being mentioned everywhere with highly varying meaning, but let me explain what I mean: You can write LoTR as, "This guy Frodo threw a ring in a volcano and saved the world." Now you haven't told an interesting story. What you need to do is to slow it down. But you can slow it down too much. You can spend a paragraph describing the molecules of Frodo getting up from his bed before he is about to embark on his great adventure. This is bad writing too. What you need to do is balance your speed. "Telling" is too much emphasis on generalities, things going too quickly and not letting the reader soak in the story; "showing" is giving some concrete observations, sticking around to actually paint up pictures. Now some people would say that adverbs is "too much telling". Instead of for example describing a character raising their eyebrows, you write that they said it "puzzled". But I completely disagree. Using an adverb or a description has completely different effects and part of the craft of storytelling is having a good feeling for how to vary this. Sometimes it's just the right thing to specifically state how something is being said rather than awkwardly piling up the sensory data; other times the latter is better. Of course it also varies with your style. Part of the appeal of Hemingway's style is the avoidance of any generalities.

There is another thing Stephen King could be talking about here though. A lot of writers modify their conversations too much, either using precise descriptions or a lot of adverbs. For example if you've read Franny & Zooey by J. D. Salinger, Salinger has huge modifiers for everything said in the final phone conversation which makes it very cluttered and awkward. This makes the free-spirited twist at the end so much more powerful. Now Stephen King writes novels full of action and stuff happening. If you want it to feel like a movie, you certainly don't want to spend time going into the details of how someone looks when they are talking. In that case I can understand why he might be against dialogue modification.

What I don't understand is why he makes a big deal out of criticizing other writers for using them. For example a big part of what makes J. K. Rowling such a wonderful writer is that she is so good at moods, character, etc. Why is he making fun of her adverb use? Really sad that he doesn't seem to think there is more than one way to write books.

I like Stephen King, of course. No one is perfect.

If you make your baits shorter you will get more bites.

I think it CAN be lazy writing if you're able to just change the verb. For instance
>quickly looked around the room
Can be
>scanned the room

It can work well, though.

>See Flaubert, Joyce, James
>Get fucked
Why would you listen to this hack about anything unless you just want to write airport paperbacks?

inb4 le money is success meme

Also, is it third or first person? Third person, there's no excuse for dumb adverbs like "quickly looked", but you can get away with it if it's from the POV of a character who would use unnecessary adverbs.

>scanned the room
Is something airport fiction authors use. Probably the most common hack phrase.

Just an example, put down the pitchfork.

Im only getting the point across

While that might be a rule of thumb, you really can't apply that across the board. Everything is okay in moderation, but you should be using specific verbs over and over or adverbs over and over.

E.g. he scanned the room and saw a woman brooding by herself. She was distracting herself with something, and he offered her an excuse for conversation

VS

he looked around the room and saw a woman sulkenly sitting by herself. She was absent-mindedly playing with something in her hands, and he generously gave her an excuse for conversation.

Should be somewhere between.

Instead of avoiding all adverbs, authors should try and set themselves a limit.To me, anything past one adverb every couple of sentences is excessive.

I honestly don't see generally any problems with occasionally using adverbs to gracefully get your point across successfully.

Say I were to enter a very dark room. And sitting there in the gloom is Dracula.

How would I say goodbye without adverbs?

say Goodnight

Emphatically no.

what is with these mediocre writers setting axioms for writing fiction?

you know what would help stephen king? rereading a chapter he wrote a week after writing it. here's another one: don't use a rock and roll guitar riff as a metaphor

Here's a good one, from The Stand, the one work King fans will tell you is at least "literary":
"Flu made who," Fran said bleaky.
"Pardon?"
"Never mind," Fran said. Her father was amazingly broadminded, but an AC/DC
fan he was not. "Go on."

Sorry... what were we talking about again?

“There are no rules – writing is purely instinctive and cannot be taught.” -- Jack Reacher, I mean Lee Child.

>an authority on writing
It doesn't exist and never will.

Not using adverbs unless you absolutely have to, is a decent piece of advice. Nothing more, nothing less.

Well Stevey, generalities are pretty lazy too.

wait?

this, you can use them sometimes

What'a wrong with it?

It's the go-to talentless author's procedure for looking around a room. It's irritating reading something that sounds metaphorical but isn't, inserts all the wrong things we are meant to infer. Also overused, if that wasn't clear.

Unless the character is VERY perceptive it's just a lazy and a painfully obvious replacement for looking around.

"See ya, suckerr"

Spit

Stately, plump...

>stately is an adverb
You better be baiting.

It CAN be.

Also you're not really reading his advise correctly. For one, he's making the point that most of the time it's redundant. Like:

>"If that fucking bitch doesn't get her goddamn cat out of my fucking ass, I'm going to find a goddamn machete and kill every motherfucker in here!" he said angrily.

Like...that kind of goes without saying that he's saying it angrily, there's no mystery to that. No real need to use an adverb there.

>"No," he said angrily.

In this case...yeah, you can use one because you don't really get a lot from just the word, "no," so there's not much context here. Still...it is somewhat lazy as there's better ways to do it.

>"No," he grit his teeth and said.

Something like that works better, it's more descriptive, more interesting to read.

But...he comes out and says you should AVOID using adverbs, and admits that he himself does it. At times, it's kind of unavoidable. In general, you should avoid it, but if you can't whatever.

its funny because he uses adverbs all the time. granted on writing has some solid advice including limiting adverbs but like any rules you cant follow shit 100% of the time. it isnt black and white.

take "rules" more like suggestions.

>implying Joyce cared about the 'statelily' when he could just use the adjective as an adverb
as if he gave a fuck about 'correct' words

this

>there are people on this board who are unironically cucked by language

lmao @ pl*bs

Well, all the great writers threw the rules right out the window and did whatever they wanted to.

But guess what?

You're not a great writer, you wouldn't be here if you were. Probably best if you follow the rules for right now, at least.

...
Wjat

Your reasoning implies you need to be a great writer first to be able to use language creatively second.

There's no logic in that. How could anyone ever become a great writer if they were not allowed to use language the way they see fit?

Great writers knew what the fucking rules and conventions were in the first place, so they knew that by not following them they were were doing something different, and knew where and when to do this for the desired effect.

Pretty huge difference between clacking away randomly at a keyboard, not having any idea what you're doing, and saying, "See! I'm a fucking genius, I don't follow any of the rules!"

But hey, show me your noble prize, or your bestselling novel, or your national book award or whatever, and I'll say you can write however the fuck you feel like.

There's no need to be so defensive, I'm just saying that your reasoning is off. You explained it much better this time,
>But hey, show me your noble prize, or your bestselling novel, or your national book award or whatever, and I'll say you can write however the fuck you feel like.
but you fucked it up here again.

Not really. If you produce good stuff that catches on, then write however you want.

Until then....

Yes. Until then, write like Stephen King.

one of the best paragraphs of literature not only uses them but repeats the same ones for added affect

"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

He uses adverbs all the time.. literally open up any of his books to any page

Underrated post

First page of the first book I could find:

I have never been what you’d call a crying man.

My ex-wife said that my “nonexistent emotional gradient” was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father’s funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn’t understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn’t cry at my own parents’ funerals—they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach—she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I was “unable to feel my feelings,” in AA-speak.

“I have never seen you shed tears,” she said, speaking in the flat tones people use when they are expressing the absolute final deal-breaker in a relationship. “Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were leaving.” This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. “Boy meets girl on the AA campus”—that’s another saying they have in those meetings.

I didn’t cry when I saw her off. I didn’t cry when I went back inside the little house with the great big mortgage, either. The house where no baby had come, or now ever would. I just lay down on the bed that now belonged to me alone, and put my arm over my eyes, and mourned.

Tearlessly.

But I’m not emotionally blocked. Christy was wrong about that. One day when I was nine, my mother met me at the door when I came home from school. She told me my collie, Rags, had been struck and killed by a truck that hadn’t even bothered to stop. I didn’t cry when we buried him, although my dad told me nobody would think less of me if I did, but I cried when she told me. Partly because it was my first experience of death; mostly because it had been my responsibility to make sure he was safely penned up in our backyard.

And I cried when Mom’s doctor called me and told me what had happened that day on the beach. “I’m sorry, but there was no chance,” he said. “Sometimes it’s very sudden, and doctors tend to see that as a blessing.”

Christy wasn’t there—she had to stay late at school that day and meet with a mother who had questions about her son’s last report card—but I cried, all right. I went into our little laundry room and took a dirty sheet out of the basket and cried into that. Not for long, but the tears came. I could have told her about them later, but I didn’t see the point, partly because she would have thought I was pity-fishing (that’s not an AA term, but maybe it should be), and partly because I don’t think the ability to bust out bawling pretty much on cue should be a requirement for successful marriage.

Airport fiction authors may be hacks with their sights set low -- but they've polished their craft and have published more novels than you have.

Is there ever a point to your babbling?

Drop another car on his faggot head.

You're confusing me with someone else. I rarely post on this board. Yesterday was the first time in months.

People like you should be kept in a cage. Don't post anymore.

He was talking about using adverbs in dialog, specifically. Such as, "Long hard, lip wetting dick," she said longingly.

He says to avoid using them mostly in that case, and there's probably better ways around them in a lot of other cases, so avoid them if you can.

It's not like he came out and said, "NO FUCKING ADVERBS EVER!"

adj.s ending with "ly" remain the same as adverbs, since ending em with "lily" intuitively seems right but is just retarded.

dictionary.com/browse/stately
stately can be an adjective and an adverb, same as other adjectives ending in ly

Scanning implies urgency, "looking around" does not

Yeah that's that I thought. I've never read 'statelily' anywhere other than in a column by someone who was translating Ulysses.

>you can get away with it if it's from the POV of a character who would use unnecessary adverbs
Third person narrative can also be written based on the personality of the characters. Haven't you ever read Joyce ?

>you're only allowed to express yourself if other people like you

i guess james joyce was lazy

Yeah, basically.

That lazy bitch of a writer only wrote four fucking books in his life

see, i'm an m-w.com guy, for reasons i can't quite pin down.

You sound angry, user. Do you want to talk about it?

I dunno, man. Here's this sentence.

>Person desperately tries to disarm the bomb.

Here, I think 'desperately', the adverb, puts us on the bad side of 'show. don't tell.'. Change the sentence to

>Person races to disarm the bomb.

'Race' is just a verb, but it comes with the implication that there are high stakes, which is how it avoids telling while still getting the situation across.

But many times adverbs are perfectly fine.

Second one sounds like some dogshit TV show. First sounds like the person's life is at risk.
No wonder why you like King

How about we assume the reader is intelligent enough to understand that disarming a ticking bomb is serious business and use neither.

I would describe the actual process of disarmament and use the overall rhythm of my prose and the selection of my details to imply desperation.

It's almost like OP literally cut the rest of the context completely.

Whether intetionally or not, that's not all he said.

King said that using adverbs as if they are "story enhancers" is lazy and bad writing, he says the reason people do it is because they are afraid their reader won't understand the emotion or scene if they don't add something extra, like. "Fuck you asshole!" Tom said angrily.

His argument is that you should already be able to gleam that Tom is pissed off without adding angrily. He also didn't deny using them, and he didn't say you shouldnt use adverbs at all.

>Asking why we should care what hack authors think
>Not asking why we should care what anonymous strangers think

Definitely, yes.

All three of these are shit.

You should know why he is saying "no." Either from before the place in the book where he said it, or the book should inform you why he said no later on.

>someone actually puts thought into a comment for once
>gets called bait

fuck this board.