My Enemy, the Adverb

I'm in the process of working through revisions on my current manuscript. Mostly this means that my agent (who is generally the first person who sees anything I write) goes through the entire thing and sends me back suggestions on how to improve it. I don't imagine any writer enjoys this, and I'm no exception. It needs to be done, but it's possibly the worst part of writing a book.

I hate almost everything I write anyway. Most of it is, I generally suspect, utter crap. The best rule of thumb I've ever heard is this: four-fifths of everything you write will be shit. Complete, unredeemable excrement. But if you have any skill at all, that last twenty percent will make the whole process worthwhile.

That's what I keep hoping, anyway.

Knowing that, the task of editing is rendered only slightly less painful than the average root canal. Essentially it means combing through every line of the manuscript to expose every possible flaw, every poor choice of words or awkward turn of phrase, and every typo or mistake that Spellcheck doesn't pick up. For someone who is already suspicious that almost everything he writes may turn out to be garbage, this process seems designed to do nothing more than confirm just that.

Fortunately it hasn't been all that awful -- so far. Except for one thing. My tireless grammatical nemesis: the adverb. I used to have several of these personal demons. My struggle to conquer the run-on-sentence, for example, lasted from third grade until late into high school. My love affairs with the multiple adjective description and the dependent clause were long and turbulent. The dissolution of those dysfunctional relationships was not easy. But I overcame them. I'm no Hemingway, I do still lapse into my own florid and occasionally turgid, prose. But the years of struggling to keep those monsters at bay has turned into a kind of habit. I can usually write with no fear of them popping up.

Not so my most resilient and nefarious foe, the mighty modifier, the old -ly.

I hate them. But for some damn reason I keep using them. A lot.

Now, my agent and I differ somewhat on just how evil these little buggers actually are. She sees almost no use for them whatsoever, and I think she would be happy if they were excised from the English language once and for all. Not me. I think the judicious use of one of these little fellas can be appropriate.

I agree that they weaken the narrative. Almost anything can be stated better without them. They're lazy and they really don't convey much, for the most part. My manuscript is almost always better for having removed them.

That having been said, my use of them is never anything close to judicious. And so I find myself flipping through hundreds of pages of text, trying to figure out ways to say what I want to say without resorting to the use of the adverb.

Other than that though, the editing process is going well, for the moment.