Adverbs, Spareness, and Necessity
Continuing to ruminate on adjectives and adverbs…
Part of the problem about adverbs stems from a confusion about necessity. According to the grammarians, an adverb, because it modifies an adjective or verb (or another adverb), is not grammatically necessary. You can test this: if you remove the word, does the sentence become ungrammatical or change its meaning completely?
He ran down the street quickly —> He ran down the street
“Quickly” isn’t grammatically necessary here, so it’s an adverb modifying the verb “ran.”
“Down” is necessary: “he ran the street” is either wrong or means something different. We might say that the mafioso “ran” the street, but the verb would no longer have to do with rapid motion. Therefore “down” is a preposition, not an adverb.
A peculiarity about English grammar, though, is that some words can be both prepositions and adverbs.
He ran down the street (preposition)
The bird swooped down (adverb)
In general, the adverbs that description Nazis hate are -ly adverbs, which are always adverbs and never prepositions, but in theory it seems as though it’s the unnecessary quality they don’t like: they think prose should be lean and spare, containing nothing but necessary elements.
That’s fine if that’s the style you choose, but I don’t see why it should be the only style. Pretty much the only writer I can think of who obeys these strictures is Elmore Leonard, and while Leonard’s writing is powerful and effective, it’s hardly the absolute pinnacle of English prose. And Leonard isn’t as absolute about these rules as people seem to think.
The opening sentence of Out of Sight is a good example:
Foley had never seen a prison where you could walk right up to the fence without getting shot.
First of all, “right” is an adverb: try removing it and see what happens.
Why does he include it? Assume for a minute that Leonard knows exactly what he’s doing, has weighed up his words and decided that he needs the adverb. What for? Because we’re already inside Foley’s head, and like any normal person, Foley uses the full spectrum of the language as it’s available to him. “Walk right up” could be “walk up” or “approach,” but Foley is the kind of guy who says “walk right up”; other guys might say “walk right on up,” and if Leonard had written that, we’d have a slightly different impression of Foley.
The point isn’t to omit adverbs; it’s to use them with precise effect and intention.
Consider Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. He’s down on description, but he’s not rigid about it:
#9: Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
There is an important explicit qualification here, and also an implicit one. The explicit is, “unless you can do it extremely well.” The implicit is, “assuming you want the writer’s voice to be transparent.” On this latter point, he says:
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. … If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight. (Emphasis added)
This approach has become so normative that it’s spewed back at us in all the “how to write” stuff you see everywhere. What Leonard is talking about—and it’s similar in a lot of ways to what Richard Stark was doing—is a lean, spare style that presents character through event. It’s the epitome of the “show, don’t tell” school. But it doesn’t fit every subject, genre, or novel.
In a ghost story—a good ghost story, not a cheap Hollywood jump-scare chainsaw freakout—everything is atmosphere. Images and descriptions dominate, not because the author just wants description, but because it’s descriptions that make the uncanny. “I went into the kitchen and saw a ghost”: that’s a ghost story, but it’s rotten. The problem isn’t that it’s short, it’s the lack of setup—but what is setup? Depending on the story, we might need to know a lot about me, the POV narrator, to understand why I’m seeing what I’m seeing, and to know how to evaluate whether I’m really seeing it or going nuts or something in between. We might need to know about the kitchen, the house, the weather, the history of the place: these things might give meaning to the apparition, so when it appears we already have a sense of what it means. We’ve been expecting it for a while now, and when it appears we get a shiver. Maybe we need all of this, maybe more. What is the ghost story about? What it’s not about is the raw, blunt observation: oh look, a ghost, hoorah. You can go Turn of the Screw, where the story is about whether the apparitions are real or not, or you can go in the opposite direction and have the story about figuring out why the apparitions are appearing (and how to make them stop). But however you do it, what makes the thing work is the uncanny, which Todorov classified as an impossible or unresolvable superposition of strange and familiar, ordinary and bizarre. If you give endless description of cemeteries and haunted-house weirdness, the apparition often seems mundane because it belongs; if you give a cheerful, upbeat description (or worse, no description at all), the apparition is out-of-place and meaningless. What’s wanted is something in between, something ambivalent and uncertain.
I can’t imagine how an effective ghost story could be told in an Elmore Leonard prose style. Leonard’s POV characters are generally too unimaginative to make it work. This is why so many protagonists in classic ghost stories are nervy, twitchy, unstable people: it extends the time in which the reader can’t decide whether the apparitions are real or products of an unhinged mind. In The Turn of the Screw, James stretches this out all the way to the end… and then stops without resolving the question.
The ghost story is just one example to demonstrate the limitations of the Elmore Leonard style—a style I admire, let’s be clear, and one nowhere near so dogmatic as people seem to believe. A great ghost story is always writerly, because its suspense relies on forcing the reader to step back and evaluate, to consider whether they believe what they’re being told. Exactly this violates Leonard’s core principle: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”