What Prose Writers Can Steal From Poets

Note: This is part of the WRITING IS HARD series of posts

This post is about using fewer adjectives and adverbs, which is something Elmore Leonard, among others, has famously addressed in his loveably bossy way. Look, you’ll never avoid modifiers all the time, nor should you. Like Chex Snack Mix, they’re great here and there. But if you made Chex Snack Mix your main course, or used it as a side dish to every meal, you’d be dead in a year. Either of Chex poisoning, or by the hands of loved ones driven crazy by your Chex-based diet.

I talked in the last post about the crazy magic that happens between writer and reader. A writer puts words on a paper and a reader reads them — in any year, any location, any circumstance — and suddenly there’s a movie flowering in that person’s head, something close to the movie the writer had in her head when she first wrote the thing. And yes, characters, plot, narrative choices — these things all make a huge difference. But what’s the first thing your reader will encounter? Your words, dude. Your words.

When we were young, we were taught, every single year, that an adjective describes. I believe adjectives and adverbs were called, in my school system, “helper words.” Aw. Yet in prose, guys, they are not helpers. Adjectives, especially, are words that have given up. They are in sweatpants all day. They are on the couch smoking pot while the nouns and verbs go to work.

Think of a pillow. If I say on the bed was a big pillow, you picture a pillow that’s, uh, large, you guess, based on your idea of what constitutes a big pillow. Wow, what an image, right? Do you need a minute to catch your breath?

Now if I say on the bed was a pillow pregnant with down, you have a more specific image, don’t you? It may even connect to an image you had somewhere in your brain, perhaps long forgotten, of a certain overstuffed pillow you’d known. And why didn’t I just say “overstuffed”? Because a) it’s an adjective and thus weaker; and b) because it doesn’t get across the physicality of “pregnant.” Pillows don’t get pregnant. Living things do, and so saying a “pregnant pillow” has a kind of violence to it (linguistically, I mean) that causes associations to happen in your brain. People and animals get pregnant, your brain thinks. Why would a pillow look pregnant with down? See that? The reader-brain is working, which is what the writer wants happening as much as possible. A working reader-brain is a happy brain. Is an engaged brain. Is a loyal brain.

Poets know this. They don’t have, usually, pages and pages to get at an idea. They don’t have, usually, dialogue and scene to convey character. Their main tool is the image. And in poems, you want images that explode in the brain.

Look at Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Goatsucker”:

First of all, you didn’t know they had Chupacabras in England, did you? Secondly, look at the work the words are doing here. There are adjectives, yet the real muscle in each image — and note that on average there are a couple of images per line — is in the noun-verb combinations. Vampiring dry of milk. Its eye, flashlit, a chip of [ruby] fire. Wings of witch cloth. Look at it again. They’re just words on a screen. But they’re chosen in such a way that they have a musicality (the adjective “fattest” in line 6 is chosen for its internal rhyme with “cattle”), they have movement, and they cause reactions in your brain. These reactions may cause entire scenes to play out in your mind — again, sometimes per image — and you’ll find yourself reading lines over again just to get back on track. That’s the power of poetry, and it’s the power of well-chosen noun-verb combinations. Which is a power prose writers can totally steal.

Denis Johnson, a poet-turned-novelist, provides examples of this in nearly every line of his prose. Here’s an early sentence from the first story in his collection Jesus’ Son:

The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts.

That’s it. Yet in 10 words it works the magic whereby you picture — no, you feel — one of the nastiest rainstorms you ever personally experienced. Because his words detonate those associations for you and you then apply them to the scene.

Or here’s a chunk from Wuthering Heights, the first in-depth mention of the rough landscape:

My landlord halloed for me to stop ere I reached the bottom of the garden, and offered to accompany me across the moor.  It was well he did, for the whole hill-back was one billowy, white ocean; the swells and falls not indicating corresponding rises and depressions in the ground: many pits, at least, were filled to a level; and entire ranges of mounds, the refuse of the quarries, blotted from the chart which my yesterday’s walk left pictured in my mind.  I had remarked on one side of the road, at intervals of six or seven yards, a line of upright stones, continued through the whole length of the barren: these were erected and daubed with lime on purpose to serve as guides in the dark, and also when a fall, like the present, confounded the deep swamps on either hand with the firmer path: but, excepting a dirty dot pointing up here and there, all traces of their existence had vanished: and my companion found it necessary to warn me frequently to steer to the right or left, when I imagined I was following, correctly, the windings of the road.

Think about it: Emily Brontë writes these lines in Wuthering Heights in England, 1846. You read it in 2013 in San Francisco or Singapore or Savannah. Maybe you’ve never seen land like this. There’s no reason it should work. And yet. You know words, and your brain has the ability to make bizarre associations and confabulations. Meaning: You won’t see exactly what Bronte sees in her brain, but you’ll make it work nonetheless. And this is important, for landscape is a key character in Wuthering Heights. So Brontë can’t get away with just saying, “The landscape was rough. Hoo boy, was it ever. Sooooooo rough.”

No, what Brontë has to do is prepare the altar, so to speak: She has to use her words and her characters in such a way that they then meet up with a reader — whether it be 1850, 1950, or 2050 — who will then complete the alchemy. And she has to do it again and again. All this two-person alchemy adds up to then create the spell that is the novel we know to be Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights was written in the days before we had people like Elmore Leonard to yell at us about adjectives and adverbs. So there are a lot in there. But I submit that, just as in Sylvia Plath’s poem, the words that do the actual work of creating images in your mind are the nouns and verbs. And as in poetry, they work best when used in a “violent” manner. After all, when is a hillside an “ocean” with “swells and falls”? That doesn’t make sense, really. But she says it, you see it — or your version of it — and it not only sticks, it makes that landscape come alive in 2013 in your Singapore-born brain.

Look at it this way: I said writers are trying to make magic happen, but I did not say writers are magicians. It takes two people to make a piece of writing work. Otherwise, it’s a one-hand-clapping thing. But this is the great thing about literature: We, as readers, get to do some of the work! If you over-describe, if you adjective-ize your scene to death, we get irritated with you. You got greedy, or else you didn’t trust us to be smart enough to fill in the blanks or make the connections between verbs and nouns. Meanwhile, we think you’re lazy, because you couldn’t be bothered to come up with an interesting way to describe someone’s clean yard, so you snoozed and wrote that it was “neatly manicured.” Which was clever the first time, not so much the next ten thousand. Cut it out.

Lastly: I suggest using as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, but of course there are times when you just want to mention the big damn pillows and move on. I think some people get a little crazy about the no-adjectives rule. But here’s a fun thought: while you may want to use the cool noun-verb combinations in your prose, consider how your characters will use adjectives and adverbs in their dialogue. If you have a British character, for instance, they may use a few more adverbs (per sentence) than someone from New York, as the adverb has a great history in British speech. (e.g.,  the adverb “quite,” which, when used alone, can leave its victim feeling for his or her spleen.) So some characters may indeed speak of the pillows pregnant with down, but if they all talk like that, your reader will want to murder them. In speech, we’re more likely to use plainer, more passive language.

All right, then. Go to it.

Photo Credit: Ray Wise via Compfight cc