Writing: Adverbial corsetage
Buried in work, plus getting ready for exchange student, etc etc.
Goo.
You high-style, literary-salon slumming auteurs will laugh, ha-ha!, at the image of this slub of a visual writer galoshing about in the mudpit of word choice. I spent how long yesterday trying, unsuccessfully, to find a verb for the effect of a shadow subduing the bright colors of a garden? Some verb accessible to the middle grade reader who will presumably be perusing this deadline-looming assignment when it makes its appearance sometime in 2006 or 7. No, it’s not one of 'my' projects, it’s work for hire to pay the bills, and yes, the money is embarrassing, but I still will not write “The shadows crept over the flowers.”
Crept. It can mean stealthy movement, but its primary meaning is to crawl on hands and knees-prone position-or a thing low to the ground crawling with its many little legs. If a bug creeps into your salad, there’s a nice, strong, vivid image. But if a note of hope creeps into your hero’s voice, never mind wondering what note registers as “hope”-my own preference would be for A flat, a nice mellow tone--and how it can possibly move about on little legs-somehow the verb isn’t strong enough, so we reach for the adverbs. A note of hope creeps stealthily into her voice.
Blegh. Verbs are so . . . versatile. We all know what that hope-note creeping means, but we sure don’t really hear it. ”I hate you!” she stormed. tells us that heroine is mad-but stormed has become so generic outside of its original thunder and lightning and rain, we usually end up seeing she stormed shrilly or brokenly and most often, of course, passionately. Hmmm. A passionate storm. Now that’s a concept-we sure need one here in SoCal, where not a drop of rain has fallen since that one single day in February.
Probably the verb that needs the most help adverbially is ‘went’. Go and its various forms through the tenses is so very all-purpose there is almost no image save the flicker of movement. I am especially bad at jamming down ‘went’ when I dash along in my text, and when I go back to rewrite, I have discovered that when I encounter that naked went I have to look for its clothing, sure to be flapping behind--went slowly, went speedily, went unhappily. Whoa. Time to press the replay button and watch the character again. She, what, sauntered? Ran? Scrambled? Slouched? from the room-what body language do I want to express? One thing for sure, I won’t say she crept unless she really was on hands and knees.
Back to my shadow.
Goo.
You high-style, literary-salon slumming auteurs will laugh, ha-ha!, at the image of this slub of a visual writer galoshing about in the mudpit of word choice. I spent how long yesterday trying, unsuccessfully, to find a verb for the effect of a shadow subduing the bright colors of a garden? Some verb accessible to the middle grade reader who will presumably be perusing this deadline-looming assignment when it makes its appearance sometime in 2006 or 7. No, it’s not one of 'my' projects, it’s work for hire to pay the bills, and yes, the money is embarrassing, but I still will not write “The shadows crept over the flowers.”
Crept. It can mean stealthy movement, but its primary meaning is to crawl on hands and knees-prone position-or a thing low to the ground crawling with its many little legs. If a bug creeps into your salad, there’s a nice, strong, vivid image. But if a note of hope creeps into your hero’s voice, never mind wondering what note registers as “hope”-my own preference would be for A flat, a nice mellow tone--and how it can possibly move about on little legs-somehow the verb isn’t strong enough, so we reach for the adverbs. A note of hope creeps stealthily into her voice.
Blegh. Verbs are so . . . versatile. We all know what that hope-note creeping means, but we sure don’t really hear it. ”I hate you!” she stormed. tells us that heroine is mad-but stormed has become so generic outside of its original thunder and lightning and rain, we usually end up seeing she stormed shrilly or brokenly and most often, of course, passionately. Hmmm. A passionate storm. Now that’s a concept-we sure need one here in SoCal, where not a drop of rain has fallen since that one single day in February.
Probably the verb that needs the most help adverbially is ‘went’. Go and its various forms through the tenses is so very all-purpose there is almost no image save the flicker of movement. I am especially bad at jamming down ‘went’ when I dash along in my text, and when I go back to rewrite, I have discovered that when I encounter that naked went I have to look for its clothing, sure to be flapping behind--went slowly, went speedily, went unhappily. Whoa. Time to press the replay button and watch the character again. She, what, sauntered? Ran? Scrambled? Slouched? from the room-what body language do I want to express? One thing for sure, I won’t say she crept unless she really was on hands and knees.
Back to my shadow.