Breaking Rules Week: Adjectivitis

New writers usually suffer from the disease of adjectivitis—a near fatal condition that kills their work in five seconds flat. Adjectives sound impressive, so try-hard writers often throw them all over the place like glitter. They’re not as sparkly as they might seem, though. They rarely give you a visual or emotive response. They tend to be abstract, vague, and distracting. Less is more, even in writing. Anything an adjective can do, a metaphor can do better. The best writing has immediacy. The reader can picture or feel it without having to do mental gymnastics.

This is, however, rule breaking week, so I have to say there is room for a good adjective. Let’s turn our attention to a famous rule-breaker: William Carlos Williams.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The poem is sparse and precise—so sparse it doesn’t even use punctuation. It includes two adjectives: Red and white. In the sparsity of the language, those colours are crisp and immediate. Red can be a thousand times more powerful than Venetian burgundy, so please stop being so pretentious. Some adjectives can, indeed, pack power. You just have to test them doubly hard to make sure they belong in your text.

Your words must work for their place, and adjectives rarely do. That said, sometimes, they’re the hardest workers in a sentence. Here’s another piece of poetry, this time by T.S. Eliot:

Gerontion

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.

The interplay between the old man and the dry month would be far less potent if Eliot had strewn adjectives all over his poetry like new writers do. These are excellent adjectives, though. They’re not the sort of words that create clutter. They’re simple, short, and visual.

Exercise: Write a descriptive prose piece with no more than three perfectly-chosen adjectives. If you prefer, write a character sketch with the same twist: Three adjectives, and no more.