I’m cleaning up the first three chapters of the zillionth revision of my MG fantasy to run by critquers before I submit them. This rewrite coincided with Kate Coombs MG/YA class. The class exercises are punching the story back and forth, up and down, mixing and mashing. Some days my head spins with it.
Last week ended with a lesson on description and those sneaky adjectives and adverbs. Adverbs, I can live without, but my descriptive passages start out loaded with adjectives. Second drafts eliminate some. Then, I bite on something hard to extract the excess. Kate offered this quote from poet Mary Oliver’s Blue Pastures: “Look for verbs of muscle; adjectives of exactitude.”
Some of the early critique groups I participated in reject adverbs and adjectives altogether and although I don’t feel that strongly, learning by abstinance has its merits. I feel queasy when nouns are unnecessarily embellished. Drat! Did you see those adverbs creep in here?
