“The adverb is not your friend.” — Stephen King

If you’ve not yet read Stephen King’s On Writing, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s one of those seminal books on the craft, at least from a Western perspective.

If you’re short on time and want to focus on his seething hatred for adverbs, do a quick Google for stephen king adverbs.

Rather than completely demonize the poor adverb, I thought I’d get into some nuance around when they are weak and when they can be strong not as weak.
 

🤔 First up: what exactly is an adverb?

I’m not a big grammar person. There’s a technical way to define an adverb (modifier of a verb, adjective, adverb, sentence). And there’s the quick way to spot 'em: words that end with “ly.”

• suddenly
• excitedly
• promptly
• begrudgingly
• fortunately

Newer or less experienced writers tend to use adverbs a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Generally, Stephen King is right—you don’t want to overuse any device, but you especially don’t want to overdo adverbs.

 

📖 Adverbs are usually weak in prose

In a nutshell: Prose is fictional stuff that isn’t dialogue or poetry. So the main body of words in most stories.

When you use “ly” adverbs in your prose to describe something, you are almost certainly telling and not showing.

• Mishka smiled charmingly. (WEAK ❌)
• Mishka’s smile started in her eyes, then lit up her face. Slow, like a sunrise. I couldn’t help but smile back. (much STRONGER 💚)

It took me 10x longer to write the second one though. When going through your first drafts, consider every prose-adverb as an opportunity to delete it and show.
 

Exceptions: strong or neutral adverbs in prose

The first rule of writing is that every rule can be broken! There can be contextual, tonal, or stylistic, or technical grammatic reasons why you might want to keep a tell-y adverb.

• The scene needs speed and “showing” slows it down
• You want to sharply punctuate something
• You’re going for alliteration or repetition on purpose
• Not all adverbs end in “ly”. The word ‘soon’ can be used as an adverb, because English is English 🤷🏼‍♀️

 

🗣 Adverbs are terribly weak in speech tags

Perhaps the most egregious use of adverbs is when they’re used to modify speech. Here are some examples:

• “Stop it!” she screamed loudly. ❌
• “Okay, sure,” he said smugly. ❌
• “Why not?” she demurely sighed. ❌

 
All of these are terrible. TERRIBLE. Kill them with fire. First off, said is the best speech tag to use. But that aside, these adverbs are distracting and force the Reader to do extra work trying imagine what you mean by “smugly.”

• “Stop it!” she screamed. A pair of pigeons burst out from behind a trash can, flying away. 💚
• “Okay, sure,” he said, confident that they were wrong. He’d enjoy watching them fail. 💚
• “Why not?” she said, avoiding my eyes. She seemed to get smaller every time she spoke. 💚

 

Adverbs are typically 100% fine in dialogue itself!

When humans talk to one another, we use adverbs all the time. In regular conversation, most of us aren’t trying to spin a tale or practise our spoken word craft. So we take shortcuts and ‘tell’ vs. ‘show.’

An aside
I believe a lot of newer writers tend to “write-like-they-talk.” As in, literally transcribing a conversation as a story. Compared to: writing a story for a Reader who is reading, not listening, and who wants to be immersed in a particular genre.

So when your characters speak, they can and should use as many adverbs as they please!

• “Actually, when I saw her last, she was frantically searching for something,” she said. ✅
• “Quickly, to me! Quickly!” I shouted. ✅
• “Tie the string loosely, breathe deeply, then gently lower yourself to the ground,” said the Witch. ✅
   

Adverbs are also okay in non-fiction

Take a look through this article, and you’ll find a decent pile of adverbs lying around (not including the examples). In non-fiction the goal is usually to efficiently (⬅ there’s one!) transmit information. I’m not trying to immerse you into a world; I’m trying to explain stuff about adverbs.

Therefore, the “tell” vibe that they convey is perfectly useful. You’d probably get annoyed if I tried to make an artful scene out of every piece of advice here!

~

I hope that you've gotten to know the oft maligned adverb a little better. It's a common tool that is almost always overused by new writers—at least according to current conventions in Western style prose.

 

About the Scholar and Scribe Community

Scholar and Scribe is a new creative writing community founded in the forges of Hive's passionate Pizza Guild. It sets itself part from some of the other writing groups on Hive with its unique dual-token system.

[ Quick token guide • Community guide ]

 

I hope you found this helpful! I own the license to all images in this post, except for the Scholar and Scribe banner icons, which were designed by @trashyomen. This tip was inspired by the massive and useful tip catalogue that The Ink Well has put together over the years.