In the last newsletter, we briefly covered seven key points for creating stronger openings. In this segment, we will dive into the first one and go into detail as to how to implement it into your writing to make not only your openings stronger, but your overall writing as well.

Using too many adjectives and adverbs weakens your writing. They tend to be distracting and when a string of them are used, readers tend to forget them by the time the reader reaches your noun or verb. For instance, take the sentence below:

 There was an old, scary, abandoned house in the middle of a dark, silent, windy field.

By the time the reader reaches the end of the sentence, they’ve forgotten the modifiers used to describe the building and the day. Also, editors and agents, at a glance, can tell the writing is not crisp by the excessive use of commas.

 A technique that helps me cut down the number of modifiers I use or to use stronger ones is this: Imagine I give you a blank sheet of paper and ask you to draw “old”. You’d probably ask, “Old what?” Subconsciously, though, your mind has already begun assembling images of an old town, an old person, an old car, etc., and if I then say, “An old house”, your mind will quickly reach into an arsenal of memories and experiences you’ve developed through the years that encompass an “old house”. If I ask you to draw or describe this “old house” you may say the paint on the walls is gone, its design may be from the early 20th century, etc. Now, if I throw in another modifier, like “abandoned” you’ll tweak the image in your mind. You’ll now imagine a caved-in roof or windows that are broken, laden with dirt or simply gone. If I add yet another modifier to the list, “scary” this time, you may picture a house next to a cemetery, or one that is dark with crooked doors and windows. Once you’ve developed all these images in your mind, write down what you “see”. These visuals will engage the reader and lead them to see the “old” house on their own. Give the reader the power to decide whether the house is old or not. Don’t smack them over the head with modifiers and force feed the visual. Nobody likes that.

When I apply this technique to the above sentence, I come up with this instead:

Cobwebs and overgrown vines covered the house walls, and the only sound that night came from the rusty sign that creaked in the wind.

This sentence is far from perfect, but it does lead the reader to picture the house on their own. I could have said “Sticky cobwebs”, but we all know that cobwebs tend to be sticky, so “cobwebs” alone gives a good visual. I used “overgrown” to describe the vines to show that they’ve been unkept, but I could have probably done away with that adjective too since the fact that cobwebs are present translates into an unkept house. I used the adjective “only” to show that the night was quiet – there were no crickets, no frogs, probably a desolate place. The adjective “rusty” shows the age of the sign and the condition of the house.

Go over your own work and try to do this exercise and see how many adjectives and adverbs you can do away with. Happy writing!