What is an adverb? Well, just as an adjective describes a noun (thing), an adverb describes or qualifies either:

In short you are looking mostly for words ending in “-ly”. Other common adverbs include: quietly, happily, angrily, jerkily, gently, seriously and quickly, but there are tonnes of the buggers. And buggers they are, because in most cases they are

Time and time again I’ve seen people give writing advice that forbids the use of adverbs entirely. I’m not one for writing rules, because every book and every author are different and have their own unique voice, so instead of forbidding adverbs let’s take a closer look at why they so often end up on the no-no list.

Pacing is really important in stories, but pacing isn’t all about where your action scenes are and how pithy your dialogue is. Pacing has as much to do with the words you use and the length of your sentences. If you are padding your sentences with adverbs, then no matter what is happening the pace will feel slower. Let’s look at an example.

Which one is giving you a better feel for the scene you are reading/writing? No matter what you are writing you should always strive for the strongest words you can, words that do the most work with the least number of letters. Especially if you are writing a short story. But just because you are writing a novel doesn’t mean you can afford to be sloppy.

Adverbs of degree are the worst of the lot. Very. Extremely. Pretty. When you are using an adverb to describe a descriptive word, or further qualify a verb or even another adverb, then you probably have the wrong words in the first place. So these are almost always unnecessary padding.

Let’s look at the first example I gave:

Here the adverb is being used to describe just how little the plant is, but then instead of little we could use another adjective that gets across “extremely little” such as “tiny” or “minuscule”.

Very is another adverb of degree. Very big. Very fast. Very strong. Pick another word instead. Such as: Huge. Swift. Powerful. These words hold a lot more value even though they mean the same thing. Huge is somehow bigger and more imposing than very big. In swift you can hear the rush of the wind entirely lacking in very fast. And powerful has a force nowhere to be found in very strong.

So whenever you see these words, get rid of them. Find a better word to use in their place.

Just like in our earlier discussion about dialogue attributions (HERE), there are some adverbs that are an entirely redundant waste of space. Check out the dialogue attribution discussion to see how dialogue itself makes many adverbular (totes a word) dialogue tags redundant. But they can often be just as redundant in the bulk of your prose. And just as sneaky.

We’ve talked about why you shouldn’t write ‘walked slowly’ but it’s a much more heinous crime to ‘creep slowly’ because how else does one creep. You never need to whisper quietly. Or run quickly. In fact the only time an adverb might be necessary in this situation is if the opposite is true. Is you character running slowly for some reason (as through magical jelly). Or whispering loudly (which would tell us something interesting about the character in question).

But in both of this examples there are other ways to write them that give a clearer and more interesting picture.

Which just makes it sound like he’s a really terrible runner, in which case run probably isn’t the word you were after in the first place.

This line not only tells us that Charles said “quiet” but it also tells us something important about his character. He’s one of those loud, confident people who can’t whisper for love or money.

Well… yes. Adverbs, like everything else, have a place in narrative. But like the fancy dialogue attributions we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the more you use them the weaker they become. (And the weaker they make your story due to the reasons above).

Each and every one of them needs to be carefully considered (‘carefully’ is an adverb here, and in this situation I deem it to be adding weight, not subtracting it). Keep those you deem truly necessary, those that add, not subtract. But remember that while you can use them you must use them sparingly. (Again, sparingly is an adverb).

Consider the famous Star Trek line:

Forget the split infinitive here for a moment and tell me that it would have been as effective a line had it just said:

Ok, so this seems rather obvious. In order not to be crap you have to write well. Durr. But weirdly this is often one of the most overlooked steps. I believe story-telling is a genetic sickness that everyone has to a greater or lesser degree (you could call it talent if you like, but it feels more like a disease to me) but regardless of how ‘natural’ you are at it, it’s still a skill that requires practice. Hours and hours of practice. You’ll write lots of terrible things before you learn to write well, but that is how you become a good writer. Don’t neglect the learning phase. Don’t assume that because YOU love your story and your characters that you’ve done them justice.

A beta reader is someone who reads your book before it is a finished product, often at the end of the first draft, or after the first rewrite. They can be a friend or family member, but there is an inherent problem with using people you know. They don’t like to upset you. And unless they are huge readers, reviewers, critics, authors or editors, they aren’t always able to give truly constructive criticism. This is a problem. If you want to be a good author then beta readers don’t exist to stroke your ego. I believe in the brutal rose pruning approach to feedback. No one should ever be nasty, but constructive criticism is FAR more important and worthwhile than any amount of praise. No matter how much someone might like my work, when I’m in the rewriting phase I would much prefer to hear about what didn’t work in detail, rather than what did.

Another good idea is to have someone read your manuscript and make a note whenever they put the book down and why, whether it is to go to the bathroom, to go to sleep, because they needed to go out or whether they suddenly realised the dishes needed doing. A gripping  book will stop most readers from wanting to deal with anything in their everyday life, so places where a book is put down are worth looking at in terms of correcting issues in pacing.

I have written a blog about this before, (here), but here we go again for emphasis. This one I REALLY cannot stress enough. Everything on this list is important, but this one is the most difficult and most skipped step in the whole process. It is true of traditionally published works too, but generally you have the powers that be to tell you whether you are or are not ready. This step is essentially what gatekeepers exist to patrol.

So when is a book ready? Most authors (read probably all of us at some point in our writing youth) have finished a first draft and glowed, sure that we just penned the ultimate masterpiece and people have only to read it to fall in love with our wonderful characters and blah blah blah boring boring. I sure did it. The books that went on to become The Vengeance Trilogy were originally written in 2007. When I was eventually ready to publish The Blood of Whisperers it was 2013. (And they weren’t my first finished novels. My first finished novel was 220,000 words long and the most amazing (piece of shit) book ever written. Part of an even shitter 800,000 word trilogy.)

Between 2007 and 2013, The Vengeance Trilogy underwent a massive overhaul, I got lots and lots of writing practice, there was a whole new set of first drafts and so many rewrites of those that I could not count them. And now I have something I can say I am proud of. If I had self-published them in 2007 when I first finished I would be regretting it now. I would have wasted some great characters and a great idea on rubbish.

The key to getting this step right is distance. Whenever you think you’ve completed an amazing book and you’re ready to publish, put it down. Don’t look at it. Start a new project or just take a break, read lots (you should do this anyway if you want to be good at your job). You should keep writing, because only by writing do you learn, but you need to leave that project alone. Give it a good three months before you go back. If you still cannot find fault with it, give it to someone new to read. Not one of your old beta readers, but someone you can trust to be brutally honest. Throw it to a complete stranger or pay for a manuscript assessment, or if you already have a relationship with an editor they might perform this task for you. In a sense, this person is now your gatekeeper. Of course you can choose whether you listen to them or not, but if my editor told me my book wasn’t ready I damn well wouldn’t let it see the light of day.

So that editor I was just talking about. I hope you have one of these. And if not, you NEED one. This is not optional. Even if you are a fully trained editor it still isn’t optional. At the very least your book needs to be proofread for mistakes by someone that is not you, because no matter how many times you go over it you’re still likely to miss them. Our brains are just that good at filling in what they know should be there rather than seeing what really is.

Let me stress again – THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL.

Once you’re confident that your story is the best it can be, once it has been beta read and reworked and you’ve bled over perfecting everything that can possibly be perfected, you are going to need a cover. We’ve all heard the saying “Never judge a book by its cover” but who the hell doesn’t?

Advertisers and marketing teams have spent years researching how the human brain responds to different colours and shapes and fonts and words so they can sell us more stuff we don’t need. Technically your book is something we don’t need (not food, water, shelter, warmth etc) so you have to employ the same principles. Don’t assume that the wonderful writing on the inside will win out. It might win a few, but not multitudes.

So unless you are a trained professional designer or artist, don’t think for a moment that you can do this shit for yourself. If you don’t have years’ worth of experience using Adobe photoshop or Indesign or some other comparable program, don’t even think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of books out there all vying for attention, a cover drawn in Microsoft paint isn’t going to cut it. You want it to look as good as the stuff the Big 5 put out, or why would someone bother taking the risk on you?

Covers sell books. In fact if you want to sell books, it’s more important that you have a good cover than that the book is any good. I recently picked up a self-published book with an AWESOME cover. I was really looking forward to it, but in the end I didn’t finish it. It wasn’t terrible, but there were so many technical errors and general wtf are these characters even trying to DO that I just couldn’t waste my time (if you have kids you know you have to be rather more selective about what you read with the limited time you have).

But this book sells well. And it will keep selling well because it has an amazing cover. End of story. Bye bye. See you later.

So that’s my five step plan to not sucking at self-publishing, but even if you decide to go with a publishing company the first 3-4 steps are still relevant. And don’t worry, after completing these steps there is a whole new world of hurt waiting for you, the bit where you actually have to produce your book and get people to buy it. But that is a discussion for another day.

Devin out.

Maybe. It all depends on why. I’m not saying there are no good reasons and no good ways, but there are a lot more bad reasons and bad ways, so let’s look at a few. As always take these as guidelines and things to think about, not hard and fast rules. (Because I hate those).

Our hero is unsure what to do next and is in need of guidance, and lo and behold here comes his dead mentor in a dream, despite the fact his mentor is dead and has no psychic link to him whatsoever. Of course magic can be trotted out to cover any number of holes, but it does beg the question, why would you want to?

If your hero is hanging around waiting for a dream cue, then he’s passive and dull and lacking a goal. If he has a goal and a plan to achieve it, then he doesn’t need a dream to tell him what to do next.

And if you do go ahead and write a scene in which a character has a dream containing important information via some magical connection, then please, PLEASE, PLEASE, don’t use it as way of creating some cheap tension by having the character wake up JUST BEFORE the most important piece of information is received. You would have to have a very good reason and do this extremely well or your manuscript may well be thrown across the room.

This is similar to reason #1, but instead of giving us information, we are given a view of the future (as it may or may not turn out) and again most writers use this as a form of cheap tension. “Oh no! Will Billy really fall out of the tree and break his neck landing on an oreo like in his dream? I had better read on and find out.”

Again there are ways you could use this to great effect if dreaming is a core part of your plot and your world (think ‘Inception’), but more often than not it is going to fall flat. Find another way to maintain or create tension.

And remember that dreams happen to one person, so unless you have mysticism at play no special knowledge comes to us in dreams. To quote Pyramids by Terry Pratchett:

This is the reason I wrote my first dream sequence when I was sixteen. I had a character wander into a magical cave and sleep there, giving him an excuse to have vivid, partly prophetic, but mostly artsy dreams that could only be connected to the plot/motivations/struggles via the most esoteric of contortions. It neither furthered the plot nor added to his character development, but because I was exploring fancy descriptions and themes and imagery I felt like a REAL writer. It’s a stage. Write your artsy dreams then delete them. Or save them in a folder somewhere deep and meaningful on your hard drive.

Think Eddard Stark having the same dream over and over again. (Game of Thrones for those not in the know)

Is your character anxious? Were they abused as a child? Are they afraid of dying? Fear come to us in dreams more than joy does, which makes a dream the perfect place to explore a character’s subconscious, especially when they are not self-aware enough to know these things about themselves. This is a great use for dreams because we have all been there, we have all had dreams of things we are dreading or nightmares born from things we have never gotten over. Use this and you are using dreams not only realistically, but with purpose. You’re reader will also be able to relate to what is happening.

This overlaps a bit with reason one, but the previously quoted Pyramids by Terry Pratchett uses dreams this way. While new information is not imparted in the main character’s dream, suspicions his subconscious has been working on come to the fore leaving him with a realisation upon waking.

Another example here would be in the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, where dreams show us (without having to tell us) that Harry and Voldemort have a lingering connection. It is a logical time for this to become obvious, as when we sleep we are the most vulnerable and the most open.

It boils down to this. If you want to know whether it’s a good dream sequence or a bad one, think about why you are doing it. Remember that most people don’t have truly lucid dreams. They can’t control what they are dreaming about. Dreams themselves are odd things, fluid and ever changing, often not making sense and rarely well remembered. No one really knows what they are, whether they are formed by our memories neatly packing themselves away, or by our subconscious working on problems and anxieties. Mostly they leave feelings, sometimes peace, other times fear or uneasiness or sadness.

Dreams are safer used to tell us something about a character than to further a plot. Although as I always say these are merely guidelines, not rules. Break them if you can.