ON THE SHELF. Adverbicide is good for you

“Dialogue is really easy. Basically, it’s just a bunch of stuff that people say.”

If only it were that simple. But the minute you start actually listening to what people say, you know that straightforward transcription ain’t going to work. We stumble, we stutter, we pause, we interrupt, we forget what we were going to say mid-sentence. And, mostly, in real life, your subconscious editor edits, cuts, polishes and fills in the blanks. At a recent book launch, for example, while I was listening to the moderator’s speech — and thought it erudite, witty and perceptive — my teenage son was counting the number of times he said ‘um’ (123, in case anyone’s interested).

Half of what we’re saying is communicated in body language, gesture and expression, regardless of what actual words come out of our mouths. Which is why it is so tempting to liberally pepper written dialogue with adverbs: she said something sullenly, worriedly, happily, viciously, anxiously, brazenly — all those little ‘-lys’ betray the writer’s anxiety that the reader is not going to ‘get it’. What to the writer feels like a gentle bit of extra prompting can feel, to the reader, like being hit on the head with a blunt stick.

Stephen King illustrates the point brilliantly in his book on writing, On Writing (yes, he’s the king of spade-calling titles too), by asking the reader to compare three sentences, with and without the additional use of adverbs:

“Put it down!” she shouted. (Or: “Put it down!” she shouted menacingly)

“Give it back,” he pleaded, “it’s mine.” (Or: “Give it back,” he pleaded abjectly, “it’s mine.)

“Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,” Utterson said. (Or: “Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,” Utterson said contemptuously).

In each case, the addition of an adverbial qualifier to the dialogue attribution (shouted, pleaded, said) makes for a much weaker sentence. King’s advice is to take a deep breath, trust your reader, and kill your adverbs. But he also warns against the tendency among adverbicides to compensate by pumping their attribution verbs “full of steroids.” Why go with a simple ‘said’ when you can have characters ‘gasp’, ‘stammer’, ‘wheeze’, or even (heaven forbid) ‘ejaculate’?

“Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb, honest or dishonest, amusing or an old sobersides,” King goes on. “Good dialogue, such as that written by George V. Higgins, Peter Straub or Graham Greene, is a delight to read; bad dialogue is deadly.”

If it weren’t for the chance recommendation by a good friend a few years back, I would never have stumbled upon the dialogic delights of the American crime writer Robert B. Parker, and in particular those featuring the Boston private detective, Spenser. With his smartass come-backs, pared-to-the-bone-marrow dialogue, and humour so dry and gritty you could sandpaper wood with it, Spenser is the natural heir to that quintessential hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe. It’s no coincidence that both bear the names of Elizabethan poets — for these are no mere thugs, but men for whom words are as every bit as deadly as the pistols in their pockets.

Poodle Springs, Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe novel, left unfinished at his death in 1959, was completed and published forty years later by Parker, who went on to produce, a few years later, the sequel to Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep, entitled (in homage to the most famous Elizabethan poet of them all) Perchance to Dream.

I haven’t actually examined every page of every Parker (there are 40 Spenser novels alone, and life is short), but I don’t think he actually ever uses a single adverb to qualify dialogue attribution. Take this, typical exchange between Spenser and his African American right-hand man, Hawk:

“I’m working on a case. You’re my trusty sidekick.”

“Long as I don’t have to call you Kemo Sabe.”

“Ever wonder what that meant?” I said.

“I always thought it meant Paleface Motherfucker.”

“That’s probably it.”

If Stephen King is right, that “to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine,” then Robert B. Parker is, basically, God. I know this genre is called ‘hardboiled’ for the tough-egg flintiness of its heroes, but if the salty, crisp, crackling dialogue is anything to go by, I wonder if it isn’t just as much to do with a distillation process: burning away the chaff, vapourising the solution, and basically just boiling the prose down to its absolute crystalline essence.

Raymond Chandler probably didn’t anticipate his own long goodbye being so artificially prolonged. His posthumous amanuensis suffered (or enjoyed) the same fate: four Spenser novels have appeared after Robert B. Parker’s death in 2010, written by a man who sounds like a detective agency himself, Ace Atkins. I haven’t, hand on heart, actually read Ace Atkins’ versions, but I am willing to bet my bottom dollar, pound or rupee, that the dialogue will be short and snappy, sparingly sprinkled with saids and with nary an adverb in sight.

Dialogue? Easy? In theory, perhaps, but not when you get down to the practice. All of which brings me, inexorably, inexcusably and cheaply, to the one about the lecturer explaining why to teach postcolonial theory rather than the Elizabethan poets: “It’s easier Said than Donne.”

(Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher)

anita@anitaroy.net

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