This concise, beautiful blog is full of helpful, insightful, important tips that will undoubtedly give your fledgling, wonderful prose a little extra umph and polish to push it over that distant finish line of completion and perfection.

Today’s tip is to write exactly like that, up there. You know, throw out adjectives like they’re candy at Halloween and it’s quarter to ten and you still have a full two bags of cheap, grocery store chocolate to dispense. Heap those descriptors like the generous soul you are to your eager patrons. Relish in their delight at your sweet turns of ingenious phrasing and the meticulous, cultivated, highly detailed description of every single little detail that pertains to your story.

If there is one thing that immediately separates experienced writers from the inexperienced, it is the use of adjectives. Look, this is a trap I fell into when I was learning. It’s also one of the first areas of my edits that I focus on. Less is more. There is no getting around that. There’s a terrible tendency for abusing the adjective and it’s important that we try to reel our worse indulgences in. 

But it is so tempting to add a little spice, right? 

The issue with excessive adjectives is that it’s distracting. Readers really don’t care how contrite a character’s smile was. They certainly don’t want to have a detailed explanation of every facial twitch she has in a conversation. Part of the problem with too many adjectives is prose bloat. It hurts your pacing and distracts from your action.

That’s not to say that adjectives are bad and shouldn’t be used at all. They should be intentional. 

However, before we get ahead of ourselves, what is an adjective?

In its simplest terms, an adjective is a word or phrase that modifies a noun. It’s descriptor words. Where they’re good is in situations that you want to either draw attention to a noun or need to have it stand out. Adjectives can highly change the mood of a scene. They can reveal insight into characters’ personalities. They can flesh out world descriptions. But you can’t have everything expressed in painstaking detail. A novel is not a movie. Unimportant objects, people and places do not require clarity in your prose. The more you describe something, the more you cue your reader into its importance. 

However, if you’re cueing them into the wrong things you run the risk of distracting your reader. Worse, you desensitise them to important descriptors, thus losing emotional punch later in the story when you’re trying to heighten tension. It’s not just that they bloat your prose but they also water down all your memorable moments. It drags down the quality of your entire piece. 

Authors also have a few go-to adjectives that they like. It’s probably the first word that pops into mind when they want to describe a person’s tone of voice or facial tic. Sometimes it’s a word that encapsulates a character and crops up every time they enter a scene or chapter. Excessive repetition on its own can be bad but there’s also a fine line between characterisation and excessive adjective use as well. While editing, you may notice these personal favourites cropping up. I always like to do a word search during my early passes to see how often a descriptor is used and where in the manuscript they occur. If they’re reasonably spread out, I may only need to cut a few. If they’re clustered into a couple of sections, they’re easy places I can save on my word count. 

In those cases though, you may be able to pull out a few synonyms. But knowing when to replace a word and when to cut it is a delicate art and if you’re ever in doubt, I’d err on the side of elimination rather than substitution. For the most part, there’s no prize for having the longest manuscript and, often, those words spent on descriptors can be better saved for advancing plot.

If you’re starting out on your writing journey, I recommend making a conscious effort to reduce adjective use by at least a third. Even if you absolutely love a turn of phrase, be very critical of each use. You probably won’t realise just how much of a difference it makes until after you’ve done a pass and drastically reduced the number of adjectives that you’ve used. 

So, when you’re writing description, ask yourself:

Have I used too many adjectives? 

Is my flow and pacing suffering from details unimportant to the plot or scene?

Have I used too many of the same descriptors?

Is this adjective really important? If I cut it do I lose anything tangible from the manuscript?