My creative writing teacher told me to cut all my adverbs and it ruined my style

In my first college workshop at the community center, the instructor, Mr. Hargrove, gave me a single piece of advice: 'Kill every adverb. They are weak words.' For six months, I followed it like a rule, stripping my stories bare. I ended up with flat, choppy sentences that sounded like a robot wrote them. My characters stopped feeling real because I couldn't say they 'spoke quietly' or 'moved quickly'; I had to find some other, often clunky, way to say it. The advice made me so focused on avoiding one type of word that I lost my own voice. I finally gave up on his rule after a friend read my stuff and said it felt stiff. Now I use adverbs when they fit, and my writing flows much better. Has anyone else had a strict writing rule backfire on them?

2 comments

2 Comments

noah_webb6d ago

Sounds like your teacher took "show don't tell" way too literally. Some rules are meant to be broken.

hugo_nelson6d ago

My creative writing prof always said the best stories balance showing and telling. Sometimes you just need to say "he was angry" and move the plot along. Slaving over a metaphor for every single emotion kills the pacing.