I am slowly working my way through Usrula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. I am doing so solo, an experience she refers to as working through these exercises as a lone navigator. The previous exercises can be found in the Lone Navigator section of this Substack if you’d like to take a look at them, though you won’t be missing any context for this exercise if you choose not to.
I have been feeling very productive in my writing lately, and in my reading (a component of craft we sometimes neglect), but I haven’t produced anything that feels ready for an audience yet. So, let us turn to Steering the Craft and another writing exercise.
The fifth exercise (halfway through!) focuses on adverbs and adjectives. Identifying the parts of speech is not my strong suit, and I always have to look up the definition of adverb, and then while I feel familiar with adjectives I tend not to identify them when I’m reading (even for editing) and so rarely notice where and how I am using them.
In short, this exercise is much needed for me.
Here is the prompt:
Write a paragraph to a page of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc.) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.
Le Guin suggests that one might, instead of writing something fresh, take something they have already written and try “chastening” it. That sounds interesting to me, so that is the route I have gone.
Below is my “chastened” section, and then below that (in the block quote) is the “un-chastened” section for comparison purposes. Here we go.
No talking it is, then, Solis thinks.
The car takes off as he sits. There is no driver, no passengers beyond the two of them. The glow of their rubaiyat is the only light in the car. Their rubaiyat are light etched into the skin, a tattoo made of the sun’s rays. They are a birthright and each is unique to the individual, as unique as a fingerprint; as unique as a soul. Everyone in Rust is born with one—they refuse to acknowledge the exceptions; consign them to the category of “not us” and give them nothing, not citizenship, and not shelter. Ionesco’s rubaiyat is a flowing pattern, a growing thing, like the roots of a tree or the spreading branches of its boughs. The roots twine along her hands, they bud up from her shoulders and across her neck, turning into branches reaching across her face and forehead. Solis’s rubaiyat is a geometry of circuit boards and right angles that spill across his neck and face, and out along the backs of his hands and up his arms.
These differences invite interpretation, of course—there is nothing more human than adding signifiers to nature’s patterns—but Solis pays no attention to the soothsayers and rubaiyat readers who set up their stalls and tents in every open air market, promising to divine the poetry written in light upon your skin. He has only been with Ionesco for two weeks, but she strikes him as the type who also pays it no mind. Still, Ionesco hasn’t asked him to stroll the markets with her, so Solis allows that he may be wrong.
No talking it is, then, Solis thinks.
The car takes off as soon as he is seated—there is no driver, and no other passengers. In the dim light of the car’s interior their rubaiyat shine brightly enough to be clearly visible; brilliant lines of white-gold light etched into their skin in tattoo-like patterns as unique to the individual as a fingerprint—as unique as a soul. Everyone in Rust is born with one—they refuse to acknowledge the exceptions; consign them to the category of “not us” and give them nothing, least of all citizenship, or shelter. It is not the case everywhere, but in Rust, a rubaiyat is requisite. Ionesco’s is a flowing pattern, a growing thing, like the roots of a tree or the spreading branches of its boughs, thick and intertwined along her right hand, budding up from her shoulder across her neck and the right side of her face, a few branches reaching across her forehead and nose to her left side. For Solis, his rubaiyat is a digital thing, all rigid lines and right angles, a geometry that rarely condescends to spirals as it spills across his neck and face, or along the backs of his hands and up his arms.
Such patterns, such differences, of course invite interpretation, but Solis has never paid any attention to the soothsayers and rubaiyat readers who set up their stalls and tents in every open air market and promise to divine the poetry written in light upon one’s skin. As far as he knows, Ionesco pays it no mind either, but their relationship isn’t exactly at the stage where Solis is spending his fleeting free time strolling the markets with her, so he allows for the possibility he is wrong here.
Okay. Exercise complete. I didn’t quite manage to get rid of all of the adverbs. Did you notice which ones were remaining? Still, I feel like the first section, the chastened one, is far and away an improvement over the earlier un-chastened section. What do you think?
I think the lesson I want to pull from this is a little bit more nuanced than “use fewer adjectives and adverbs”. I think the deeper lesson here is that one needs to be more mindful of the use of adjectives and adverbs, to use them intentionally and with an eye for how the prose and narrative are altered by them, because the main reason I think the chastened section is an improvement is that the language is clearer, smoother, with an easier flow. That isn’t just because of the culling of some extra wordage, but from the change in sentence structure as well.
It’s almost like building the sentence structure, and then the narrative flow, is best accomplished utilizing mostly verbs and nouns—writing the way Hemingway would want us to write, I suppose. Then, going back, we can consider the other parts of speech as our touch, our personal choices; the pictures we choose to hang on our bare walls, or the paint we intentionally splash on that whitewash.
As always, these exercises are helping me immensely. I wonder, how much of this is filtering deep into my mind and taking root, versus how much of this is something that one has to work at to be mindful of? What I mean is, I am hoping these lessons are going deep enough into my subconscious that they will show up in my earlier draft writing. I am worried that might be hoping for too much, though, and that rather I need to do the work to recall these lessons when I begin revising.
Honestly, though, Steering the Craft is proving so valuable to me that once I finish it, I kind of want to just turn around and start it over from the beginning.
Alright, I’ll leave it there for this one.