Adjectives

I did the adjectives exercise with my story last night. It wasn't exactly difficult, but it was arduous. I was cutting and pasting into a separate doc without a mouse, and then I gave up on that and just deleted the adjectives. Also, and this is embarrassing, but I had to stop more than once and decide if a word was an adjective or not. S-M-R-T smart!

But here's a list of what I got from the first three pages:

jerky
unhappy
ok 
obligated
in person
sometimes
infrequent
mostly
officially
wasted
very pleasantly (wasted)
extensive
mild
dangerous 
basic 
vast
tastiest
pleasantly
smashed, wasted
thigh high
striped boycut
long
sleepless
loudly
perfect
big sad
arrogant playboy
no good
always
dirty
most of the time
all the time
casually
racist
specifically
offensive
socially skilled
in seconds
instant
interesting
funny
complete
serious
chronic
different

Now, the exercise asks the writer to look at the list of adjectives/adverbs and see which ones are cliches, and figure out better, non-cliche words to use. I don't see a ton of cliches here, although 'vast' and 'arrogant playboy' have got to go. What I see are common, boring words. 

Next, the writer is 'posed to see how the story reads without the adjectives. Here's where the task is really onerous (hard, difficult, arduous, a lot of work): when you take an adjective out of a sentence, often you have to go back and rewrite that sentence! So like, "She felt sad and lonely" becomes "She felt       and       ." And you have to rewrite that shit! No kidding! 

That was my favorite part; seeing how I could rewrite with no adjectives. I do like how it reads. I think too many adjectives is a lot like expository dialogue. You insult the reader by saying the day was cloudy, cold and overcast, when you could just say it's overcast and let them draw their own conclusions about the cloudiness and coldness. 

So tonight I'm continuing with taking adjectives out, and then I get to put some back in. Yaaaaaay!