As writers, we all want to be accepted and have others like our work, but we owe it to ourselves to write from the heart.
 
Chuck Wendig, in his post The Danger of Writing Advice from Industry Professionals, says,
 
“And so the advice really should be, don’t use adverbs or adjectives when they sound awkward, or when they fail to tell us something that we need to know.”
 
I repeat: Don’t use adverbs or adjectives when they sound awkward, or when they fail to tell us something that we need to know. In other words, use them when they are necessary and cut them when they aren’t.
 
We know that certain words and phrases don’t add to the narrative and only serve to increase the wordiness. Used too freely, they separate the reader from the experience.
 
For me, especially in my first draft, these words are like tics—they fall out of my fingers and into my keyboard randomly, and out of my voluntary control. I don’t self-edit as I go because at that point, I’m just trying to get the story down. The second and third drafts are where I shape my grammar and phrasing.
 
Two of my three current manuscripts are genre fiction. However, even in my contemporary work, I must write active prose. This means I don’t want to use words with no power behind them.
However, I will not blindly remove every ‘ly’ word because that would be ridiculous.
 
Consider adverbs, words that are sometimes reviled and banned by writing groups armed with a little dangerous knowledge. Descriptors frequently end with the letters ‘ly.’ You could do a global search for these letters, and a list will pop up in the left margin of your manuscript.
 
When it comes to adverbs, many times simply removing them strengthens the prose. If they are necessary, I leave them. As Chuck Wendig said, words like “later,” or “everywhere,” or “never” or “alone” are also adverbs.
 
Personally, although it would be an awesome challenge for a NaNoWriMo writing sprint, I don’t see myself writing with no adverbs whatsoever.
 
I seek out adverbs, descriptors, qualifiers, and other “weed words,” look at how they are placed in the context of the sentence and decide if they will stay or go. Many will go, but some must stay.
 
Perhaps you are new enough to this that when other writers point out that you incorporate too many passive phrasings into your narrative, you become confused. This confusion can make us feel angry and hurt, make us want to quit that writing group.
 
We want to avoid wordiness. Overuse of forms of to be (is, are, was, were) leads to wordiness. Long, convoluted passages turn away most readers. Each time you come across a form of this passive phrasing, see if you can use an active form of a verb in place of a form of to be.  Acted, as opposed to acted upon.
 
Some people use Scrivener for their writing and swear by it. For myself, I don't need a fancy word-processing program with a difficult learning curve—my life is complicated enough as it is, so I use MS Word as my word processing program, but Google Docs works just as well. Simple is good.
 
A good program to help point out how certain passages need to be “made active” is Pro Writing Aid. I use the professional version for my own work, but they do have a free version that will show you some limited problems in your prose, and just knowing what these are will give you a road map.
 
Indies who don’t have the benefit if a close knit writing group must hire line editors to go over their work. Even editors must have their work seen by other eyes. This is not cheap. If you don’t have an editing program, you must try to find these words on your own.
 
Caution: if you are hasty or impatient, a global search can be dangerous and can mess up an otherwise good manuscript. Be aware: This is a boring, time-consuming task.
 
You can’t take shortcuts. If you get hasty and choose to “Replace All,” you run the risk of making a gigantic mess of your work.
 
Consider the word ‘very.’ This word comes in for a lot of abuse in writing groups and writers’ chat rooms, and there are good reasons to limit its use.
 
BUT suppose you decide to simply eliminate every instance of the word “very” because you have discovered you overuse it. You open the navigation pane and the advanced search dialog box. In the ‘Replace With’ box you don’t key anything, thinking this will eliminate the problem.
 
Before you click ‘replace all’ consider three common words that have the letters v-e-r-y in their makeup:
 

• Every
• Everyone
• Everything

 
Deleting every instance of ‘very’ could mess things up on an incredibly large scale.
 
If you have decided something is a ‘weed word,’ examine the context. Have you used the word “actually” in a conversation? If so, you may want to keep it, as dialogue must sound natural, and people use that word in conversation. If you have used it in the narrative to describe an object, it's probably not needed.
 
Context is everything. Take the time to look at each example of the offending words and change them individually. You have already spent a year or more writing that novel, so why wouldn’t you take a few days to do the job right.
 
It’s unfortunate, but there is no speedy way to do this. Every aspect of getting your book ready for the reading public must be done with the human eye, patience, and attention to detail.
As I have mentioned before, editing programs are out there, some free, and some for an annual fee. Your word processing program probably has spell check, which can help or hinder you. Grammarly is another editing program I use for checking my own work, in tandem with Pro Writing aid.
 
The BIG problem for those who don’t understand the basics of grammar is, these programs are unable to see the context of the work they are analyzing:

 
“The tea was cool and sweet, quenching her thirst.”
 
Grammarly suggested replacing quenching with quenched.
 
Pro Writing Aid makes similarly strange suggestions.
 
I have no idea why.
 
Context is defined as the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect.
 
A person with limited knowledge of grammar will not benefit from relying on Grammarly or any other editing program for advice. This is because these programs operate by finite rules and will often strongly suggest you insert an unneeded article or change a word to one that is clearly not the right one for that situation. New writers should invest in the Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, and learn how grammar works.
 
Currently, at this stage in our technology, understanding context is solely a human function. Because context is so important, I am wary of relying on these editing programs for anything other than alerting you to possible comma and spelling malfunctions.
 
I don’t mind taking the time to visit each problem and resolve them one at a time. I see this as part of my job, just what an author does to make sure her work is finished to the best of her ability.
 
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Credits and Attributions:

The Danger of Writing Advice from Industry Professionals, by Chuck Wendig, Terribleminds,  The Ramble, http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/12/12/the-danger-of-writing-advice-from-industry-professionals/  ©2017. Accessed 12 Dec 2017.
Portions of this post previously appeared on Life in the Realm of Fantasy in the article Context and Adverbs by Connie J. Jasperson © 12 Dec 2017 and are reprinted here by permission.
 
About the Author:

Connie J. Jasperson is a published poet and the author of nine novels. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. A founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group, she can be found blogging regularly on both the craft of writing and art history at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

(The following article is from the author’s archives at Life in the Realm of Fantasy and has been reprinted by permission.)
 
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Every writer has moments when creativity fails them. We sit before our computer and the words refuse to come, or when they do, they seem awkward. At times like this, we feel alone and isolated. After all, an idea is jammed in our head and words should fall from our fingers like water from the tap.
 
I have suffered this, the same as every author does. However, it never gets too firm a grip on me because I have several exercises that help me write my way through the block. Something we sometimes forget is that the act of writing every day builds mental muscle tone and keeps you fit and in the habit of writing.
 
Every author suffers a dry spell now and then. Even so, this job requires us to practice, just like music or dancing. Doing well at anything artistic or sports related requires discipline. Just like a retired football player, when we stop writing for any reason, we lose our momentum and our purpose.
 
We lose our passion.
 
If you are in the middle of a manuscript and you lose your ability to go forward, save the file and close it. Walk away from that manuscript for a while.
 
Before we go any further, you must delete nothing. You will come back to your manuscript later with a fresh viewpoint and will be able to use some or all of it, so file it properly.
 
Occasionally, we get distracted by a different project that wants to be written. When that is the case, I always suggest you go ahead and work on the project that is on your mind. Let that creative energy flow, and you will eventually be able to become reconnected with the first project.
 
But what about those times when you need to write, you have to write, but the words won’t come? Trust me, it isn’t the end of your career. This is true writers’ block.
 
First, we have the element of fear to overcome. You are suddenly afraid that you have written everything good that you will ever write, and anything you write now is garbage.
 
It isn’t the end of everything. You will prove to yourself that you can write. This is a small exercise, very short. It should take you perhaps ten or fifteen minutes each day. My solution for this problem is a combination of mind-wandering and a a few simple writing exercises.
 
I got the idea for this while in a seminar on the craft of writing essays offered by the bestselling author of Blackbird, Jennifer Lauck.
 
In that class, Jennifer gave us prompts and asked us to write to them. I have never been good at writing to someone else’s prompts. My ideas don’t flow that way. To make it worse, we were going to have to share them with someone else in the class.
 
I felt panicky, terrified I wouldn’t be able to write, and would embarrass myself. My mind was blank.
 
When I saw what Jennifer’s prompt was, it occurred to me that I could do that. I had one of those bolt-of-lightning moments, a tangent to nowhere that didn’t pertain to her class. But it seemed important, so I wrote it down. When I got home, I pondered a little more about it and put my thoughts into a short essay.
 
In that class, I realized that most of the time, writer’s block is a result of not being able to visualize what you want to write about. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t articulate it.
 
It hits us in two stages, two emotions that are so closely related, it feels like one horrible emotion.

1. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t describe it. This can create a brief flash of panic.
2. Once you have experienced that moment of complete inability, fear that it will happen again magnifies the problem until it paralyzes us.

 
This is the writing prompt Jennifer Lauck used as the first exercise in her class:

1. Open a new document. At the top of this document type: Where I Am Today:

 
This is going to be a literal interpretation and description of your surroundings:

• Look around you and see the place where you are.
• Briefly describe the environment you are sitting in, what you see.
• Describe how you feel sitting in that place.

 
Just give it two or three paragraphs. For me, sitting here at this moment and writing this post, it runs like this:
 
I sit in the small third bedroom of my home. It’s my office, a cluttered storeroom, known here as the Room of Shame. A cup of cooling coffee sits beside my elbow, as does my cell phone. My desk holds many books on the craft of writing and also my computer.
 
Stacks of cardboard boxes filled with things that were, at one time, deemed important to keep, surround me. Filing cabinets full of legal papers, tax forms, and research take up space, all stuffed with the debris of our business life.
 
I could easily clean this space. It would take no time at all, perhaps a day at most. It’s a mountain I put off climbing.
 
See? At the end of this exercise, you have written a small short story.
 
But, more importantly, you have written the setting for a scene. Those paragraphs are around 120 words and are nothing special. But they were words and I wrote them, which keeps my mind functioning in a writing mode.

1. For your next exercise, go somewhere else and take your notebook. Write three more paragraphs detailing what you are looking at, and how you fit into it, and how it makes you feel.

 
You could do that on your porch, in a coffee shop, or the parking lot at the supermarket, but go away from your normal writing space. Just write a few paragraphs about the space you have come to, what you see, and what you sense.
 
The third exercise is more abstract:

1. Where do you want to be? Visualize and describe it the same way as you described the places you could see, a few short paragraphs. For me, I want to be flying my kite on Cannon Beach.

 
Your practice work is for your eyes alone. No one has to see it if you don’t want to share it.
 
If you do these three exercises at the same time every day, describing the environments and your perceptions in a different space each time, even when you have nothing to say that is worth reading, you are writing.
 
It’s a weird thing but writing about nothing in particular is like doodling. It is a form of mind-wandering. It can jar your creative mind loose. With perseverance, you will be writing your other work again.
 
The important thing is to write every day, even if it is only a few paragraphs. These are the exercises that work for me and which I recommend for working through writer’s block.
 
Remember, if you are suffering from a temporary dry spell, you are not alone. All authors go through those times.
 
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Connie J. Jasperson is a published poet and the author of nine novels. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. A founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group, she can be found blogging regularly on both the craft of writing and art history at Life in the Realm of Fantasy.
 
This article was first published on April 10, 2019 on Life in the Realm of Fantasy as When Creativity Fails © 2019 Connie J. Jasperson https://conniejjasperson.com/2019/04/10/when-creativity-fails-amwriting/ and has been reprinted by permission.