Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

not lost anything in bulk. It floats away, the water round it torn and splashed by the sharks, and the air above vexed with flights of fowls, whose beaks are like so many poniards in the whale. The phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the din. For hours and hours from the ship that sight is seen. Beneath the sky, upon the face of the sea, wafted by breezes, the mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

That, of course, is from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. It is, however, rather different from the way the author wrote it, and is more like what would have resulted had he gone back and crossed out the adjectives. Melville, as it happened, used a great many adjectives in this passage. Having read it once in an abridged version, please consider it in full:

The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, the great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

Adjectives certainly bring this scene to life?or to death, one might prefer to say. Some of Melville's phrases make the passage almost unbearably vivid?the peeled white body, the rapacious flights of screaming fowls, the vast white headless phantom floating in the murderous din.

But notice, if you please, what Melville does in the final sentence of the passage. All of a sudden the adjectives change altogether in tone. All at once the author is directing our attention to the unclouded and mild sky, the fair face of the pleasant sea, the joyous breezes. The effect is shocking, and Melville has heightened it by selecting?deliberately, I would assume?adjectives which are not merely gentle and positive and life-affirming, in contrast to those employed earlier, but adjectives which are definitely bland and unimaginative, even banal. The fair face of the pleasant sea? The joyous breezes? The unclouded sky? These would be clichŽs but for the context in which they appear.

We can decide for ourselves why Melville wrote that last sentence the way he did. Perhaps he wished to contrast the enormous energy of destruction with the banality of life. Perhaps he wanted to show life going on in the face of death. Perhaps, like so many writers, he didn't have anything consciously in mind but merely thought the paragraph would have a certain something going for it if he wrote it in that particular fashion.

The passage from Moby Dick is additionally instructive because the author uses several different kinds of modifiers. First we have these adjectives which simply describe, and do so in an uninflected fashion. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale?these adjectives fill in a picture for us without telling us how the author feels about it, or suggesting how we ought to feel. The ship, we are told, is stationary. The body floats slowly. The sky is unclouded.

A second class of adjectives includes those which, while still deliberately factual, are concerned as well with our response to what is going on. It is a fact that the sharks are insatiate, that the fowls are rapacious and screaming, that the bulk of the dead whale is colossal, but how we feel about the noise and appetite of the scavengers and the size of the whale is colored by the choice of modifiers.

Other adjectives are still more subjective. That the din is murderous is not a measure of its volume, nor does it have anything to do with what is actually going on?the whale is already dead, so the act performed by birds and sharks is only figuratively murderous. That the sight is hideous is similarly a conclusion of the author. Finally, fair and pleasant and joyous are wholly subjective, telling us nothing about the actual effect or appearance of the sea and the breezes but instructing us as to how they are to be perceived.

As a general rule, I believe we do best to stick to adverbs and adjectives which describe and limit our employment of those which attempt to control the reader's response. Modifiers of the latter sort don't add any detail to the picture we are painting. They add clutter, and they simultaneously interpose the author's perceptions between the writing and the reader.

Consider:

She was a pretty girl, with a cheerful grin and a keen glint in her warm eyes. Her figure was well-proportioned, her clothing attractive.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with those two sentences, and they certainly don't glare at one. But they're quite empty, and if a writer were to go on in this vein for pages on end, the