If you’ve been writing long enough, you’ve probably come across advice that goes something like this:
Be vigilant about your use of adjectives.
Two adjectives to a single noun are usually too many, and even one is risky.
Sound advice, surely.
Her weak body shook as the salty sweat trickled down her tremulous, frightened face.
might better be written as…
She trembled as salty sweat trickled down her cheeks.
But sometimes we heed the call to reign in adjective too dogmatically, dismissing the possibility that, when carefully selected, adjectives can breathe essential life into our description.
It’s not about heaping on unnecessary modifiers. It’s about selecting adjectives with purpose. Nothing should ever sneak into our narrative that serves as mere ornamentation.
Effective adjectives heighten your story’s effect.
Denis Johnson, one of the most economical writers I know of, uses adjectives sparingly. When he does adorn his prose with the occasional descriptive, it’s carefully chosen, sensually evocative, and placed for impact. And it often serves a larger, more evolving need of the story.
Take these two sentences from his story, Emergency.
- …Georgie and I went out to the lot, to his orange pickup.
- We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues.
What’s so effective about dusty and orange?
Without dusty to describe the plywood, we wouldn’t get a tactile and visual sense of the truck’s dinginess and grit.
Not only does dusty trigger sensory replications, it marshals forth a flood of unconscious associations. Neglect, dilapidation, poverty, and even self loathing are all imbued in that dusty stretch of plywood.
Plywood on its own just wouldn’t give us the same imprint.
Selection and Purpose
Even the orange color of Georgie’s truck is strategically selected. Johnson could’ve easily chosen a more familiar color, let’s say blue. But blue would’ve barely registered. The unexpected orange pickup jumps out at us. We can’t have a neutral reaction to it.
What’s really interesting about this choice though, is how Johnson recycles it three pages later, repeating the color of the truck to show, rather than tell us, the changing time of day:
- It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge. In this light, the truck’s hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue.
That’s the difference between a consciously crafted adjective, and a throw-away word.
Why Adjectives Get a Bad Rap
Many adjectives don’t describe at all. They just take up space.
Telling us Annamaria is beautiful, that she’s thin, has short black hair and a penchant for wearing black clothes, gives us little, if anything to see. A good start, maybe, but it doesn’t even come close to bringing this woman to life.
What does thin and beautiful look like, anyway?
Give us the proof, please.
General adjectives like attractive, skinny, big, young, etc. just bloat your prose with meaningless labels. And they hold little, if any descriptive power.
That’s because they don’t call forth images.
Check out this introduction to Annamaria from Bernard Malamud’s story, Still Life:
- The pittrice, a thin, almost gaunt, high-voiced, restless type, with short black, uncombed hair, violet mouth, distracted eyes and tense neck, a woman with narrow buttocks and piercing breasts, was in her way attractive if not in truth beautiful. She had on a thick black woolen sweater, eroded black velveteen culottes, black socks, and leather sandals spotted with drops of paint.
Here Malamud appears to break every cardinal rule we’ve learned about adjectives.
To begin with, he uses the vague attributes, attractive, beautiful, thin, and restless. But he pulls it off because he backs those labels up. With specific nouns and a surge of vivid, dynamic adjectives.
An unrepentant rule breaker, he packs adjectives upon adjectives. 22 of them in just 2 sentences! He even repeats black four times – a narrative breach most high school English teachers would relish taking their red pen to.
Malamud may be more liberal with adjectives than Denis Johnson, but he still chooses each one deliberately. If he’d left out even one of these qualifiers, I doubt Annamaria would have the same impact.
Accumulating Effect
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we infer a lot about the pittrice in a mere two sentences.
… distracted eyes, uncombed hair, narrow buttocks, and piercing breasts provoke the image of an intense, undomesticated, sexually charged woman. Her thin, gaunt figure, eroded black clothes, and paint-splattered sandals suggest bohemian poverty.
The author never discloses Annamaria’s age. But we can intuit that she’s probably in her late twenties by the black velveteen culottes she wears, her piercing breasts and the ornery disposition that her tense neck and high voice suggest. Her violet mouth and black clothes imply mysterious, dark, even morbid preoccupations.
In sum total, these adjectives help deliver a knockout introduction to Annamaria, who, as the story unfolds, makes good on every inference we make. These adjectives don’t create a static portrait. They live on in the character throughout the story.
To Adjectify or Not
An adjective is either enriching your description, or diluting it. It’s either expanding your narrative universe, or rendering it dismissible.
If it lacks purpose, even one adjective is too many.
But if it’s heightening the effect, it doesn’t matter if you have one adjective to a single noun, as in Johnson’s example, or several, as in Malamud’s.
As long as it serves your story.
Use adjectives liberally or moderately. Just don’t use them cheaply.
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