Describe it to me

After we fully explained beginnings last week and kept coming up with the benign suggestions of “make it interesting” and “show don’t tell” we figured we ought to dive deeper into the bricks of the “show” universe. Those bricks are adjectives and they’re used to describe nouns and pronouns.

Adjectives are modifiers. They modify a noun to make it more specific. House becomes tiny house. Cat becomes lazy cat. Grandfather becomes grumpy old man. Full explanation here.

So when should a writer use them? Like all things, there’s a blog about that. Find it here. But in general, here’s the suggested guidelines:

• Brevity - don’t over do it. In drafts sometimes we’ll have two adjectives and then revise it to one or none. If the noun can get the job done, it doesn’t need the adjective.
• Specificity – be specific about what you’re describing. The adjective should do the work of narrowing the reader’s WIDE imagination into the very specific image you want to impart.

Types of adjectives:

• Telly – informing or surmising such as “She was angry.” in which case, we see the summation of her emotion as ‘angry’ instead of the symptoms of that emotion like a glare, narrowed eyes, or some other indicator of rage.
• Showy – dramatize or activate the noun such as “The drink was fizzy and cheerful.” You might just say “The drink fizzed cheerfully.” to replace the weak “to be” verb, but either way “fizzy” is a pretty descriptive word.
• Overwriting – applying multiple adjectives like “he London bus was big, red, and smelled of lentils.” We know it’s big and red, it’s London. The interesting part is its smell but if the sentence read “big, red, and smelly” we wouldn’t really know what it smelled of, would we?

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