“Morality,” Exposition, & Adverbs

Not long ago, I read through the July, 2009, issue of Esquire. In it, there is a new short story called “Morality” by Stephen King, which is available in its entirety here. This story evoked a few thoughts about exposition and adverbs. Plus, this gives me the chance to post pictures of Bar Refaeli, because the words of King’s story were painted on her not-so-terribly-unpleasant body for the cover.


I don’t know why Script Mag doesn’t do covers like this. I’ve offered to pose nude, too, but Shelly seems reluctant. Hehehe…

“MORALITY”

First, I’m going to praise King and then rip him a new one.

The story is very simple. You have a financially struggling young couple. The husband is an aspiring writer working part-time as a substitute teacher. The wife is a nurse to a retired and wealthy priest, who decides that he wants to do something really really bad before he dies. He propositions the nurse to do this on his behalf for $200,000.


THE HANDLING OF EXPOSITION

Here's a classic example of good exposition. King never tells you what the proposition is. We know it’s really bad. We know it involves blood. We know it has to be filmed so the priest can watch this dirty deed later in his mansion. And we know this moral question of “should we or shouldn’t we do this really bad thing” is tearing apart the young couple. So you’re hooked. You keep reading because you want to find out A) what the proposition is and B) if they’ll do it. But you will not learn any of these details until the time has come to carry out the dirty deed.

This is good exposition in a nutshell: it’s putting a question in the minds your readers and making them want to keep on reading to get the answer. A lot of amateurs, I suspect, would’ve given the game away early. They would've explained in full detail what the proposition is when it’s proposed, which not only makes the story less intriguing but it’s also risky because if the proposition’s not interesting or juicy enough, people will stop reading your story right then and there.

Essentially, just show instead of tell then show.


There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes you have to explain a plan beforehand, so that people know what’s supposed to happen and feel tension when that plan goes terribly wrong in the midst of its execution like in a Jean-Pierre Melville film. Or, as in the case with Titanic, James Cameron wisely explains how the ship sinks before we see the ship sink so that we will understand what’s going on as the ship is sinking and can stay focused on the story.

But putting questions in the minds of the readers to make them want to keep reading even from scene-to-scene is an art form. I loved a point that Carol Phiniotis made in her column, “The Art of the Rewrite,” in the brand new July/August issue of Script Magazine:

Scene transitions are often overlooked. A simple line of dialogue at a scene’s conclusion can greatly affect the flow of your story. In an early draft of American Beauty, a scene transition between Jane and her soon-to-be boyfriend Ricky played out as follows:

RICKY
Come on, let’s go to my room.

By the shooting script, Ball revised the line:

RICKY
You want to see the most
beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?

While the first transition is functional, it falls flat. However, the second transition not only engages Jane, it also engages the audience. We’re invited to participate in the mini-mystery Ricky has woven.

I whole-heartedly agree.

Although I’d stack this Bar Refaeli vid up against Ricky's fluttering plastic bag any day of the week. Hehehe…



LET’S TALK ADVERBS

I place the blame for everyone’s hysteria about adverbs squarely on the shoulders of Stephen King. Remember what he wrote in On Writing? “The adverb is not your friend.” “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” King was and is horrifically wrong about adverbs.

Of course, he backs up his opinion with Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, a book SO pre-digital age and revised only 4 times since 1918. About 50 years later, E.B. White wrote in The New Yorker, “I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.” Even Strunk, the English professor, said, “the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the readers will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation.”

WHAT? You can break the rules?

But King told us to follow the rules. You do not use adverbs, period. And every time I read an adverb in one of his stories, I want to stand on the rooftops and scream “HYPOCRITE!” The man is incapable of abiding by his own rules. This short story alone has over 100 adverbs. (Yes, we counted.) Consider these doozies:

With the hiring freeze currently in effect in the city's schools…

or

…but it would be a very small contract, likely a good deal less than you currently make as a teacher…

Would anyone argue that “currently” is essential in either sentence?

…the stroke had left him partially paralyzed on the right side…

Wouldn’t a hater of adverbs change that to “semi-paralyzed?”

She was also a masseuse and occasionally…

Wouldn’t a hater of adverbs change that to “on occasion?”

…although Chad had had a relatively good few months teaching...

Couldn’t that sentence be rewritten to describe exactly how those months were good without having to resort to “relatively?”

It was the first time she had really thought of him in connection with money.

“Really?” Isn’t that the mother of all bad adverbs?

Deliberately planned and executed.

Aren’t most plans “deliberate?”

…she wrote simply: Savings.

Can’t we see for ourselves that what she wrote was simple?

And so on. Here’s the deal about adverbs. No one will complain about your adverb so long as it’s a good adverb. There is nothing wrong with an adverb so long as you’re not being redundant, like glitters brightly. Why say ran speedily when you can just say raced? Most people think of adverbs in terms of a word that reinforces the adjective: extremely gorgeous, really sensual, etc. Shoot me now, right?

But a good adverb can inject an air of freshness to those stale words: bitingly gorgeous, witheringly sensual.

In fact, I prefer adverbs that are almost contradictory to the words they’re supporting: delightfully hypocritical, engagingly demented, sporadically authoritative, and charmingly brutish.

Not long ago, I read a fabulous book, Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik, a spirited argument against Strunk & White’s principles. He writes:

Arts reviewers (and blurbists) everywhere seem enamored of [adverbs], and little wonder; it offers an alternative to shopworn critical adjectives like brilliant, gripping, or plodding. It can also tweak such adjectives toward fresh meanings, as in yawningly brilliant.

These examples feature what grammarians call “adverbs of manner.” They reveal the way in which a thing or quality is distinguished. According to yet another New York Times critic, Allesandra Stanley, a new television show was “deliciously horrifying,” distinguishing it from other modes of horrifyingness. Writers also toy with so-called adverbs of degree, which answer the question “how much”? Performances are routinely described as “hugely boring” or “minutely entertaining.”

When a term and its modifier seem paradoxical, like horrifying and deliciously, they form the rhetorical device known as the oxymoron. Oxymorons can produce any number of effects: sarcasm, incisiveness, archness (i.e., roguishness, sauciness). But not all adverbial zingers employ the incongruity of terms in contrast. Many reach for metaphor, as in lashingly funny, or hyperbole (exaggeration), as in woundingly beautiful. In addition, critics often find –ly forms suited to the put-down. Slate’s Gary Lutz called the grammar chapter of the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style “perversely unhelpful” – though I deviantly disagree.

Plotnik had other examples I enjoyed like dormantly Mormon. (Why write 20 words to avoid an adverb when dormantly Mormon will work just fine?) Other examples: gloriously uproarious, scarily fervent, militantly prosaic, incongruously ordinary, juicily ridiculous, resolutely unclever, wittily intricate, inflammatorily hostile, and metaphysically naïve. Consider, too, all the adverbs in 15,000 Useful Phrases.


So now we’ve come full circle back to Bar Refaeli. I couldn’t help but smile at the use of adverbs in Ross McCammon’s article on the Israeli model. As he’s observing the words of King’s short story getting applied to her body by an “application professional,” he writes:

She is wearing white bikini bottoms and a red bikini top, which is pulled up, revealing the bottom third of her breasts. The skin there is white. She reads a novel in Hebrew. She doesn't talk. She doesn't move. Without her clothes on, she looks 10 percent larger. She is thin, of course, and her stomach is impossibly taut. But she has grown somehow. Maybe it's the clivvage.

She's become inaccessibly exquisite.

Indeed!

-MM