Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Pity the poor adverb

    We writers hold it in such low regard. Yes, I know, a strong verb has more muscle than a modifier.

    “He yelled,” packs more punch than: “He said loudly.”

    And yet, listening to my nephew Logan reading the opening pages of a “Harry Potter” book this past holiday, I was struck by how fond J.K. Rowling seemed to be of the lowly adverb. She had sprinkled adverbs throughout those pages and they did not appear to upset or disturb Logan in any way.

    I noticed, but I am a cranky reporter and often envious of the freedoms enjoyed by those who practice less constrained writing. Many a writing mentor has red-lined and otherwise scolded the adverb out of me. Maybe the Brits don’t mind it as much.

    So is the adverb all that bad? Is it the “um” of writing, a little placeholder while we collect our thoughts?

  • Going beyond “change is hard”

    “Nor can we hurry change, which has a calendar of its own. The best and the unique turnings in life are never forced, their roots have been growing in us underground for a long time, without our conscious notice, awaiting only what Jung calls a ‘meaningful coincidence.’”

    This is from novelist Dorothy Gilman, who wrote the “Mrs. Pollifax” mysteries, plus a little gem of a book about her own search for independence, “A New Kind of Country.” The quote comes from page 74 of the 1978 paperback edition.

  • Scheherazade’s husband

    Props today to E.M. Forster. We know his great novels, mostly because of the movies “A Passage to India” and “A Room With a View. ” But I love Forster for his lovely “Aspects of the Novel,” which is the best book about writing that I know.

    An excerpt:

    “Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different–melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form. … We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.”

    Revising for perhaps the seventh time, the first chapter of a book that I can’t quite get right. I just want to remember that if the story doesn’t work, then all the other stuff doesn’t really matter.