Chapter 106: The Adjective Problem

My students are preparing to graduate, which means the Season of Existential Dread is nigh. I cannot blame them. Graduations conclude with exhortations to go out and conquer the world. Graduates then run smack into a reality captured in an old commercial that showed Abraham Lincoln in an employment office being asked if had a chauffeur’s license. We’ll get back to you, fella. 

It is scary out there and having big dreams but not knowing what the future holds feels akin to wondering after a breakup if you will ever be loved again. Yes, you will. You just don’t know when and by whom.

The language of fear can feel hackneyed and tortured; I’m afraid that…can feel like the title for a book of aphorisms. My students are worried about first jobs, whether internships will extend into jobs, having good editors, knowing nothing about the places they will cover, and whether a whole new set of strangers will ever, ever return their calls. 

The other day, however, a student who is more talented than she gives herself credit for, posed a question that on the surface seemed reasonable but which, in retrospect, seemed a clever way to pose the question she really wanted to ask without putting it in so many words. 

She asked about adjectives. She wanted to know when was a good time to use them, and how best to do so, and where they fit. The reason she asked this is that I seldom if ever talk about using adjectives, except to say avoid them. 

As the sagacious baseball team owner Bill Veeck once said of profanity, adjectives are a poor excuse for language. They are a shorthand for description that tells us next to nothing. They are a  cheat, an easy way out. Adjectives require no laboring to spot and use the telling detail. They are as much an approximation of the real thing as a hookup is of true love. I have made my point.

Still, this student, who had written a powerful, haunting story – it’s in the Memory Project collection which goes on sale next week – nonetheless still did not see herself as a writer of distinction. Perhaps, she reasoned, more adjectives might liven things up, give her prose a bit more pizzazz.

To which I replied: wrong.

She had written this: The drive clocked 45 minutes on Google maps but felt interminable. I shifted in the passenger seat trying to find comfort. The rental smelled of Clorox wipes. I gripped the worn leather so tightly my knuckles turned white. 

She had pushed for worn and I agreed. Just one. The rest was pretty damn flawless and needed no embellishment. The prose was her’s. Yes, I had trimmed away the excesses, the adjectives, so that the soul of her story could see the light. She had it. She didn’t believe it. In time, I hope she will. But for now, she felt the need for an adjective or three. Which was another way of saying, I don’t know that I can make this work otherwise.

And therein, lies the terror that afflicts all writers, especially the young: am I and will I ever be good enough?

Here is the thing about the writing life: at the end of the day, after all the lessons and tips and rough drafts and reading and reading and reading it comes down to what athletes call betting on yourself.

Athletes do this when they spurn a contract and with it security to take their chances as free agents on the open market. They are betting that they have the goods, the talent, drive, and emotional strength to make the investment in their services a wise one.

With writers it is different because we do not live in a world of landing the one, big, multi-year contract. Granted, athletes do have to prove their worth every time they suit up. But they still get paid. 

Even writers with solid careers, multi-book deals, and enviable jobs assume a risk each time they start anew, with another story that exists only because they will it into being. 

The other day I went around the classroom and asked each student what lesson they learned that mattered most. They said they learned to trust themselves, that they felt they could construct a narrative. Then came an answer that initially took me aback, if only because I had never heard a student, let alone a colleague, come right out and say it. The student said, I learned that I am great. 

I paused and I suspect that like me the students were not quite sure of how to react. I felt the need to say something that might leaven things after what felt so boastful, and suggested that all writers feel that they have greatness in them, a feeling that is almost always balanced with an underlying fear of failure, because the fear, the anxiety will keep you honest and humble.

Well, yeah, fine.

But the more I think about what that student said, the happier I am that they did. I am great. That’s what I learned.

It was the lesson drawn from seeing what they had written. Their story was terrific. So too were the others. My editing was largely cosmetic; they had the goods. 

And while no one else would admit it, they all knew what all writers know – if not all the time then often enough to keep us doing this work, story after story after story: we don’t need the adjectives. We’re too good. Good enough to bet on ourselves.

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Our newest story, Confessions of a Beauty Pageant Loser, is now live – you can read it on our site or on our newly launched channel on AppleNews. The story marks the debut at the Review of Sabrina Qiao, who had no intention of entering the Miss China International pageant. Until her mother suggested it might be an interesting idea.

As Sabrina writes in the story’s opening, “To be clear, I did not cry on stage.”

But then again, what story about a beauty pageant does not end in tears of one kind or another?

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