# Word Economy: Adjectives, Adverbs, Crowding, and Leaping — Steering the Craft

## Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives and adverbs are rich, good, and nourishing. They add colour, life, immediacy. They cause obesity in prose only when used lazily or overused.

### The Core Principle
When the quality an adverb indicates can be put directly in the verb, or when the quality an adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself, the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.

| Weak | Strong |
|------|--------|
| They ran quickly | They raced / They sprinted |
| A growling voice | A growl |
| She said loudly | She shouted / She bellowed |
| He walked slowly | He shuffled / He crept |
| A big house | A mansion / A sprawl |

### Bloodsuckers: Qualifiers
These words weaken almost every sentence they appear in:
- rather
- a little
- just
- very
- kind of / sort of
- somewhat
- quite
- really
- perhaps (when hedging, not when genuinely uncertain)

They are ticks in written prose. In conversation, they serve as social lubricant. In prose, they drain authority and precision.

### Empty Intensifiers
Words that have lost their meaning through overuse:
- great
- suddenly
- somehow
- absolutely
- totally
- literally (when used as emphasis)
- amazing / incredible / unbelievable

### The Muscle-to-Fat Ratio
Narrative prose, especially long narrative, needs more muscle than fat. The English language is rich beyond belief — but richness must be earned by precision, not accumulated through decoration.

## Crowding

**Crowding** means loading every rift with ore. Avoiding flabby language and clichés. Always seeking the vivid phrase. Keeping the story full of what's happening in it, keeping it moving, keeping it interconnected.

### Qualities of Crowded Prose
- **Vivid** — the reader can see, hear, feel what's happening
- **Exact** — the right word, not its approximate cousin
- **Concrete** — specific objects, actions, sensations — not abstractions
- **Accurate** — true to the physical and emotional reality being described
- **Dense** — every sentence carrying weight
- **Rich** — multiple layers of meaning working simultaneously

### How to Crowd
- Seek the specific over the general
- Choose the vivid verb over the weak verb + adverb
- Choose the precise noun over the generic noun + adjective
- Make every detail do double or triple duty (reveal character AND advance plot AND illuminate theme)
- Eliminate any word that isn't pulling its weight

## Leaping

**Leaping** means what you leave out. What you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There must be white space around the word, silence around the voice.

### What to Leave Out
- Information the reader can infer
- Steps in a sequence that are obvious
- Descriptions of what the reader already knows or can imagine
- Transitions that don't need to be spelled out
- Emotional states that are already clear from action and dialogue

### Listing Is Not Describing
A catalogue of objects or actions does not create a vivid scene. Only the details that matter — that carry meaning — belong. The rest is noise.

### The Danger of Overcrowding
Even good writers can overdo crowding. Borges's fictional character Funes the Memorious perceived and remembered every detail of everything — and was utterly paralysed by it. Flaubert's Salammbô is a real-world cautionary tale: a novel choked by its own mots justes.

### The Danger of Insufficient Leaping
Action writing that tries to give blow-by-blow accounts creates confusion and boredom. The reader doesn't need to see every swing of the sword. They need to see the moments that change the stakes.

## The Revision Method

Crowd in the first draft — be generous, overwrite, include too much. Then cut.

**Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine until what's left is what counts.**

Chekhov's advice: "First, throw out the first three pages." Most first drafts circle and explain before they find their way. In revision, if the beginning can be cut, cut it.

### The Halving Exercise
Take a piece of 400+ words and cut it to half — not trimming but counting words and actually reducing to half while keeping the narrative clear and the sensory impact vivid. This forces you to discover which words are Styrofoam and which are heavy gold.
