The Much-Maligned Adverb
October 2, 2011 § 10 Comments
Adverbs freak me out. A few years ago I got serious about my writing and, as a reader, one of my first steps was finding some good books on writing. And it seemed like every book I picked up had the same thing to say about adverbs: “hunt them down and exterminate them with no mercy.”
And so began the great adverb annihilation. My writing at the time was rife with them and I soon found, as the books had suggested, that many of them were unnecessary. I lost a lot of “quickly”s and “very”s and “suddenly”s, and my writing tightened up and « Read the rest of this entry »
Why I hate (even good) movies based on books
September 28, 2011 § 456 Comments
Yesterday I heard the news that the classic Roald Dahl book, The BFG (big, friendly giant) is being adapted for the big screen. Every time I hear about another one of my favorite books going to film I can’t help but cringe. I think of adaptations of books like Michael Crichton’s Timeline, which I had to turn off halfway through (something that I have only done a handful of times in my life); or Eragon, which was too terrible for words, cutting so many corners in the story that they ended up with a circle; and I live in constant fear « Read the rest of this entry »
