Trust me when I say: I get it, the difficulty of writing. We pour ourselves into the words, bleeding onto the page, only for publishing houses to come back and say the work doesn’t capture the reader’s attention, or is lacking urgency, or isn’t the right fit at this time. There’re authors who, if they bear witness too many rejects, stop believing in their magic gift.

Even now, when you’re reading these words…someone, somewhere…across both time, and space, is speaking to you. The scrawls of text I’ve put on this page makes sense in the mind, and they can transport us back to either some of the happiest moments in our life or they can take us to depths inside an infinite Hel[1]. It is why the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword,” is a real thing.

It's why, when we do get these rejections, we turn to our work. We overanalyze the context, and then use both adjectives and adverbs to help convey the mood, tone, and scene we’re trying to capture. Right? Wrong. This’s where most new writers lose themselves: in adverbs and adjectives. Most of the time, we think they’re doing justice to the work by allowing different words to help guide the reader into the situation we want them; but, instead, this muddies the message.

Think of these lines for a moment:

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

These are the first two lines from Jane Hirshfield’s poem, For What Binds Us. By analyzing them, we see how, and why, there’s no need for the extra usa of adverbs and/or adjectives. Putting added detail takes away from the strength of the line, rather than aiding, because trying to define a quantity for the amount of names that bind us doesn’t matter. Only the implication matters. The quantity of things that bind us is always going to be different for the individual reader, which is why the same thing can be said for further identification of strong and weak with pinpoint accuracy. What is strong for one might be weak for another, and vice versa.

So, the next time we work a piece, don’t think of how many words can get the point across. Instead, think of how a few words––ones that have been chosen with purpose––can impact mood, and tone, within a specific scene.

1 Helheim, the realm presided over by Hel, is a place of eerie desolation and perpetual twilight. It is said to be located beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, and is accessible only to those who have passed through the veil of death. Helheim is a realm of contrasts, with vast icy plains juxtaposed with dark, cavernous halls where the souls of the departed reside.

Gregory Gonzalez graduated from Sierra Nevada University, where he earned both a BFA and an MFA in Creative Writing. He's studied under and many other wonderful artists, and his works can be seen in the San Joaquin Review Online, Hive Avenue: A Literary Journal, the Dillydoun Review, Wingless Dreamer Publishing, Bridge Eight: Film & TV, Drunk Monkeys: Literature and Film, Causeway Literature, Nat 1 LLC, Vermilion Literature, Writing Workshops, and Havik Literary Journal.