Unpack your Adjectives

In the movie Amadeus, one of my favorite scenes is when the king criticizes one of Mozart's pieces for having "too many notes." I feel this way every time I'm in a crit group and someone complains I have too many adverbs (and her boyfriend's story had exactly the same density). In beloved classics, I've seen everything from 33 to 87 adverbs per thousand words. It takes exactly as many notes as necessary to achieve the desired effect. However, with all my work on editing software, I know that there is a definite threshold at which adverbs become noticeable--around 50 instances per thousand words. I don't require a hard limit when I'm making my final pass on a story, but it's a signal for me to thin the number of excess adverbs in dialog tags, places where I start three sentences in a row with the same type of word, and reduce the instances of my top three addiction words (currently just, still, only). Thin areas where people may object. Think of it like hair--everybody needs it. You just need to have it properly styled to fit your personality. A rock star will have a different expectation than a drill sergeant.

I said all that to ask if there is a similar threshold for adjectives because I count them as part of the statistics for the prototype I did for Fiction Vortex/Story Shop. Editors call too many lurid adjectives being "purple." Looking down the list on one book, I discovered my use of the word "whole" 88 times was an affectation, which could be eliminated with no loss of meaning in many cases.

Running the tool on over 200 published books (25 of my own, 25 from Fiction Vortex, 13 Andre Norton, 125 free Kindle, and 23 classics from the Guttenberg Project), I found a definite recurring value. Modern writers across genres average 52 adjectives per thousand with a standard deviation of 7. For those of you who aren't math majors, a deviation is enough of a difference from the average to warrant docking you a letter grade. So, if you have 60 adjectives per thousand, you should look it over, and at 67, you're as purple as Barney.

This number is not hard and fast for many reasons. HP Lovecraft had eldritch beasts and all manner of queer folk, topping out at 77 for Dunwich Horror.

old 50
some 45
more 39
great 33
much 20
any 19
such 18
strange 18
certain 17
black 16
kind 15
big 14
monstrous 14
another 14
dark 12
ancient 12
cold 11
terrible 11
deep 11

In fact, narrative-based epic fantasy that has longer paragraphs and less dialog will necessarily rely on more descriptive words to convey setting and tone. Some action-heavy sequences are the same. You use the tools you need. Hemmingway had journalistic training, so he was a minimalist. He chose every word for maximum effect. But it bears noting that the Victorian epics like Jane Austen with 600-word paragraphs intend to be baroque and overly detailed--that was the style. So a friend who has a Victorian superhero story with lots of Steampunk battles or a Three Musketeers styled courtly romance, intrigue, and sword fights can expect to average 61+-9 adjectives per thousand. However, Dunwich is purple even for these genres, and movies made from his work tend to be over the top. But that's why his fans like them. If people went to see Kill Bill 2 and it didn't have as many dead ninjas as Kill Bill 1, people would ask for their money back. The point of a tool is to see if what you have on your canvas is what you intended.

Since I was collecting stats, I threw paragraph length into the mix. I saw everything from 93 to a thousand words in the classics. But modern novels average 165 words +- 36 (expecting the range 129-201). If you are outside this range, it should be by conscious intent. All the books I wrote before 2010 were over the 200-word boundary, but this was the Ancient Greek or Tolkien style I wanted to emulate. However, at 250 words, your paragraphs are a page long and your reader may need some white space, and it can feel like a flogging (Moby Dick details on the whaling industry). More importantly, you should vary the lengths over the course of a novel so you don't bore your reader or wear them out. Also, make the length appropriate to the mood. Action passages should be brief and have punch. I remember reading what should have been a thrilling escape through the wilds of Canada and saying "Another two-page description of mountains?"

The last statistic I examined was the percent of the novel told through dialog. This was the most variable of them all. The average was 31 +- 12 (expect 19 to 43). However, my YA novels and team books have more. This wasn't a place where I could make any rules. Seven percent dialog seemed natural for a novel about survival alone on an alien planet. Call of the Wild and Robinson Crusoe are both 3 percent, whereas Sherlock Holmes is 75 and Time Machine is 87. There doesn’t seem to be a wrong answer for the average, as long as you keep things interesting and give adequate descriptions of each new person and place.

Editing sofware can be a valuable tool to improve the quality of your writing, but in the end, the artist and reader have the final say over whether the components used achieve the desired effect.