Word Choice: Real World Writers
Richard Aregood
Journalists instinctively flee from adjectives because it's almost a disease. The best description you can possibly do is…stark verbs. Verbs are the life of things. You get too many adjectives all clumped together they start fighting with each other. They don't carry you forward the way a verb does. It's lazy, too. It is a very lazy way of writing to try and set a scene by just modifying the crap out of everything, you know? It just doesn't work. It doesn't give you description. What it gives you is a reprint of Roget. You sound like a thesaurus…nobody reads thesauruses for fun. But if you're…you know, simple nouns and verbs. They still work.

Frank McCourt
I sometimes, myself, I was given to excess, excess, abundance of adjectives and so on. And flowery language. Which is all right sometimes, it depends on the circumstances. If you're going to write about flowers and so much, you have to be flowery, I dunno. But I said, if an adjective raises its head, slap it down. The adjective has to justify its existence.

Santi Buscemi
Try to use concrete nouns, and try to be as specific as you can. Instead of saying for example, that an automobile or car rushed down the street, tell me that it was a 1947 Chevrolet, or a 1997 Toyota Camry. Use adjectives, but don't use them loosely, and don't use them promiscuously. If you use an adjective, make sure it adds something. A lot of writers, beginning writers, will go ahead and pile adjective on adjective on adjective, but they will be the same adjective. He wore a dirty filthy shirt. Well, filthy shirt will do it, thank you very much.

Charles Johnson
I would think that when somebody's writing a first draft, there, I don't think it's a bad idea if you can't think of the image that you want, to use a tired piece of language, just so you can get on what that part of the story that is inspiring you, and then you can go back and take it out.

Tom Robbins
Challenge it for originality, which takes us back to clichés and metaphors. To ask yourself, is there some fresher, more original way that I could say what I just said and not lose the idea Don't lose the truth of the description, the accuracy of the description. But something that would enliven that sentence and make it more memorable. And of course that's where the imagination comes in.

I was describing light underwater and I said it was the color of…the color it produced was of old cabbage brains. Now I didn't know what that meant, "old cabbage brains" and I still don't know what it means, but I know that it's right. And the sense that it conveyed of that green light underwater I think was perfect. You couldn't explain it rationally but that's not what fiction writing is all about. Fiction writing is not about communication; it's about revelation.