Everywhere you turn you find advice on decluttering.
A friend of mine is trying to rid his home of mountains of clutter, including a collection of six books on decluttering.
Most great writers become ruthless in eliminating adverbs — "an adverb is a crutch for the wrong verb." They also implore us to be ruthless in rejecting adjectives, especially adjectives that carry a writer's judgment.
It's fine to describe something as green; green is a fact. It's not fine to call it lovely; lovely is an opinion. If you want to convince us that something is lovely, describe it so that we can see it, and allow us to decide if it is lovely.
If someone did something that may have been heroic, don't call that person heroic; show us the action.
John Hersey's nonfiction account of the aftermath of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb — the only story ever to fill an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine — ran 31,000 words. You will not find in it one adjective that carries Hersey's judgment.
In a critique of that piece Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: "If ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten, it was the bombing of Hiroshima." But Hersey's sentences and paragraphs were "so clear, calm and restrained, that the horror of the story he had to tell" pierced a reader's consciousness.
Hersey later said about his approach: "A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator. I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible."
