Confessions of an Adjective-Lovin’ Junkie

Confessions of an Adjective-Lovin’ Junkie

The first discouragement happened when I was just six years old. For Mother’s Day I had written a story about a young girl who woke up in the wee hours of the dawn (direct quote), crept down the stairs, jumped on her horse (but of course), and rode to the Cross Plains General Store to buy her mother a present, then rode home and presented this present to her mother before she awoke.

Granted, the plot wasn’t very dynamic, but I made up for this by wedging descriptive words around every dot and tittle I could find. My mother, beaming with pride, took this story along to Bible study and passed it around as if it had just garnered the Pulitzer Prize. During fellowship time, when my brother and I came downstairs once the smell of food had wafted up them, my mother looked over at a woman with a cap of frosted hair and a stiff upper lip (both literally and figuratively) and said, “What did you think about Jolina’s story, Sarah?” (Name changed to protect the cold-hearted.)

“Sarah” took one bite of her dessert pizza, primly touched a napkin to her rigamortis lips, looked directly into my tiny, expectant face, and said, “Frankly, my dear, you use far too many adjectives.”

Or something to that dream-dashing effect.

Fast-forward a few years. The date is September 12, 2001. We 9th grade students have just been asked to read our one-page essays about the day which will forever live in more infamy than all the ones preceding it. I am among the first to come to the front of the classroom. Clenching the notebook paper with both hands, with all the passion of a presidential address I read the words I had worked on for hours and hours the night before: about torn flags fluttering to new heights; how our united front would disband any attempts to take the land of the free and the home of the brave down into the depths of ground zero. I go on and on–dispelling images like a literary slide show. Once I am finished — my face red and nostrils flaring — the teacher just looks at me for a long time, then quietly says, “Jolina Miller, did you plagiarize this?”

My senior year I was at home, typing up a short story for English class (“Unspoken Words,” Branchwood Journal, 2006), when a well-meaning family friend — who sold the quite popular ’70s jingle “Me and My RC” — came into the living room and peered over my shoulder.

“Don’t put all those fancy words in there that people won’t understand,” he said.

Little did he know I had been employing my trusty thesaurus for every other word out of 5,000.

One of the first papers I ever wrote in college — which I slaved over for weeks, not days — came back with a fat C+ scrawled across the top. I remember that day so clearly. How I stumbled out of the classroom, down the steps, and into the rainy day beyond. Using my umbrella to shield my face, I stalked across campus and cried, for I felt I would never make it as an English major if I couldn’t even pass, with flying colors, English Comp I.

Over the next four years, many moments like the one above presented themselves: when my newspaper articles would be slashed in half to eradicate my superfluous modifiers; my short stories receiving praise, but professors and students alike using bold caps and exclamation points to exclaim, “TOO MANY MULTIPLE MODIFIERS!!!!”; my Communication Arts and English papers returning with “BE CONCISE!” scrawled across the top of them with green magic marker. (Teachers who think green marker won’t cause the same inner turmoil in students as red are kidding themselves. I now hate Christmas more than Scrooge because those green and red markers marked me for life.)

Now, 18 years after the completion of my first short story, “A Gift for Mother,” I still struggle with over-writing. Like an adjective-loving junkie, I always circle back to my earlier sentences and wonder where I can fit in “just one more.” But, with my husband, best friend, mother, writing mentor/former professor (who gave me my first college-level C+), and my book club gals’ help, I’m hoping they’ll provide enough strength to keep my deluge of descriptors back.

In that wild, black-and-white publishing yonder, we shall see…