Hi! I am new to the forum. I am writing a narrative. This is how I plan on opening... I first had this: "Inches away from my eyes, I could see my uncle sitting. His presence was seemingly large, and his presence instilled fear in me as a young toddler. His presence was different from what I was accustomed to." My English teacher then recommended I condense this part of my intro, and insert sequential commas between the sentences with repeated beginnings. Here, take a look. Specifically, notice the adverbs in bold, and tell me if they work or not: "Inches away from my eyes, I could see my uncle sitting. His presence to me was seemingly large, instillingly frightful, unaccustomedly different." I am more so concerned with "instillingly" and "unaccustomedly." I did some research on their existence, and I found some, but I keep getting the red dotted underline from my word processor. Bottom line: do those adverbs work?
For me, no, but not because of their form but instead for other reasons. His presence to me was seemingly large,.... You don't need seemingly here because you already have to me. The to me already intones that the perception is uniquely yours and not necessarily literal. Using seemingly here weakens the impression, as though you, the writer, were not quite comfortable with the visual impression you are making of his largeness. His presence was large to me is more confident on its own than when the seemingly is dropped in as a hedged bet. instillingly frightful, .... Here the adverb is not needed because all it's doing is over-manipulating the reader. It says that you, the writer, feel that the reader won't understand that the feeling of frightfulness is instilled through the perception being conveyed in the sentence. Assume instead that the reader knows how to parse meaning and that simply saying frightful becomes part of the rest of the logic of the sentence, which engages the presence of the uncle before the POV character. ... unaccustomedly different." This one, I think, could stay as is even though it's an unusual construction. Not every construction we use needs to be ratified in a dictionary. Dictionaries are only histories of word-use. They are historical, not instructional. Every word has a first use at some point in time and prior to that first use, it did not exist in any book making it "valid". Though your use of unaccustomedly is certainly unusual, it's perfectly parsable and comprehensible, so I think that one works.
They don't work as adverbs, no, and I agree that the "to me" makes two of them unnecessary. IMO, the third one is redundant with the following word. If this were my sentence and my goal were to compress it, it would become: "Inches away from my eyes, I could see my uncle sitting. His presence, to me, was large, frightful, and unaccustomed."
I'm going to suggest scrapping the whole thing! The "inches away from my eyes, I could see my uncle sitting" is awkward and ambiguous. You've got the filter words, obviously, but also a sort of inversion, and it ends up being possible to read it as if the act of "seeing" is somehow occurring inches away from the character's eyes, which doesn't make any kind of sense. How about "My uncle was sitting inches away from my eyes"? But, no, that's still weird, because it's not just the character's eyes that the uncle is sitting close to. Honestly, I think this comes down to intention and POV. What are you trying to convey in this scene, and how would your POV character convey that? If your POV character is the sort who would make up words, then maybe your made-up words make sense. If your POV character is the sort who says things with lots of redundancies, then maybe "unaccustomed" and "different" work together. But if your POV character normally writes/speaks/thinks in plain English, then I'd try to simplify.
No. Nein. Negatory. Nyet. Build a mighty funeral pyre for these. Anyone who advocates "[was] instillingly frightful" to mean "instilled fear" is committing a sin against all that is decent and proper in the art of writing. "Instillingly frightful" doesn't even really mean anything, does it? Urgh. This sentence badly needs to be recast. "Unaccustomedly" may be grammatically correct, but it's such a hideous word I'd lead a division of troops to strike it from any sentence in which it appears. Try reading your sentence (or better yet, your whole paragraph) aloud. I mean aloud, not just reading-while-moving-your-lips. If you can say "unaccustomedly" without tripping over it, you win some kind of prize. PLEASE do not use those adverbs! They are UGLY!
three uses of 'presence' in quick sucession aren't helping this either , and you could lose the adverbs completely with a rewrite I could see my uncle sitting inches away. To my toddler's eyes, he seemed large, frightful, and different.
Sorry, Moose. I just hate that word, seemed, and all its derivatives. I wrote a whole diatribe railing against its use. I'll be waiting for a good segue to post it.
ETA: Also, I just went through my WIP to ensure I wasn't a huge hypocrite* as regards the word seemed and its derivatives. I have five occurrences of the word in just shy of 30k words. Three are dialogue (because people do speak this way) and two are narrative where, try as I may, I can think of no better word than seemed in that spot. I'm okay with that. * This, because we've had many discussions in the forum as regards frequency of this, that or the other thing in a manuscript wherein members professed to have negligible/zero occurrences of said thing only to check their work and discover it was riddled with said thing. So, yeah... checked.
