Enough with the adverbs

Another one of my narrative problems is working out how to express what a character thinks and feels without relying too much on the omniscient narrator and adverbs. A pox on adverbs! I want to write expressive text that sparkles with compelling verbs; not, I want to write expressively and compellingly. In my work as an editor, too much reliance on adverbs strikes me as lazy sometimes: a writer who cannot be bothered to seek the correct, evocative verb, or a writer who gives up when the sentence structure frustrates their attempts to express an idea and throws in a few adverbs to dress it up instead of rewriting. A pox on adverbs, I say! When I get a few more pages of my novel written, I'll do a find/replace and destroy all the -ly words. I don't want to sound like I use a thesaurus when I'm writing, either; where simple verbs will do, that's what I'll use: such as "he said" "she said" almost all the time, never "opined" or "asserted" or "pronounced." The way some writers use adverbs and those specific speech-verbs bothers me because the writers fail to take the time to describe the character's face and voice. I don't need a plethora of details, but a crinkled lip and a turned head combined with the right dialogue conveys disgust in a profound way to the reader, much more so than writing "Tom was disgusted." When people interact in real life, those microexpressions on others' faces, body language, and word choices reveal all we need to know, unless the person actually says, "I am disgusted." And no floating bubble (aka omniscient narrator) resides behind people's heads that reads in a large black font [definitely NOT Comic Sans], "Ooh, Tom was disgusted." My interest in facial expressions expands with every episode that I watch of the Fox show "Lie to Me." I will definitely incorporate some aspects of this study of microexpressions into my novel in order to describe the moods and reactions of my characters -- much better than adverbs.
And this omniscient narrator business, or even the first-person narrator, are getting a bit tired. We never get to see what a person thinks and feels inside their brain, inside their soul, except for our own; how can we identify with this person's innermost thoughts when they are so completely foreign from our own. The only stories using first-person narrators that I enjoy are the ones written like diaries or letters; clusters of glimpses inside a person's thoughts and feelings presents a much more convincing narrative strategy to me. I know, I know "suspension of disbelief"; but that only works for me with movies and similar media. I want a book to convince me of its believability, to work at converting me to its version of the world, to draw me in while I struggle to maintain a foot outside, yet I fail because the word-world compels me to change my beliefs for those moments I indulge in its wonders. Visual media requires suspension of disbelief, while print media forces a change of beliefs, at least for that time my brain engages with the particular wordscape.
Oh third-person omniscient narrator, who invented you? What wunderkind novelist blessed the world with your first appearance? Jane Austen does work wonders with her narrators, but many modern novelists rely on this point of view to the extent that their descriptive work gets lazy. Why do I have to figure out how to inform the reader about the mood of a character, when I can just tell the reader that "Tom sits in a chair by the window, bored, as he watches rain trickle down the pane"; there, wasn't that easy? What if Tom taps his finger, leans his head on the back of the chair, or shifts in his seat: don't those movements convey his boredom without simply writing "bored." I think I'm annoyed lately with the writers telling me how to perceive a situation with such exactness. "Tom is bored," writes the novelist; but what if I want to interpret the situation presented in this novel of Tom's sitting by the window and swinging his leg as a deep-seated melancholy for that character which will influence his life's path and cause him great distress every time he tries to talk to his hyperactive, cheerful sister? Stop telling me as the reader how to read these characters and their dialogues and their actions and participactions; isn't that part of the fun of reading? To take those settings and characters and dialogue into your brain and imagine what is going on; as with paintings, part of the great art of novel-writing should reside in the mental pictures and moods that the reader sees, not only what he or she is told to see and feel by the author. Without that aspect of great fiction, most of literary criticism could not exist. This incompetence exists in so much current fiction, at least what I've been reading lately; I find this informing instead of storytelling even in books that others proclaim to be great works of art of our contemporary era. I want my words to paint a picture, but I don't want to try to control how people see and experience that picture. In my book, Tom will not be "bored" and boring, he will sigh and shift in his chair until the reader thinks, "ah, he's bored; now why is he bored, and what is he going to do about it?" and then turns the page in anticipation. 

A compelling blog

Back when I was thinking about writing a novel, THE novel, the one that haunted me every morning for weeks when I woke up and then followed me to work, tickling details for scenes inside my brain ... back then I was trying to work through a problem. Many writers mention that working through a problem is part of their writing process, and it actually was happening to me every time I thought about writing this particular novel. My problem? How do you get a person to do something that he or she does not want to do? How do you really compel a person? Can you MAKE anyone do something that he or she doesn't want to do? And if you can MAKE them do something, how do you write about that accomplishment in a realistic way? The reason I was thinking about this problem was that in order for the protagonist of the novel to fall into the arms/trap of the hero/villain, she would have to do things that I was certain she would never ever want to do.
Now, on tv shows and in some movies, they show wives giving their husbands the "evil eye" or some such LOOK, and he magically bends to the wife's will, doing something he did not want to do. I've never had this experience, succeeding with the compel via a simple look; my evil-eye look is defective, or I wore it out by using it too often on my brother when we were growing up, without much success then either. And, I've heard people say that some children obey their parents, even doing things the children do not want to do, just out of respect for their parental units' wishes. I'm sure I did that a few times when I was a child, but I really don't see how parents nowadays can make that happen if a child were to really dig in his or her heels in any given situation (so many methods of "persuasion" are disallowed today: no screaming at them, no spanking or whacking with a wooden spoon, no sugary treats as rewards).
Child-rearing aside, how do you compel?

I made a list.
The basics are extortion, blackmail, and force; all illegal in modern society, all ubiquitous, all unethical. But they work.
Back to my novel, none of those options would work in my story if I was going to make the reader believe that the heroine was falling in love with the rapscallion at the same time that he was (somehow) getting her to do something she didn't want to do (steal a priceless Egyptian artifact from the small regional museum where she worked, if you must know).
The rest of the list reads like this (nouns and verbs mixed together here, GrammarBros): persuasion, logic, convince, persistent demands, plead, peer pressure, reward, bribe, lie about results/benefits of the desired action, call in a favour, beg for help, lie about the reality of the situation. I've been thinking about this a lot. 
Most of those options fail in the ethical realm too, because they abrogate the person's right to freedom of choice. If a person does not want to do something, don't they have the freedom to NOT do it in our 21st-century Canadian society? Now, I'm talking more about my experience with life than my novel. [I mean, in my novel the villain/pretty-boy is actually quite unethical, so I can use all the methods from the second list throughout the course of the novel, to bend her to his will. But will she bend? And why?]
IRL, since thinking about this, I have been less and less likely to try to manipulate a person so that they will do something they do not want to do. Nothing is really that important to me that I will step all over a person's freedom of choice, the only freedom we really have anymore in this world.
Way too serious, this blog, but it's something I've been thinking about, a lot, so I let it pour out tonight; thanks for staying tuned. Any other options you can think of, to compel? Share them in the comments: t'anx.