Here’s something I wrote as a comment to someone else’s blog somewhere. I offer it to you not as writing advice, which maybe it is if you turn it sideways, but as something I’m thinking right now.

See that top one?

I keep discovering myself writing more freely in the comments of others’ blogs — where I know I’m being conversational — than in entries to my own blogs here or any of the various places I do this. Why? Because I know a comment doesn’t count the same, and I think I won’t get wholly summarized and categorized by it. The hurdles to Just Doing It are low in a comments field. Everywhere else I run the risk of talking myself out of it. (I do that a lot less lately.)

As an example, I have a draft half-written that gets at what I say in the following 400 words, but with more poise and precision. And you’ve never seen it because I won’t publish it because it’s not good enough yet. It’s not ready.

Will it ever be ready? There’s the rub. Not as long as I’m afraid that somebody is going to reject me for using two adverbs, it won’t.

For sure, I get that blogging can be conversational. That I tend to treat it as something not so conversational anymore, and sometimes edit the hell out of my blog entries, is why I blog less and less it seems — it feels like work. The reason I put my blog entries through the wringer, though, is because I have been made terrified in the past that writers and editors I admire will discount me utterly if I use colons to set up complete sentences, adverbs at all, or “there is” in any form. And that’s writing out of fear, that’s writing out of a desire to placate or pose rather than a desire to make the work good. Peeves be damned, I’m not sure that any good work has been made bad by an adverb or “there is.”

As Stephen King does in On Writing, look at the advice versus how its actually implemented anyway. He says adverbs are bad, and then later uses one that he “could not bring [himself] to cut.” And it (”sexily”) is a pretty weak adverb, in my opinion.

More and more, from the exclamation point to the semicolon, I find that the instruments I used to have pet peeves for have served me well, now and again. Granted, there are plenty of constructions I still see as feckless twits, best avoided, and there are sentences or passages in best-selling novels (you know the one I mean) that I think are evidence of lazy writing, but passing judgment on those two words, without specific context (e.g. “This instance of ‘there is’ pricks a hole in the balloon.”) seems unhelpful to me. Yes, writers had best be cautious with the phrase, as it cannot support weight — some sentences become more interesting fragments if you just remove it — but the toolbox is infinitely large, so why take anything out of it?

Fortunately, this is more of an old problem — I’ve climbed near enough to the summit now that I’m confident — but I’ve been not putting into words for quite a while, because it’s not a good idea to show weakness, right? Tell that to David Sedaris. The man shows his own weaknesses constantly. He’s built a career on it. That’s possible because his writing is strong, cunning, and hilarious. He’s been to the summit.

My struggle is motivating myself to write more and show it to people. I write less now that I’ve had more contact with editors who transform their peeves into rules, because I let myself believe once that their peeves were indicative of some secret wisdom they’d gleaned from the DNA of the language. Or something. I’d become afraid not of writing badly, but of writing wrong. For me, if for no one else, rules that diminish my writing do not help me. I am only partway through the process of restoring my method of writing to serve the material and not to please, for example, Justin Achilli.

Ideal reader be damned, sometimes strong writing isn’t polished. Sometimes it’s a knotty, twisted old timber, rough and ragged and stubborn as hell. Sometimes it’s jagged and ugly and heavy and knocks you, like a fucking hammer, right and proper dead.

The ideal reader is a fine tool to get you writing and to get the writing into a shape that people will like. But writing to be liked — no matter what Aaron Sorkin’s characters say — may be, at least for me, a winding woodland road to the bad place.