So you think you can...

...Write.
Well yes, actually, there is the occasional day when I'm pretty sure I can write. There are days in between when I'm convinced of my general crapness, certain that I can barely string together a sentence. People who get emails from me will know all about those days, the ones where I take all the words I want to say and just throw them up in the air to see where they land. I like to think of it as free form sentence structure, much the way my word inventions (witness:crapness, found in no dictionary I know of) are driving language forward; purists call it gibberish. One day I'm sure that someone will recognise the almost Joyce-ian genius of it. After all, they thought his novel-without-punctuation idea was pretty kooky at first, too.

The days when I know I can write are the days when I use a lot of adverbs. I like adverbs. In fact, I love them. Lovely, cheerfully, merrily, disgustingly, horrifically, mercifully. It is one of my favourite kinds of words. I've been known to write sentences without a single verb, with barely a noun, but with plenty of adverbs. On days when I feel ten feet tall and invincible, I scatter them with gay abandon - gaily, even - throughout my fiction. But apparently, this is the wrong thing to do. According to the experts, they should be used sparingly - that's their adverb, not mine. So lately, on the days when I believe everything they tell me about how to write, when I don't trust my own instincts, I go through and take them out. I strip ever single word that ads something descriptive to a noun. If it ends in -ly, it gets culled. I'm trying to be ruthless, really I am. And it has its advantages, too. Like at the moment, when I'm trying to do NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Today is day 3 and I'm ahead of the curve, so I'm optimistic about reaching the word count. Part of this is because of just how many more words are involved in saying 'a tone full of doubt' than just a simple 'doubtfully'. But the experts know best, after all.

Or so they would have us believe. Because the experts would get rid of all the fun in language. I know plenty of people who use adverbs when they speak. Are they saying that we should get rid of them in speech as well as writing? And shouldn't writing be all about finding an individual voice? Because if we make everything uniform, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more bland. Instant grey. Why read a book if you could have those thoughts, in that voice, in your own well-ordered mind? Personally, I like something a little more disorderly. Which might explain my liking of fluff-literature, as I consider it; fluff is all about the exuberant over statement.

Besides, if you iron all the quirks out of literature, you lose something delightful. Like the man in the shop I go to for my caffeine supplies at work. He recognises me now and even raises a half smile, no longer the surly morose individual who would barely grunt the total to me after pinging the cash register when he saw me pull yet another bottle of Coke from his drinks fridge. Now, I not only get a hint of smile, a hello, a nod, but once I've given over my money, I get a wonderful little gem of English-as-a-second-language that should never be wiped out: rather than just the ordinary, 'Thanks', he delivers up the delightful, 'Thank you please.' It might sound like I'm patronising his English; I'm not. I have seen him have conversations with people in languages I don't know enough to recognise anything about other than there being more than one of them. I know from experience that my own understanding of languages other than my own is sadly lacking. But I challenge the experts to keep English evolving, keep it going in the way it has for centuries as it steals from other languages, is innovated by people with the strength of will and personality to impose their own speech patterns on those around them. I challenge the experts to keep the intuitively, delightfully unique in the language.

And yes, today I think I can write. Tomorrow? Meh, who can tell?