Stephanie here. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing since my parents gave it to me for Christmas my senior year of high school, but I’m currently reading it again. When I learned that Stephen King reads the audio book, that was all the motivation I needed to grab a copy and load it on my iPod.
This time around, in the grammar section where King theorizes on why writers are drawn to adverbs, he said something that struck me. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”
His point was that when we write things like, “He closed the door firmly,” we do so because we’re afraid we haven’t set the scene up well enough for it to blossom in the reader’s mind without that word “firmly.” We’re afraid we aren’t doing our job well enough.
But I think it’s also true in other aspects of writing. Like when I pick a plot line that feels safer than the one that first excited me. Or when I want to talk about an issue … but I think some readers might disapprove of it, might even give me a bad review on Amazon.