It's Never Right to Write Never

American Sign Language

“Never say never” never gets a chuckle anymore; it doesn't even strike a nerve. And some people still demand their right to deny, to set in stone and bound with rocks; to feel safe in their little versions of reality and make sure no one else feels safe outside it. Writing teachers too, of all people, still make their right to say “never.” Well I say, “Under no circumstances say never.”

Okay, okay; to be fair, there is one circumstance: noobs. It might be better to tell a young writer “never do this” just to make sure they don’t get in the habit. But the danger of saying “never” too often is then they have to unlearn that “never” as they get better.

I had a professor who would strikethrough every instance of the word “very” in any paper I wrote, unless it was dialogue. “Find a stronger noun or verb,” he would say. In other words, his position on many word-choices was: “Never, outside of dialogue.”

But see, I’m a fan of context. Everything happens in it. Even the creation of the universe happened in context. Sometimes, using “very” is a very good idea. It’s not a brilliant idea, or an amazing one, or a fantastic one, or even an excellent or wonderful one – it’s just very good. Because sometimes the flow of a sentence can handle a two-syllable word, but not three or four – it just throws it off. Other times, popular word-usage makes “excellent” nuanced a little too strong, while “very” has softened enough from use to be just a little better than what it modifies.

But if you've trained yourself to catch every “very” outside dialogue and get rid of it, and you’re used to teaching noobs whose papers it may normally be safe to assume are not brilliant works of literature, then you may not be paying attention to such context.

This is perhaps the best lesson I’ve been given on writing in context, and it’s a good one. It is in the light of this lesson that the cry of “never!” forever loses its punch – for it is not the schoolteacher in charge of proper words, but the sense, the story, the emotion of the work and what the writer seeks to play in the reader. That little nuance, that subtle tickle: it may be lost on many readers, but I still write for that ideal reader – the one that doesn’t exist alone but exists only in the compilation of the whole. We live in a fallen and broken universe, but I write for the One whose understanding is infinite.

Call it practice, though now far, far from perfection.