Afraid to say? Really? Are you a master of avoidance, or diplomacy, of… beige?

Me too. Dithering too much about what comes off your fingers, onto the keyboard and onto the screen will kill many a zingy piece of writing.

A famous writer once talked about the ‘girls in the basement’, and writing quickly, instinctively, using what the girls ‘sent up’, without too much self-criticism and correction. This writer maintained that if your filters are on too high a setting in this stage of the writing, the girls stop sending stuff up.

She was right. Not only do the girls stop sending stuff up, but they stop telling you the really good stuff that they know won’t get past your censor. The outcome is that your writing will suck. Basically because you will have sucked the life out of it. There will be nothing in your writing that anyone finds worth reading.

For when we read, we are looking to find ourselves, with all our imperfections, foibles, disasters and griefs as well as our triumphs and subtle, private joys. Therefore, if there is nothing of this sort for a reader to find, or they have to read more than fifty pages to get to it, they will a) throw whatever it is of yours that they’re reading against the wall, and b) vow never again to read your woeful, pathetic prose.

So stop worrying about what others will think and say. Stop being a good girl or boy. Stop giving a fuck about people. If you are writer and you are an artist, then remember that there will be times when you will shock, thrill, dismay, disappoint and bore. Most of the time, you will try to completely avoid, or keep to an absolute minimum the last two of these, or risk losing your audience completely. No reader wants to be disappointed or bored. When they are, they turn to other writers. As for shock, thrill and dismay… equal measures, I guess, with a little extra devoted towards the first two.

So go ahead, tell it like it is. Dig deep into that horrible pain, or that excruciating embarrassment. Disclose the terrible secret hidden by the bitch who made your life hell – just make sure you clothe it in a different outfit before you trot it out in all its majesty. You may well risk humiliation, but the mediocrity factor in your writing will decrease at the speed of your rising readability. There is always an upside for those of us who look for the glass half full: the heavier the humiliation, the further it will sink, leaving you to cover it with something far sweeter.