This is part of my series of essays for writers. Get them delivered to your inbox by signing up here!

Another throwback this month: this is me and my little brother, Evan. He’s a music producer now; doesn’t look like this anymore lol.

I recently heard someone say, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions.” To be clear, it was Stephen King who said that, and he wrote it in his book On Writing, which you may have heard effusively recommended to you like it’s the modern-day writing Bible.

If you haven’t figured this out yet, I have a lot of opinions, and my opinion on this particular quote is very strong. Which is that in this particular instance, Stephen King is full of shit.

Now, because I’m a writer and a lover of nuance, I’m going to give our esteemed horror writer a break here. He continues on to say in On Writing that he does use the occasional adverb in his own work because they occasionally serve a useful purpose, but he thinks they should be avoided in most cases, and newer writers tend to use them as a crutch, which is actually what he suggests you refrain from doing.

All fair enough, I suppose. But this has not stopped the writing world from latching onto this piece of advice and shouting it from the rooftops on Mr. King’s behalf: in Facebook groups when an unwitting newbie asks oh-so-innocently, “I’m doing NaNoWrimo for the first time—what writing advice would you give me?” someone will inevitably yell, “Don’t use adverbs!”; or in a critique group, when a critiquer goes through and crosses out every single adverb; or when a new editor has made it their god-given responsibility to eliminate every use of an adverb from every manuscript that crosses their desk.

To be clear, I like dandelions and I try to spread them everywhere I go. They are good for the bees.

And if the road to hell is paved with adverbs, there’s probably good reason for it. Like the fact that hell is an extremely, terribly, ridiculously awful place to travel to.

Personally, I like adverbs. I think they are useful. And I plan on using them whenever I damn well please.

But “avoid adverbs at all costs” isn’t the only rule that is repeated incessantly within the author community. Many writers cite rules like, “show don’t tell,” “use an active voice,” “use simple vocabulary,” “keep sentences short,” “don’t use metaphors or cliches,” “write every day,” and the list goes on.

There are rules for writing, rules for publishing, rules for design, rules for distribution, rules for marketing, rules for running an author business, and rules for exactly how a writer should spend every minute of every day of their writing life. There are rules for how to interact with other authors and how to interact with readers, rules for how much your work should cost, rules for when to give something away for free, rules for how often to appear in public and exactly how you should look when you do so, and rules for what types of author photos you should use. Rules for how many people should read your work before you publish or submit, rules for the process you should follow going from rough draft to published work, and rules for exactly how many words should be in each chapter. And for how many chapters in each book. And for how much percentage of the book should be reserved for each part of the story.

(In fact, someone reading this right now probably thinks I used the word “rules” far too many times in the previous paragraph and will probably email me to say I should have written it differently.)

There’s a reason I titled this post “Calling Bullshit On The Rules of Writing.”

It’s because all the rules are bullshit.

Because I’m a lover of nuance, I will say that I think there is generally a grain of truth in most of the rules that get thrown around. There is usually a useful piece of advice to be found somewhere. Like in “Show don’t tell”—Yeah, in many cases, it makes more sense to add detail, action, description, and active voice to draw your reader into the story and create an emotional experience. But on the other hand, telling can also serve to help draw your reader into the story, by allowing the reader to have the information they need without boring them out of their minds in the meantime.

No reader needs to know every detail of how every character spends their time (ever heard of pacing? Or tension?) so sometimes saying something like, “The character was happy to skip going to the grocery store with their mom,” is a million times better than saying, “The character dashed outside to meet their friend, relishing in the sensation of happiness that flooded through them at the realization that they didn’t have to collect groceries with their mother that afternoon.” It depends on the voice, style, and tone of the piece, as well as the genre conventions and needs of the story.

The same is true of adverbs. Sometimes, it suits the story better to say, “She smiled gratefully,” as opposed to “She flashed him a grateful smile,” or “She squeezed the man’s hand, wishing she knew the perfect words to say to express the grateful feeling that filled her as a result of his kind actions.”

It depends on the story.

But my main beef with the rules of writing is not just that they lack nuance and don’t always apply.

Nope.

Mostly, I hate the rules of writing because they make it so easy to forget that writing is supposed to be fun.

Writing is art! Writing is play! Writing is an expression of emotion, an exploration of an idea, a journey, a progression, a sparkle of delight.

Writing is like cooking a bowl of soup or rolling through a field of dandelions or traversing that inexorable road to hell. It’s challenging and rewarding and terrible and exciting and beautiful. And fun.

So what if there are “too many” adverbs in a piece? What are the stakes?

Is someone going to terribly suffer from a dreadfully painful heart attack because I capriciously used one too many adverbs? Or perhaps the ghosts of Strunk & White will rise from the dead to murder me because I dared engage in the heinous crime of purple prose! Perhaps all of my ancestors will roll over in their graves from the agony of my tacky use of cliches! And if my metaphor usage is like driving a car without an engine, starting a fire with damp wood, or beating a dead horse with a stick… exactly what harm is that going to do?

There may be consequences, of course. An editor might not like it. A reader might not like it. Your mom might not like it. Your English teacher might not like it.

But the good news is that it’s your art. The only person whose opinion ultimately matters, is yours.

And if you need to make some adjustments during revisions to meet the needs of a client, a teacher, an editor, a publisher, or whomever, you can do that.

But in the meantime, just remember, the rules are bullshit and writing is fun.