Go ahead, write something shocking!

We are surrounded by a sea of bland, flavorless fiction, non-fiction, blog posts, bathroom wall graffiti.... The mucky waters of conventionality are rising and we will drown if we don't fight back.

How did we get to this point? Most of us learned to write in school. The purpose of a school is to homogenize us, to turn each of us from individuals into part of the school collective. *You Will Be Absorbed* says the school.

The school does the work so well that the child learns to rigidly conform even when proclaiming himself a non-conformist. All the non-conformists conform to a rigid non-conformist code.

As a result we are conditioned to see the bland and ordinary sentence as the safe and correct and grammatical sentence. And our readers drop with soft little thuds as they die from boredom.

So: write something shocking! Don't do what they expect you to do. Instead of 'she went to work as she did every day', write 'down! down! down! she fell, into a vat of melted lawn furniture'.

Don't write about some accountant who can't get the girl, write about the guy in purgatory who just found out Adolf Hitler is moving in to the purgatory-cabin next door. Write about the guy who sees fairies in the back garden--- then calls the exterminator.

If you are afraid to shock people with your writing, you may well end up seeing your writing coming to a screeching halt. After all, even if everything in your novel seems bland and inoffensive, something in it will offend somebody somewhere.

I am finding lately that my best writing in years is coming from a project that has an element in it that would shock the secular publishers silly, and another aspect that would put off Christian publishers as well.

Doing this is not safe. It's not practical. But at least it's not boring.