Gary A. Nilsen's Blog, page 4

The Journey

It’s probably been said a gazillion times, but writing is a journey. Every writer has had to find his or her own way, suffer their own successes and defeats, face rejection after rejection, deal with rewrite after rewrite. Every story that has come from every writer is a story unto itself. It’s about the creation of voice and the conversations between writer and reader.

This blog will serve as a running-board of how I got from there to here and how my experience has translated into the fiction I write. I hope you’ll spend some time with me.

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Robin Williams: A Depressing Connection

For a moment yesterday, I got to enjoy the fact that I had only a two-degree separation from Robin Williams. My brother-in-law was a member of the film crew on The Fisher King and had the incomparable experience of goofing with Mr. Williams on-set. I can only imagine the personal satisfaction of having that memory. But my thoughts went much deeper than that.

Like so many around the world, I felt considerable angst over his death. Yes, because he was a genius and an exceedingly rare talent, but more so because he became, by his suicide, the light which shines on a problem that is remarkably tragic. Suicide is so often the end-game of depression. Commercials on television say that the disease hurts, not just those who suffer from it, but also those whose daily lives come in contact with that person. One might wonder how it’s even possible for someone like Robin Williams to have suffered from depression, but that’s just it – like cancer, it doesn’t distinguish, nor is it fussy about the people it infects. Who on the planet was more loved than he was and yet he suffered in this way.

Tony Dokoupil, in his article Deadly Stigma: Robin Williams’ Suicide Exposes Silent Epidemic, cites the fact that, in this country, while so many other leading causes of death are in decline, suicide rates remain static. In fact, the CDC claims that the rate of suicide “among Americans 45 to 64 has jumped more than 30 percent in the last decade.” It’s a frightening statistic, and the causes for such an increase are legion.

I’ve been angered by responses to his suicide, claiming it was cowardly or self-centered. These statements are only possible by those who have no intimate familiarity with depression or have never been driven to the point of wishing to take their own lives. At the moment you make the attempt, there is no thought about who will suffer by your departure, there is no consideration about your ego; there is only the hyper-focused desire to stop the pain. In fact, the thought process is often counter-intuitive: you start to believe that committing suicide will save those you love from having to put up with you. I have two children whom I adore. I enjoy the love of a girlfriend who makes my day, every day. Yet, five years ago, standing several feet back on a NYC subway platform, I watched a train pulling into the station and took a step toward it. In that very second, I recognized the way out – I knew it would entail an instant of pain and then there’d be no more. If I had been standing three or four feet closer to the edge, I might not be writing this post today. The distance of those few feet gave me the second I needed for my brain to think of my sons and girlfriend, and I stopped. It was the wakeup call that told me I needed help; so many aren’t fortunate to have had that moment of clarity.

Robin’s death is a tragedy, but I can only hope that it will serve as a larger gift to all of us as a reminder that depression must be studied in greater detail, that the root causes: the physical, social, and environmental influences be identified, and that this horrific form of mental affliction must be cured.

Another Shooting - Where Are We Going?

     Every day it becomes a challenge to find a reason to get out of bed. I’m a month shy of my 59th birthday and it’s though I’ve lived for a hundred years when I consider how unrecognizable my world has become. Granted, I’ve heard my parents say such things, but they’re in their eighties now, so it becomes a dependable barometer by which we can measure the acceleration of these changes. I get the sense that most of the grousing from the elderly centers around the shifts in technology. As a baby boomer, I can also recognize that technology shifts are not all for the best, but what we’re seeing is worse than that.

      Over the past week: my nephew was one of the students under lock-down in North Hollywood as a lunatic chased by police for three hours hunkered down in a neighborhood with an assault rifle, two Las Vegas police officers were gunned down while having lunch and quickly followed by a third victim across the street, and yesterday, yet another report of a school shooting in Oregon. In today’s news, a report by Brian Ries listed the 74 U.S. School Shootings since Sandy Hook. Seventy-four shootings in 18 months, that’s roughly one per week. And yet, people like Joe the Plumber can stand up and make statements that dead children don’t trump his right to bear arms. If the Second Amendment was read in its entirety, anyone with more than a Kindergarten education would realize that the circumstances by which people claim the right to keep and bears arms don’t exist in our current society. I’d love to see Joe the Plumbers “well regulated militia” membership card. I’d love to see the morons who stride through Target with assault rifles slung over their shoulder show me their “well regulated militia” membership cards.

        I’ll admit that but for the grace of the Second Amendment, I’m licensed and own weapons - none of which could be considered an assault weapon. But the way things are going, I would willingly surrender these if it meant some meaningful shift back to a society where people didn’t have to live in fear of lunatics wandering around shooting people, gangs killing over drugs or to gain membership, criminals using deadly force to get what they’re not entitled to, white supremacists – a truly sick bunch of people – eliminating the “undesirables” from our society (when in fact they would do us all a favor by shooting themselves first). On the contrary, we seem to be moving back to the lawless west of the 19th century where it might have been prudent to wear a sidearm for protection. After all, our role model is nothing less than the governments of the superpowers leaning on the principal by which the world has lived free of nuclear holocaust for the last sixty-nine years – we’ve got them and they’ve got them so no one is going to draw first. I can see this happening.

          There’s a push for responsible gun ownership, for background checks to root out the mentally unstable and criminally minded, waiting periods, the banning of high quantity clips, etc. The truth is that if all this were legislated, there are just too many guns in too many hands for such laws to ever be effective. Criminals and mentally unstable people without guns will simply steal them from responsible owners. You can take matches away from children who like to start fires, but they can always find them somewhere. Still, organizations like the NRA and politicians who stand by constituents like Joe the Plumber in defending their “rights” should not be allowed to stem the tidal wave of reason. They prevent any retreat to more stable ground.

           Also, I’m sick of the argument: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Well, yes that’s correct 99.9% of the time, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier. I rather try to outrun someone wielding a knife than a bullet. People don’t run at 1200 miles per second.

           During the Vietnam War, there were many Neanderthal types (especially the hard hats, if you’re nostalgically oriented) who waved the slogan: Love it or Leave it! It was aimed at those who conscientiously objected to the conflict suggesting that if you weren’t satisfied with how overly wonderful our country was, then you should take up residence elsewhere. Over the past two decades that slogan has run through my mind more and more often as it has become harder and harder to find what there is to love about this country. The list of things NOT to love about the United States grows longer by the day. This comes from someone who shed tears at the sight of the American flag flying over the embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1982 while I was living overseas and hadn’t been home in seven months. This comes from someone who had the slogan Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for your country) taped to the wall by my desk during high school and whose hero was George S. Patton. Where did my country go? I was born ten years after the end of WWII and in the latter part of the 1950s and early 1960s, apart from the horrors of segregation; an illness from which the country was still suffering from and still is in many ways, the American Dream seemed within the grasp of every American. Where did that go? I’ve wondered about the sensibility of leaving for another country. Are there better places to be or have we just reduced ourselves to being just another afflicted society? I wish I knew the answer.

          People will suggest things like: look at the wonderful freedoms we enjoy here or look at all the wonderful forms of technology we benefit from. Freedoms? Does anyone remember the days of going to the airport and being able to either drop off or pick up your family right at the gate without all the stringent security procedures? Does anyone remember the days of walking through Penn Station when the police weren’t on hand, side-by-side with the military, checking back packs on open tables? Does anyone remember the days of walking down the street and not being recorded on more cameras than you can count (if you could even detect them all)? Does anyone remember the days before your emails and phone conversations were not routinely monitored? Or your IP address being captured and stored in order to track every single move you make on your computer? Or the fact that your cell phone’s GPS capabilities can be used to hunt you down?  

         And technology? Does anyone remember when kids used to go out and play and laugh and have fun using their imaginations instead of finding it on a handheld device? Does anyone remember learning how to write in cursive? Now we see kids at every table glued to their phones, texting and playing games non-stop. I’ve tripped over people on the street or in train stations that stop suddenly because they’re reading emails or sending them. I see ads for portable two-wheeled motorized devices now that you can step on so that you don’t have to walk ten feet.

         Insanity is closing around us from every side. Pick up a newspaper on any day and really take a look, you don’t have to take my word for it; you’ll have plenty to choose from.

         Seventy-five years ago, the world stood on the brink of devastating destruction. We’re almost right back to where we were then. Globally, we should be in such a better position than we are. And we, as the epitome of the free world, should be a shining example. Well, we ain’t so shiny, are we? When I wake up every morning, looking for the reason to get up, it’s sad that I find comfort in the knowledge that there are fewer years ahead of me than behind me.


An Open Letter to the Governor of Arizona

Dear Governor Brewer,

I am of the age where seeing signs that allowed businesses to discriminate against black people and withhold service is an actual memory. For younger people in our society, the closest they might come to that shameful chapter in our history is by seeing pictures or watching it take place in a movie. The anti-gay bill that is currently before you for ratification would be equal to taking a giant step backward toward the practices that were rampant in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. To hide behind so called religious principles is counter-intuitive to what religion is supposed to be about.

The world looks to the United States as an example of what is decent, what is fair. To pass such legislation downplays and undermines the quality of life we are so bold in proclaiming as one of the supreme benefits of the American way of life. For years, living in Saudi Arabia where slavery is still very much alive, despite what they may say about it, any time the subject would come up, I would be criticized as being hypocritical as one coming from a society that had condoned such a state of affairs as little as a hundred years ago. A resurgence of such policies would only give credence to foreign disdain for the reality of what transpires within our borders.

I urge you to put aside any consideration of the worst our country has to offer and to practice the enlightened thinking that must take place in order to keep human decency as the hallmark of The United States.

Very truly yours,

Gary A. Nilsen

public executions: Barbaric? or are they?

Riding the elevator to my office this morning, I saw the news report that there had been another mass shooting, this time in Chicago. When I checked with CNN, I saw that no one was in custody as yet, but the article referred to a relatively recent incident in Chicago that involved a young lady who was killed in Chicago, Hadiya Pendleton. She had participated in the Barak Obama inauguration ceremonies as a band majorette, only to find death at the hands of gang members who mistook her for someone else.

I shook my head, yet again, over the mindless and needless death of people in a country that is touted to be the greatest in the world. My thoughts turned back to the years I spent living in the Middle East, specifically in Saudi Arabia, during the early 1980s. Putting aside, for a moment, the understanding that that country has spawned some of the worst terrorists on the planet, I considered the experience of a significantly lower crime rate within the country itself. I looked up a simple statistic: their homicide rate is over four times lower per capita than ours. And there’s a reason why.

Time and again, I have watched and listened to the endless debates on the subject of capital punishment, how it sends the wrong message, that it doesn’t really work, how it’s not the hallmark of a civilized society. But, I have to say the arguments are conducted by people who have never really experienced capital punishment in a visceral way.

In 1982, in Riyadh, I was shopping in the main part of the city on a late Friday morning. A friend of mine, who had been in the Kingdom for some time, grabbed my arm and pointed to a police tow truck, moving cars out of the large open central square and policemen directing traffic away from the area. He told me it meant there was going to be some kind of public punishment. In the Muslim world, Friday is their day of worship, and most were in the Mosque at prayer until just before noon. As the masses let out, the Saudi police formed a large ring to one side of the square and people rushed to the surround them, eager to witness the events that were unfolding. I’m not a small guy, but I was jostled and pushed as I stood there, unable to avert my eyes from the public spectacle. Within minutes a van pulled up, just inside the ring of police, and two men dressed in thobes and gutras were led from the van one by one and forced to kneel. The red and white checkered gutras were pulled away, exposing the necks of the two criminals. A tall Saudi entered and, almost casually, walked up to the first man carrying a long sword. With what must have been a highly practiced move, he swung the blade down on the man’s neck stopping within an inch of completely severing his head. He performed the act on the second man.  The mob witnessing the event had been driven to a frenzy, some pushing to get to the front to see, others vomiting and shoving their way to the rear. At first, I didn’t know what to feel, there was mostly numbness, the kind that freezes your brain until it’s ready to process something unbelievable. My first conscious thought was that I now understood why it was so safe to wander the streets of Riyadh with virtually no fear at any given hour. The lesson of the beheadings was unmistakable: commit a capital offense and this is what you get. No matter what, the image never completely leaves you, ever again.

It turned out that the two criminals were policemen who had shot and sodomized a man. The man lived, which led to the two being convicted of their heinous crimes. Some have told me that what I witnessed was wildly barbaric and the reason that capital punishment, especially those conducted in a public forum, have been discontinued in the United States. I’ve wrestled with this question over the years. Their system of justice has certainly resulted in lower homicide rates (guns are illegal there, too, which also helps). So which society is ultimately more barbaric, the one which delivers the unambiguous lesson of punishment, or the one which harbors its citizens, who commit crimes such as these, in prisons for years, or even decades (at our expense) with no significant deterrent to others who continue such brutal lawlessness in their wake? I’m not so sure how to answer that question any more.

Feed, A Must Read for Every High School Student

The first few pages convinced me that I was destined to have the story narrated in the voice of Jeff Spicoli inside my head; it was frightening. By about page thirty, it was like whoa, unit, this is meg. In other words, the book is simply brilliant. Though it was published eleven years ago, M.T. Anderson makes an unmistakable statement about American consumerism and the sheer dependence we have on the ever increasing forms of social media “feeds”. There are very few among us who aren’t tied into Facebook, Twitter, Linked in, subscriptions to any number of product based websites that send updates to your email. And clearly, we’re moving in the direction of Feed. We already have cars that have readable screens embedded in the windshields, and the military (the source of all things technological) have feeds directly into the face masks of fighter pilots. The next logical step is having these feeds physically embedded in us, which is the premise of the novel. The conclusion is that these innumerable feeds attenuate our ability to sort out the relevant from the mundane to the detriment of our society. Couple this with the dumbing down of entertainment, the worst culprit being reality TV, and you have the makings of a disaster. Anderson blends news flashes into the novel about very serious issues taking place in the country, all of which go unnoticed because in the next moment the characters are being convinced to buy the newest fashion accessory. The novel is a satire of our world, but it’s also a startling wake-up call that, once read, you can’t help feeling a bit shaky, because he makes it so easy to recognize the pitfalls in our own lives.

The growing face of a new(ish) addiction

In order to acknowledge an addiction, one has to recognize the face of it. An alcoholic doesn’t become one overnight; it’s something that builds over time, and somewhere along the line it crosses the threshold from enjoyment to dependence. Recognition of the dependence is the acknowledgment that might lead to treatment. The same can be said for cigarette smoking or crack or heroin, or even video games for that matter. However, in each of these cases, it’s an individual form of self-abuse that affects you directly and those in your immediate sphere of influence. Seldom do we recognize a deeper, more pervasive form of addiction, one that metastasizes in the nodes of society. Worse still, I believe the ability to recognize one form of this malignancy is fading away. It suddenly frightens me to realize that, as a baby-boomer, I have membership in a part of society that can recall a time relatively free of technology. Young people will probably moan and roll their eyes that they’ve heard this a gazillion times from parents and grandparents: how we didn’t have color TV (forget about 3D or Blu-ray), or pre-recorded movies, or computers, or the internet, or cell phones, or video games; that we spent time outdoors riding bikes, playing sports or board games, reading, even talking face to face just because it was fun. Younger people don’t recognize the newer and better ways that technology is wordlessly and seamlessly invading their lives because they often lack the frame of reference to make that detection possible.

But every now and then we catch a glimpse at where this is leading. We read how Nordstrom used cell phone tracking to gather data to inform their decisions on merchandising and trends, Facebook had a way of attaching your location with each and every timeline update, there was the recent cautionary article that showed how easy it is for a pedophile to track your child’s location simply by using the data from the innocently posted photo’s to social media, our cell phones have GPS capability which means you can be located by anyone at anytime, our computers have IP addresses that can be traced. Ever notice how amazing it is that Facebook posts sponsored ads on your homepage based on the “likes” that you make? Major cities have greater and greater omniscient camera presence to monitor activity as do all ATM machines.

Technology has a wonderful side, like a nice glass of wine. My writing career would have launched far earlier had the presence of the internet been available to me in my twenties (I lived for a time in a place where research facilities were non-existent), I feel comfortable in knowing that my children can reach me 24/7 by way of text or cell phone, I can tell my car what song I’d like to hear just by asking for it. 


Here comes the addiction. 


Ever notice how you can never truly be away from work, ever again? How your boss can find you with a text or an email, no matter if you’re sitting down to a meal with your family, or if you’re having fun at a museum or an amusement park? That your internet usage is probably tracked in places you have no idea about? We’re starting to slip over that threshold toward dependence. Take a look at the faces of people; indeed, watch their physical reaction when their cell service is interrupted. Take a video game away from a child and witness the tantrum, lose cable and you’re ready to freak out. We’ve gone from books to nooks to tablets and now smart phones with apps for everything. You can go into Starbucks and pay for your coffee with an app that shows up on your screen and is scanned by a wand waving barista. All that information goes somewhere; it goes back to profit-hungry corporations and security-minded governments. The problem is the line between what’s good and what’s abusive can no longer be adequately measured. And it’s only just begun…just wait until retinal recognition and nano-technology hit their strides. I recently re-read Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some would argue that the book’s relevance died with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I think the books message has new life in its brilliant prediction of a society with the kind of control that we are all willingly starting to surrender. Just think about it. It might be worth considering how to unplug a few things, take a step back, and reconsider having a life. Take it from an aging baby-boomer, we’re not heading in the right direction.

Editing, self publishing, and ego...

Often, until you’ve experienced something for yourself, there is the tendency to gloss over what you hear and not pay attention. That changed for me yesterday when I read a social media post by an author who claimed that it had been a life-long ambition to see their writing published, but could ill afford the cost of editing. So, given the ability to self publish anything within moments of its completion, this was the route that was taken. Allowing the writer the benefit of the doubt, I went to Amazon, looked up the title, and began to read the opening of the novel. Quite literally, I wanted to stop reading after the first thirteen word sentence which contained one spelling error and the repeat of a word. Had the writer simply spoken the sentence aloud, it would have screeched like Harry Potter uprooting a mandrake. But I forged ahead to complete the first paragraph. It had additional spelling errors, three clichés, another repeat of the word from the first sentence, and little or no punctuation. I stopped reading.

I’m going to take a hard line here, and I am not the first to make this observation, but it bears repeating. Writers who promote their ego at the cost of craft and basic editing do a gross disservice to the writing community at large. The fact that we all have the ability to self publish is a boon to writers who have difficulty cracking the traditional paradigm. Let’s face it, there are many writers whose quality fiction won’t make it through the narrow doors of the big six publishing houses or even beyond the slush piles of the agencies. Self publishing remains a clear path to get your work out there, but that doesn’t mean a writer should not strive to perfect their “product” to the best of their ability. It is costly to hire an editor, but there are some alternatives to improve your work if your budget doesn’t allow for that. Consider contacting your local high school or community college English department to see if there would be a teacher or professor who might be willing to help with line edits. There are innumerable writer’s groups who will peer review, critique, and help with editing. There are self-help books on the subject of editing and revising. To simply write something and publish it without several rounds of polishing is inexcusable. Imagine Ford selling you a car where the doors don’t close, or they put two different size tires on the wheels. What if Hollywood made a movie where they filmed the actors just reading from a script and forgot to add any action? Who’d buy that? Who’d see that? Who’d pay for any of that?

No one polices the self publishing world, so it is up to us as a community to do our part in maintaining a standard that the reading public can rely upon when selecting a book to purchase or to download. I’ve written two novels, and I refuse to publish either of them, yet. Each has gone through a round of editing by third parties, each has been revised at least twice and even a third time. I love my stories as much as any other writer, but I simply will not allow the work out in published form until they reach my own standard, which I’ve purposely set at a reasonably high level. I put some of the blame on our culture which has fomented the ideal of instant gratification.

This post may ruffle some feathers or possibly hurt some feelings, but everyone has to draw the line somewhere, and on this issue, I just did. Write to your heart’s content, but make it ready before it goes out.

Ender's Game: The Movie debate

Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game is set to be released as a movie on November 1st. After years of people recommending the book, I finally capitulated and started reading. It turned out to be one of those stories I couldn’t put down; in fact I went beyond and read the sequels as fast as they’d download on my Kindle. Card remained unknown to me as a writer; it wasn’t until I was deep into the series that I took the time to familiarize myself with his bio. At first, it came as a shock to learn he’s directly descended from Brigham Young, one of the founders of the Mormon chuch, but then the context of Ender’s Game started to made more sense. The Mormon cannon centers on the concept of atonement, and this is precisely what Ender Wiggin does by becoming the “Speaker for the Dead” in subsequent books for his role in unwittingly annihilating the bugger race. Then comes the irony. One of the central themes of Ender’s Game is compassion; it’s what ultimately saves Ender, proves the worth of his humanity, and drives him to making it his mission to restore the bugger race by providing a safe haven for the one surviving queen. How does an author so at one with the concept of compassion become an outspoken “Speaker for the Anti-gay”?

So the controversy begins. There is a growing intent by many, especially those of the LGBT community, to boycott the movie on the premise that by paying the price of admission one is contributing to the funding of anti-gay concerns. There is a value in considering the boycott, similar to the recent Chick-fil-A storm especially since Card is listed as a producer of the film. It stands to reason that he may, in fact, profit from the release beyond what he would have received for the movie rights. The temptation to brand Orson Scott Card as a bigot is easy; he condemns himself by the very words that issue from his mouth. Not so easy to dismiss is the value of the Ender’s Game story. The world is starving for compassion, so the message is quite constructive. Is it the art or the artist that one pays attention to? Can you accept the art and ignore the artist? Do you condemn Michael Jackson for his alleged abuse during his sleepovers or can you still enjoy Thriller? Does the abhorrence of Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a thirteen year old prevent you from re-watching Rosemary’s Baby or Chinatown? Anyone unfamiliar with Card the person may find the movie inspiring. Unfortunately, by feeding into the debate, the likelihood that such familiarity will go unnoticed is fading quickly.

There is a lot of ranting over this issue, and there is no clear-cut answer to the dilemma. Everyone with an opinion will draw their line in the sand somewhere. As a writer, I’m tempted to say my hope is that whatever I produce will not be judged by the person that I am. Yet I’m discouraged by those who do not support gay rights or same sex marriage. I’m an avid participant in the Chick-fil-A boycott, and I was thrilled when my brother-in-law announced his engagement to his partner, relieved that we’ve now arrived at the moment in our history where such a thing is legally permissible. Will I go see the movie? I have yet to decide, especially as there are other considerations, specifically that so many other people look to the production of movies for their livelihood - one of my other brother’s-in-law included. It also scares me to think that any expression of art, for whatever reason, can be threatened by the concerns of an interested group of people, however legitimate they may be. The fear is that once we begin to tread upon that road, we enter the territory of censorship, and that’s a dangerous thing, one not to be taken lightly.

*@&% That!

At the age of nine, I had mastered virtually every four and five letter expletive in the English language. By ten, I graduated to the use of compound curse-words incorporating familial nouns by adding them to the prefix and telling you which foul words should be ingested. There would not have been a construction site in New York or a naval vessel in the Atlantic Fleet on which I would have failed to fit in – insofar as my vernacular was concerned. However, my grandfather, who was quite literally born in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, passed to my mother the principles associated with that august royal personage, which in turn instilled in me the sensibility of when not to use my stunning vocabulary. In other words, foul language was to be strictly avoided in the presence of my mother, adults in general (especially my teachers), children younger than me, and women (from my contemporaries to the elderly – go ahead call me chauvinistic).

I realize times have changed and changed considerably. I hardly recognize much of the new diction one hears on the streets – “like” has become an annoyingly overused preposition that is, for some reason, sprinkled liberally in all spoken sentences and paragraphs with a nearly every-other-word frequency. I find myself wanting to slap someone for the abuse it puts on the ear. But, what concerns me is that so many of my literary peers seem to think it’s incumbent upon them to spice their writing with unnecessary foul language. It’s as if they say, okay I’m a writer and that gives me license to saying anything I want because it’s acceptable and the literary thing to do. This first occurred to me as I listened to the readings of my fellow students and my concern was reaffirmed as I began to read the short fiction in such literary tomes as Tin House and The Paris Review – in both cases, I discovered writers resorting to the use of expletive language in a way that simply wasn’t necessary. I am no prude and frequently resort to the use of four letter words because sometimes it just won’t do to use anything else, but I have always remembered the rules. Using it in writing when unnecessary means anyone of any age might stumble upon it – in effect, overhear you saying it. There is a time and a place for it – generally in adult fiction and specifically when it is clear that characterization depends on it without justification, otherwise it simply detracts from the quality of writing by shifting the focus away from story to the relative shock value of an individual word. It’s similar to the argument for avoiding the use of adverbs simply because you haven’t chosen the best verb.

You can disagree with me, but then I might have to curse you out, and I assure you, being from Brooklyn, I know how.