With regards to "politically correct" word usage...

Andrea:  Could we replace “this joke is a bit of a long walk” with a different metaphor?

My first thought:  BUT IT’S NOT EVEN A WALKING-HUMAN METAPHOR!  Do I HAVE to?

“Do I HAVE to?” is the wrong question.  Firstly, I don’t have to.  I like to think I am the kind of person who would choose to, but clearly this isn’t always my first instinct.

Step one in evolving language isn’t deciding between options. Step one is figuring out what those option are, and expanding them.  That’s where the magic happens.  

The first step is to change the question you’re asking your brain.  Shift out of power struggle, or a conversation about censorship, and just treat it as a writing prompt.

Not, “How can I preserve what I’ve written without using language x?”, but “How can I write something better than what I’ve written?”

My favourite example of this is Jason Shelton’s song “Standing on the Side of Love”, which came to him as a sentence in a very powerful way.  He was reluctant to change it, because it had a place in a specific story.  

His eventual choice “Answering the Call of Love” isn’t a patch-fix to avoid ableist language.  It’s an improvement.  It’s a continuation of the story… This sentence, too, came to him in a flash, after he’d been feeding his brain the question of “How could I respond to this in a loving and intentional way?”  And the act of changing the language didn’t ruin the first story—it continued it.  The act of changing the language was an act of answering the call of love.

When Andrea suggested changing “This joke is a bit of a long walk”, my reaction was defensive.  It always is.  Even when, as is the case with this line, I am instinctively protecting some writing that is not even good.

My brain is like a kitten.  It can be compassionate, but not reliably so.  It does not always respond to morality, and it ignores rules. Telling it what we should write is not effective. 

If I start a fight with it, it will fight.  If I dangle a challenge in front of it, off it goes like a kitten chasing a string.

I have to intentionally say “Okay, brain, treat this as a writing prompt.  What would be even better?”

In this case, brain came back with "Okay, the punchline to this joke is a bit UU (as in, it’s four paragraphs)”.  

Which is better.  It’s funny.  Long walk was not funny.

Nine times out of ten, the thing it comes back with will be better.  That’s why I start there.  Because I'm a writer, and so I do my job—I write.  Don’t look for a way to keep what’s good while removing the ableist language.  Look for a way to make something even better.

Never treat a fallen tree as a path-obstruction when you could treat it as a nurse-log.

Never hear “no” when you could hear “and then”.