Why I Do Not Trust the Word Freedom in a First Draft

I used the word freedom eleven times in a poem I drafted my first month in Toronto and cut all eleven uses by the third revision, not because the word was wrong but because I discovered, cutting it, that I had not written a single sentence about what freedom actually let me do. I had written eleven sentences about how relieved I was that the word was now legal to print.

There is a belief writers hold, and I held it for most of my life, that free expression automatically produces truer writing, that a writer released from constraint will simply write more honestly because nothing stands between the thought and the page. I no longer believe this, and I want to be precise about what I do believe instead, because the difference is not the usual contrarian claim that constraint is secretly good for you. The difference is narrower: freedom of expression reliably produces more writing. It does not reliably produce writing with more in it, and treating those as the same claim is a mistake I made for three decades before I caught it in my own drafts.

The placeholder word

Here is the mechanism. Certain words in a language are so large, so socially rewarded to invoke, that using one lets a writer feel they have said something while actually having deferred the work of saying it. I call these placeholder words: words a first draft reaches for because the word itself carries applause, and the applause substitutes for the sentence the writer should have written instead. Freedom is the placeholder word of my own writing life specifically, for an obvious reason, but the category is general. Justice is a placeholder word for a certain kind of political poem. Love is a placeholder word for a certain kind of elegy. In every case, the word arrives pre loaded with a reader's approval, and a writer under deadline, or simply under the relief of no longer being forbidden the word at all, will take the applause and stop there.

My eleven uses of freedom in that first Toronto draft are a clean specimen of this. Line four read: I write now in freedom that costs nothing. When I finally forced myself to replace the placeholder with the actual sentence it was standing in for, the line became: I write now in a room nobody enters without knocking, and the difference between those two lines is the entire difference between a placeholder and a fact. The first line lets a reader nod, because who is against freedom. The second line makes the reader construct a door, a knock, a nobody, a specific privacy I had never had and did not, until I cut the placeholder, know how to actually describe.

Why the word is not banned, only distrusted

I want to be careful here, because the natural misreading of this argument is that I am recommending writers avoid certain words entirely, and that is not the claim. The word freedom appears twice in the finished version of that poem, both times in its fourth and final draft, both times earned by three stanzas of specific, sensory replacement that came before it. A placeholder word used after the actual content has been built is not a placeholder anymore. It is a summary the reader has already been given the material to verify. The distrust is only for the first draft, where the word arrives before the sentence that should have justified it, doing the emotional work the rest of the poem has not yet done.

The obvious objection

You could say this argument proves too much, that any word capable of carrying strong approval, home, mother, grief, could be diagnosed as a placeholder by this same test, and that a writer who distrusts every rewarded word will end up distrusting language itself. I accept the risk but not the conclusion. The test is not whether a word is capable of being a placeholder. Almost any word is. The test is whether, in this specific draft, the sentence containing the word could be deleted without the poem losing information, only losing applause. Most sentences using home honestly cannot be deleted this way, because they are carrying a specific bed, a specific street, a specific version of the word that only that poem owns. My eleven uses of freedom in that draft could all be deleted without losing a single fact, because they were not carrying facts. They were carrying my relief, which is a real feeling and a bad reason to keep a line.

I still catch the placeholder now, twenty years and a different language later, and I no longer feel it as a failure when I do. It means the actual sentence is still coming, and the word arrived first only because it was faster to type than to earn.