Wednesday, August 03, 2005

The Art of Writing Without Writing

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah suman latik blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah.




There it is, everyone: My Suman Latik post for today.

...

...

...

Yeah, I can imagine that you were probably looking for something more, er... substantial.

Quite frankly, this post really isn't about suman latik. It probably pushes creativity, but it doesn't directly concern suman latik's latent properties, its tribe structure, or its mating habits. I just find it vaguely interesting that we can literally write anything we want, and then turn it into a "suman latik" post merely by tacking a reference to the glutinous rice delicacy somewhere. Heck, now that I think about it, we can do this with practically any piece of subject matter that comes to mind.

Blah blah blah blah suman latik.

Blah blah blah blah American Idol.

Blah blah blah blah economic degradation of society as a whole.

Blah blah blah blah bah weep granah weep ninni bong.

Not very filling, is it?

I have a strong suspicion that this has more to do with our sense of practicality than it does with our general laziness. We can't necessarily come up with articles that focus on a given topic all the time, so we merely create articles as normal and just find a way to stuff the topic right into them. It's kind of like observing ourselves trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Yes, we're technically cheating. But in a way, we're also making attempts at working an otherwise unusable topic into a coherent essay. It may not be a pretty sight sometimes, but we're getting the hang of it.

Now, with that said, I've really got to find better ways to write about suman latik...




Ampersand
Pilcrow
Ellipsis

4 comments:

Sometimes Mary said...

That, I'm afraid, is true.

A thought comes to mind: if the editor wants 1,500 words, and you are perfectly capable of saying what you need to in 250, then most of the other things in your article would be space fillers.

Hence:

Blah blah blah blah ( and the rest of your 250-word article) blah blah blah...

Raymond Carver, where are you?

Sean said...

Mary: I didn't know you wrote for a publication. For that matter, I didn't know you wrote poetry for publication. :)

And you do realize that I'm currently in the process of expanding a 1,500-word average into a 3,500-word story, right?

Dominique: Hey, we're all guilty. Join the club. :)

Unknown said...

Am obviously guilty too. But heck, it's still some kind of a feat to do that :P

Sometimes Mary said...

Yeah, that's true. Poetry, PR articles, boring articles, hopeful fiction, and, if I'm unlucky, copy (there was also a time when I was offered to review something I didn't even patronize--oi--hah hah).

It's hard, man. I wish you luck. Of course, I'm pretty sure, you can do it. :-) Yeey, you!