Writing

My friend Tamie tagged me, which means I need to give three tips on writing and then tag three more people.

This is difficult, because I'm not sure I know much about writing. I've written some pretty amateur articles for Op/Ed sections, and if you're reading this, you're well-acquainted with the drivel I regularly (not all that regularly, I guess) post here. I'm okay at historical writing, but since historical writing is not okay writing, I'm not really the person to be giving anyone advice on writing. If you want to write like I do, then follow these three easy steps. Understand, though, that following these steps will most likely make you a much worse writer than you already are.

1. Get kinda pissed off. This helps you develop a good, arrogant writer's voice, and ensure that there will be at least one non sequitur in your work, probably two or three. Good ways to get pissed off are to skim CNN headlines (headlines only -- don't read the articles), read the first couple sentences of some letters to the editor in a local newspaper, or listen to a new album out by a band you once liked.

2. Use as many commas, hyphens, and parenthetical comments as you possibly can. That way, your sentences are hard enough to read that people will probably give up before they find those non sequiturs I mentioned earlier. It also helps your writing sound more like an uninformed, blue-faced rant. That's what sells these days. After you've typed a couple of really, really long sentences with loads of commas and hyphens and stuff in parentheses (it's a good idea to make sure there's at least one phrase in parentheses distracting from your point in every paragraph), and you're sure your reader isn't really paying attention to the sentence you're writing anymore, toss in a really short sentence. It works.

3. You might want to mention that no one ever comments on your blog, even if you get quite a few comments and you hardly ever post. That way, the blogosphere sympathizes with you and someone posts a comment. This makes it look like you have a whole bunch of people hanging on your every word. In truth, they probably aren't, but everyone checks their blog at least once a day and gets disappointed when it still says "8 comments" and it has for a couple weeks, but the text is that faded version of the original color of the comments link to make sure you're well aware that you've already clicked it five or six times that day, hoping maybe the page didn't refresh and someone complimented you for your wit and good humor.

When I was a little kid, I wasn't a very fast runner and I wasn't very competitive. I'd play tag until someone tagged me, and then once everyone ran away, I'd usually go sit in the shade or something. So if you wanna be it, be my guest, but I'll be under this tree eating that Handisnack I saved for story time.