Saturday, March 08, 2008

Hol's well that ends hell

Having takne it upon myself at the beginning of every school holiday to contribute to the giant gaping void that is our planet's ozone layer, I've decided to write about the rather controversial topic of controversy.

It would be rather expected if about half my readers (I'm sorry, wrong word there? "my"?. Silly, arrogant little me.) immediately made the planet less unhappy by a negligible amount the moment I mentioned this topic, but this is probably what writers (from this it can be seen that I am really not one individual, but a collective entity composed of thousands of individuals) as "self topic syndrome" or STS, if you're the kind of person who goes through a cardiac arrest and dies if you don't get the opportunity to puzzle people every half a minute or so.

In fact, let's drop all this controversy nonsense and just talk about STS instead.

Many a writer tends to reach a certain point in their lives where they can no longer write anything (or think about anything to write about) the topic that they've been writing about for years. This may range from large smelly pointed hats categorizing young children, or generally insulting things about the physical form of God who came down to wash our sins away so that we may be entered into the kingdom of heaven. And many a writer will then try to write about writing itself.

This usually results in the vain sacrifices of millions of trees around the world for the cause of dissecting the process of sacrifing millions of trees around the world.

But the root of this problem usually comes around from trying to write something for the sake of being different, and this is where Dan Brown needs to start being ashamed of himself. So before I'm silenced let me just say this:

There's really no need to write about something different. What a writer really has to do is... well.. bonus points for the one who guesses this. Very simply, write. Write about what you want people to know, or what you think about something. Many a time have I found my thinking process get cut off by simply thinking "Is this going to be a good one?". If you're currently experiencing that, my advice would be to shut down your computer (or typewriter, depending on how many medical conditions you have at the moment) and go for a cup of coffee (or an IV drip), then come back when you've seen the error of your ways.

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