Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 27, 2024

Why English, necessarily? There are professional writers publishing in other languages.

To save on car insurance, don’t have an accident.

To win a basketball game, score more points than the other team.

Sounds more like a game of AdLibs……..The notepads where you fill in the blanks…….

Reminds me of an elephant joke:

How do you make a statue of an elephant?

Take a block of marble, and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant…

I thought the method was to stare at a blank piece of paper or computer screen until drops of blood start forming on your forehead.

Liquid inspiration, sound about right, or “write” for Rat!

Hey, it worked for Hemingway!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

The Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000 words, but the average person has a vocabulary of “only” about 20,000 to 35,000 words.

Oh, good. Finally some advice I can use.

Write drunk, edit sober.

James Joyce says Sláinte!

Rat is basically correct, but the trick to being a professional writer is to know which words to choose and what constitutes the right order.

Like Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

Of course, all this assumes that the writer has something worth saying.

I once tried to write a Country-Western song I called “Drunk Before Noon” … but I never made it past 11 o’clock!

If you’re writing for streaming TV or the movies, you only need one word that begins with F.

(1.) Be a relatively well known celebrity or a member of the royal family.

That sounds like what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and they, Rat and Capote, were both right.

and ignore Goat!

Really not much more to it than that.

Try Esperanto. Fewer words.

All I can think of is to write about whatever is on your mind.

Step 1: Acquire an infinite number of monkeys. Step 2: Acquire an infinite number of typewriters. Step 3: Wait.

and use AI.

Well, I guess that’s one way to do it. It’s worked for a lot of authors.

They say, “Write what you know”. That’s why I haven’t published anything.

I love irony.

Many things look easy until we try to do them ourselves. And to do them well requires even more levels of knowledge, skill and talent.Like I can cook an okay meal, but it is primitive next to what my mother can do or those that cook in restaurants (note – McDonalds is NOT a restaurant despite what they claim).Likewise I am handy enough to lay a new floor, change a light socket, hang a painting… however I’d rather not attempt to build a house.

That’s the chatbots’ approach.

The best cure for writer’s block is a juice glass of Jack Daniels.

Amazing how many seem to have a real issue in getting the right order, myself example for…

Is Pastis giving us a clue as to how he comes up with his strips?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are approximately 171,476 words currently in use in the English language, with an additional number of obsolete words listed as well; however, the total number of words including technical terms, slang, and newly coined words is often estimated to be around a million

The drinking part helps a bit.

No, drinking comes first.

It might be more than that, but 170,000 words is certainly more than I know.

Step 3: enter the words as a prompt into your preferred AI generator.

Like I used to tell the people on my software development team: It’s all just ones and zeroes. All you need to do is figure out how many of each and in what order. Problem solved.

Of course, after dropping that I was on the hook for some useful advice. Happily, I usually had some.

This doesn’t work if you’re writing in Spanish.

Strangely enough, that is the process.

Don’t drink a lot. Writing is work. Deadlines are work. People who drink and write are just looking for a reason to drink.

Ah – the Hemingway school of writing.

Finally, a use for that big, humongous, unabridged dictionary I got in 8th grade

And remember, sequels are a writer’s friend (if not necessarily a reader’s friend…..)

Alcohol seems to be a major occupational hazard of the creative set.

Actually, Goat, the only thing Rat’s missing is a little creativity.

New Yorker cartoon showing a man raking leaves in his suburban front yard, speaking to a passerby:

“I used to be an important writer, but then I gave up smoking and drinking.”

OMG! This is so funny — LOLOL

If you want to be a professional writer for TV, you only need a dozen or so words.

On a side note….I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in newspapers lately of supposedly professional writers using words that only sound like the word they need — and it actually getting past editors! Or have they been replaced by spell-check? If so, bad call.

or you could just hire a roomful of monkeys on typewriters…

Is this what Stephan does?

That’s what I’ve been doing wrong!

If that doesn’t work, ask an AI to make up some new words. They are very good at that.

To be a professional writer, you also need to know how to sell the arrangement of words.

Is that how cartoonists do it?

I can relate, Rat. I write for fun, and though it ain’t easy, I enjoy it and keep at it.