Thinking about structure again. For quite a long time now I’ve held the view that narrative structure does most of the heavy-lifting in any written work. A piece has to start somewhere, go places, and stop at an appropriate place. Not doing so results in a shapeless blob of text with no narrative drive. Walls upon walls of text that go nowhere.

Structuring a piece, however, is not easy. Having enough ‘meat’ in a story to warrant a substantial structure is another orthogonal, but equally important, problem.

I would love to write more, but structuring a piece takes a lot of thought and nothing is gained from rushing this process. There also happens to be a dearth of stories in this prolonged writer’s block. Hopefully ideas just appear out of nowhere.

Reading about the ways prolific writers go about finding ideas does provide hints. Many of them appear to be regimented and time-conscious. And so a part of me wants to see if structuring my day would help, but I’m not a fan of time-tables. My time was always unstructured until people decided I was having too much fun and needed to get serious in life. Turning relaxing hobbies into regimented activities doesn’t sound like a bright idea. The idea of slicing a day up into blocks of time itself sounds absurd to me. All hours of the day are not made the same and it’s about time that people started respecting the subjective nature of how time is experienced versus how it’s measured.

I do happen to think about abstract structures outside of prose. Writing software for a living involves reasoning about structure and how different information entities interact with each other in mathematically defined ways. Perhaps this monkeying around with abstract structures is the reason I believe prose should also work the same way. It’s all muddy and difficult to reason about. Woe is me. I wish I had a burning passion for middle-management or an affinity for multimedia.

Ultimately this piece has the structure of a wet tissue. It starts out feeling substantial but melts away into blob of nothing.

A foray into graduate studies, a taste of employment, and here we are again. The world has changed quite a bit in these years of absence. Overeager capitalists who don’t recognize the value people bring to their work are betting on a half-baked energy-hungry technology to increase their margins by eliminating humans. People all over the world are (hopefully) realizing that capitalism’s promise of rising tides lifting all boats was a bait and switch. They want to replace you and keep the loot for themselves.

Me? I’m just bored out of my mind. Why else would a reasonable person write in the age of text generating machines. Having a job helps this little corner of the internet quite a bit as no one has to ever read this for it to be successful. It’s okay for it to be good for nothing.