The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Inspiration for this column is a bit like wind power. When the wind blows, you get power. When the wind blows too hard, you can’t use all the power. And when the wind isn’t blowing, you’re in a considerable pickle, as there’s no way to save the surplus power from the days the wind blows too hard.

On relatively uneventful weeks (like this one), you’re sometimes reduced to blowing really, really hard in the general direction of your metaphorical wind turbines, and possibly enlisting a few friends and/or small mammals to do the same.

I don’t know if this sort of inspiration trouble applies to any of your jobs. Just in case it does, here are a few suggestions on what not to do:

Don’t look on the Internet. There is literally nothing there that is even remotely similar or relevant to your everyday life.

Even if you do go to the Internet for inspiration (which you shouldn’t!), don’t watch any murder mysteries. Instead of typing, you’ll end up huddled underneath your bed with your stuffed animal collection, wielding a baseball bat.

Working on a recreational writing project to get your creative juices flowing is a great idea. But after half an hour, when your parody of an obscure cartoon is three pages longer and your column is seven words long (this, coincidentally, being the length of your heading), you might need to put the fiction aside for a while.

Don’t fake a home invasion just so you can write a column about it.

Faking Ebola is a bad idea, too. It involves a lot of barfing, and if you want to pet your cat, the cat will have to wear a Hazmat suit.

Just say no to plagiarism. Not only is it unethical, it’s hard to spell.

Avoid extensive desperation-induced coverage of subjects you don’t fully understand. In my case, that’s football. Apparently, there was a game that a team won and everybody got excited about that for some reason involving a mysterious event called the Super Bowl. Which is good. I guess.

Don’t cheat by using large fonts to make a small event fill up more space. The first thing that will happen when it is pasted into the column slot will be an adjustment to a standard font and font size. IF YOU WANT TO, THOUGH, TRY PUTTING IT IN CAPS, WHICH TAKE UP MORE ROOM THAN STANDARD, “CORRECT” CAPITALIZATION.

Don’t bang your head on the monitor. It doesn’t work nearly as well as it should, although it will result in a fun, floating, slightly tingly hairdo.

Staring at a blank document is a lousy way to generate ideas. Eventually, your brain may give up and attempt to emulate the blank space, which will get you exactly nowhere.

“Reruns,” while popular on TV, don’t work terribly well in the news world.

And whatever you do, do not enlist a chicken to type your column. They have no sense of plotline development whatsoever. And don’t get me started on their syntax…