Professor: I can't read all through your short story.
Student: Okay.
Professor: Look at the first paragraph.
Student: Yes.
Professor: All your sentences are complexly structured! Awkward syntax!
Student: You don't understand them?
Professor: You can say what you mean in fewer words.
Student: I'll revise it then.
Professor: I know what you're trying to get at.
Student: What.
Professor: You're trying to become a literary writer, aren't you?
Student: No.--Yes.--No.
Professor: You've been writing like this before?
Student: Yes. And that's my version of less complexly structured sentences.
Professor: You mean you've already simplified this.
Student: I tried.
Professor: Break it down further into simpler sentences.
Student: I will.
Professor: Who are you trying to imitate?
Student: Nobody. I've been influenced by Latin syntax and the structures of other classical literature.
Professor: Ah, translations from Spanish and Latin American writers! Who are you reading? Guiraldes! Fuentes! Marquez!
Student: I have read Cien Años De Soledad. But no. I meant Classical Latin. The moribund language.
Professor: Latin 10 and 11? The dead language.
Student: Repeat, moribund.
Professor: And why would you let it influence your writing?
Student: I find it beautiful, precise, and lyrical.
Professor: But I can't understand your work. You're giving your readers a headache.
Student: I don't ask them to read my work.
Professor: What's your purpose then?
Student: Self-fulfillment. Self-expression.
Professor: Do you want to be heard?
Student: By like-minded people.
Professor: And just who are you going to stir interest in? Homer? Virgil?
Student: If I can I would. Literary rejects, most likely.
Professor: Your short story is crap.
Student: And so is your work.
Professor: You've been reading them?
Student: Just one. From the internet. Bland. Vacuous. Characterless. Superficial.
Professor: Which story?
Student: I don't even remember. It didn't stick to my mind. Something about a college guy writing a letter about fraternity feuds to his father. Despicably vapid. Hilariously artificial.
Professor: And you think your writing is superior to mine.
Student: No.
Professor: But that's what you're doing.
Student: Just being frank. You're ego is superior to mine.
Professor: But your work--they're overloaded, excessive. Bigger ego than mine!
Student: Prolix.
Professor: Yes! Wait--what's prolix? And too many unnecessary adjectives! Too many details! Excise! Excise! You're not writing a novel!
Student: And yours has no description at all.
Professor: There is too!
Student: Whatever it was it seemed to have slipped from my memory. Neither had it cultivated any emotion in me.
Professor: And you use difficult words!
Student: I have no difficulty learning them and using them for the mere purpose of their own existence.
Professor: There you go again! Simplify! Simplify!
Student: You must be an idiot with an attention span of a goldfish.
Professor: Which lasts?
Student: A nanosecond.
Professor: What's a nanosecond?
Student: A thousand millionth of a second. And I'm kidding; goldfishes have an attention span of ten seconds.
Professor: And your sources?
Student: Verify it yourself. I don't need to explain everything. Fill the gaps of your ignorance with information.
Professor: Trivial information, you mean.
Student: Everything in the world is trivial, and you can only optimize it in its maximum utility by applying them to other fields of study.
Professor: Again! Optimize! Utility! Similar words! Simplify your sentence.
Student: My brain is wired that way. And I am trying to be simple-minded here, talking to a simpleton like you.
Professor: Simpleton! How dare you! What's a simpleton?
Student: Bugger off.
Professor: What's bugger? Use another word!
Student: Sodomize yourself.
Professor: What's sodomize! Use another word!

I'm difficult to read, you say. I accept. Now go away and leave me alone.

I don't write simple english and the english department shouldn't have had accepted me in the very first place. Why I'm here, I have no idea. I passed the transferee exam, so what, big deal. Should I blame myself from passing it or should I blame the department for not winnowing the potential writer from the nuisance? I must be a nuisance, a leak in the exams. If that's the case my relative unintelligibility is not my fault.

I'm not going to amount to anything, you say. Interesting. I amount to myself, and I don't need you to give a definition to my meaning.

Writing that short story cost me four hours of ceaseless typing and six sticks of Marlboro Lights.

Every short story ends like this: What's the fucking point? I say to fuck with the fucking point. The point is to enjoy reading the fucking thing that's fucking what.

I reduced my twenty-paged (double-spaced) short story into simpler sentences and this is what I came up with:

He was obsessed with her. He pursued her. He got her. He proposed. She declined. He lost his mind. And it was only the sent of her perfume that remained in his memory.

That's the point. Deal with it and move the fuck on.

Pointless? But pointlessness is the point!

A picture paints a thousand words.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
But my morning breath can mutter but a word,
and put the earth to extinction.
Besides myself, of course.

My blockmates in Ateneo are graduating on the 30th. In a year's time, they'll all be corpy people wearing snazzy corpy outfits talking corpy lingo like "marginal utility" and "profit margins" and "diminishing retuns" and suchlike. I could've been one of those, you know.

Math and physics and arts is (the collectivity of it) my forte. And if I will suck in Creative Writing 110 this summer, I'll be shifting to the mathematics department, major in physics, and graduate as a mathematical physicist, who also has no future.:D

Professor: What's this?
Student: The protagonist's employer's name.
Professor: Does he show up somewhere else in the story?
Student: No.
Professor: Get rid of it. Call him the the employer.
Student: Okay.
Professor: And who's this?
Student: His co-worker.
Professor: What's her purpose?
Student: She sprays the protagonist's handkerchief with raspberry perfume.
Professor: Does she show up somewhere else in the story?
Student: No.
Professor: Get rid of her. Call her the co-worker.
Student: Fine.
Professor: What's this place?
Student: The place where the pilgrim begins.
Professor: Does it have any bearing to the story?
Student: No.
Professor: Then remove it.
Student: Okay.
Professor: What's this girl's purpose?
Student: Sister of the protagonist's object of obsession.
Professor: Does she have any role in the story?
Student: No.
Professor: Remove her.
Student: I should just remove the story altogether.
Professor: No. What's your purpose for writing it?
Student: My purpose is to have fun writing while stumbling along some coincidental insight.
Professor: So you have no purpose in mind.
Student: No.
Professor: No simple or radical idea to put forth?
Student: No.
Professor: So what's the point of writing this?
Student: For people to enjoy reading without bearing the onus of the What Does This Fucking Bullshit Mean question mark.
Professor: So you give all these unnecessary details without arriving at a specific denouement.
Student: It's the reader's job to distinguish the important details from the useless.
Professor: But the point of a short story is to present a concise story using only details that would contribute to the writer's intention.
Student: That would be spoonfeeding your readers. My intention with those details is to provide tone, verisimilitude, atmoshpere, setting, and character.
Professor: But you don't know where the story's heading.
Student: How do you know? You've read only the first page.
Professor: You just said your intention is for the reader to enjoy reading.
Student: Yes, the process of reading itself and recreating an alternate mental dimension according to the reader's unlimited imagination, or the lack thereof.
Professor: But what is the point of writing it if you don't have a central idea to which all the elements must be brought together?
Student: Why does a beautiful lone flower have to have meaning by merely existing?
Professor: What??
Student: Does a flower have to have meaning in order to exist?
Professor: What's your point? A lone flower can beautify hectares of barren field.
Student: You created that meaning for the flower. What if it was an ugly flower--black and wilting, reeking with urine, but nonetheless alive?
Professor: To exist is to be perceived.
Student: The being who perceives itself exists. The flower knows it's alive despite all other living being's perception of it.
Professor: Short stories cannot live by itself alone; it cannot perceive itself.
Student: Texts exist when they are perceived by someone else. They are not living creatures, hence they exist only in the mind of the reader.
Professor: And when they are not in the reader's mind they die.
Student: Exactly.
Professor: Propounding?
Student: Texts must be merely read and recreated in the reader's mind in order to exist, regardless of whether or not they should mean anything.
Professor: But what's the point of existing without meaning?
Student: The thing that exists creates meaning for itself. For living beings, it's sufficient to perceive itself to be alive. For lifeless objects, it's sufficient to be perceived by someone else to be alive.
Professor: If a story is unread it dies.
Student: It's preserved in the pages, and is dead when not perceived.
Professor: Without readers your story is dead.
Student: Then let the dead read the dead. If I read it, it exists.
Professor: And if you die?
Student: It shall die with me. Unless someone else reads it.

This is a faulty argumentation, of course.

Word did you say?

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