Bob Goes On A Diet: An Explanation of "Short Versions"

 Since I’ve been that sorriest specimen of humanity, the out-of-work writer, I’ve tried various cornered-rat survival tactics.  The next seven “short-version” blog entries represent one such.  They are vintage Bob’s Little Acres put on a crash diet, because I was trying to whore up to the syndicates, which want a maximum column length of 600 words.

Repeat readers know it takes me 600 words to say good morning and how’s them hemorrhoids, Mabel?  There have been times I introduced my subject around paragraph 7!

Sadly, though, brevity seems to be not just the soul of wit but the wave of the future.  Such work as I have managed to scare up recently included a 500-word feature (Yes, I said, “500 … word … FEATURE”) and a request to cut a 1200-word piece down to 700.  The whole exercise reminds me of the old rule of composition:

            Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. 

            Nowadays you get the added instruction:  “Choose one of the above.”  You don’t need to be Horace Greeley to figure out which one wins out every time.

            So the old rule was you needed a beginning, a middle and an end.  Now you get the middle if you’re very very lucky.  This is good for me, I reckon, because I used to take forever coming up with just the right intro and I was even crazier about how to say goodbye.  Now?  For my 1200-to-700 miracle, I turned the whole piece into an alphabetical list.

            I haven’t heard yet about that one, and the syndicates are also still playing a little hard to get.  In the meantime, though, I thought I’d post these short-version Bobs on the blog for anybody who wanted to read them.

            It may interest you that I have now taken 318 words to explain to you why I shortened things down!