“All writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart.” (Martin Amis)
“I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument and I have an imagination. And when the time comes up in the song to play a solo, it’s me against the laws of nature: I don’t know what I’m gonna play, what I’m gonna do. I know roughly how long I have to do it and it’s a game when you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it. And depending on how intuitive the rhythm section backing you up is, you can do things that are literally impossible to imagine.” (Frank Zappa)
I promise I did not set out to have every piece of writing titled with alliteration of paragraph. I didn’t even know the Substack would be called “Promising Paragraphs” when I sat down to create it. But once the Substack name was there and the first paragraph alliteration popped into my head, it was inevitable. At first, I thought it would be the first title or a few here and there - mostly because I expected that there can’t possibly be enough alliterations that would fit with what I want to write about for a whole month worth of writing. I even asked ChatGPT to suggest some because I thought I’d run out in a week. Boy, was I wrong! There are hundreds of p-words that fit the bill. And they’re pouring out of me at a rate of knots - no need for AI to help. I could probably go a whole year. There are enough words that will fit the Paragraph P… template that I can write about pretty much anything and still have a title that fits. But that does not mean that the initial decision about the form of the title did not have an impact on what I write about. Having “Paragraph” in the title makes it more likely that I will focus on writing over other aspects of the epistemic process. And often the pun titles give me ideas what to write about. I am still in control but only as much as a flooding river, I can go anywhere but there are channels I’m more likely to explore that the form of my chosen landscape has made for me. Form matters. Choices matter.