Or not another Open Call Writing Exercise!

I’m a title grabber. I admit it, and I just grabbed your titles and wrote some sentences with them:

 I’m screaming it to the world: How I Fit My Teenager for a GPS Without Her Knowledge.  

Every now and again I get a moment of clarity while wrangling for a Tango. Does this mean I’m getting wiser? 

What Rick Perry's book should be titled:Take Testestorne, get stronger, have a heart attack, die!
(some of these just write themselves)

Lately, I’ve been bored with Open Salon. I have not been posting nor commenting as often. Part of it has to do with burn-out; I have been on Open Salon for nearly two years (come February) and I have been running out of things to post. When I first came to this site, I wasn’t sure which direction to choose so I started writing crazy stuff. Does anyone remember my FAIL2FOOS posts? Don’t look for them; I took them down some time ago.

Or I would edit, resuscitate, reheat, and refry those tried and tired old e-mails joke we get from friends or co-workers. But I got tired of that too. I have tried some serious stuff in hopes of getting respect and props from the Da Pow-wahs Dat Bee and the Kewl Kids, but by then I had already established myself as a clown so they don’t take me seriously. Although I did achieve some editorial recognition with The Running Shoe and The Night I Almost Checked Out.

In addition, the inundation of spam attacks has been drowning my muse. I want to write but then think, “Why bother?” It will only be on the feed for a few seconds before it gets swept away by a tsunami of “live streaming” and “buy some useless junk” posts. And since the editors seem powerless over this whole spam thing, Open Salon has become an endless parade of peddlers hawking their cheap wares especially on the weekends. Talk about the money-changers at the Temple. The editors should change Open Salon's mission statement to “we are a community of spammers who will try to sell you anything. Cheap!”

So I decide to do play a little game and help some bloggers out at the same time. As you may have noticed the above sentences are composed mostly of links; they link to posts that were on the “Most Recent” feed of the Home Page.

The game is called Turning Titles into Sentences or Paragraphs

The game is played like this:

1. Go to the Most Recent feed; and hang out there for a few minutes. You may have to do this over the course of a couple of days, but don't spend too much time waiting for the right titles.
2. Read (rate and comment as you deem appropriate) several posts.
3. Now write a paragraph or several sentences from the titles you have chosen.
4. You cannot alter the title, but you can add conjunctions, punctutations or some words to have it make sense.
5. Link the titles only. This way we know which part of your paragraph or sentence is the original title.
6. Now here’s the fun and altruistic part: the titles you select must be from bloggers you don’t know or you have never read before. Also, it cannot be from another OS persona you may have here. Plus, if you know another blogger has multiple accounts and you know which ones they are, you cannot select them either. That’s called cheating. (I won’t be able to tell, but if you do cheat, “may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits on the night you are about to make wild passionate love to your one true soul mate”.)
7. Once you have your paragraph/sentences complete, post it and title it  “Title Grabber,” “Headline Grabber” or “Turning Titles into Paragraphs”. Add these to the tags field too.
8. In the tags field, add the title and the name of the blogger.

This game is more of an editing exercise than a writing exercise in that it forces you to take unrelated content and make something out of it. It also helps the blogger get out of his/her sphere of influence. Most people when they come to Open Salon build an audience. Once their audience is established, they don’t venture out of their neighborhood. This is a shame because there are a lot of other good writers on this site that need and would welcome some fresh readers.

So if you’re bored with Open Salon, help a Blogger out by hanging out at the “Most Recent” feed, grab some titles, and turn them into sentences or paragraphs. What are you waiting for? Start grabbing!

Text by Trudge164 ©Trudge164, 2010