literary laryngitis

Writers do not lose their voice, they merely misplace it.

Like an errant punctuation mark, or missing set of car keys, some things simply get laid in the wrong place. This happens to people all the time, but that is an entirely different subject matter and one not discussed in polite company.

As one who crafts advertising copy the way others bake bread or mop floors or grind sausage, I have lost the discipline to be long-winded, to string multiple thoughts together just so. After years of writing to fit prescribed spaces, my capacity to elongate has been truncated; chopped at the bit, as it were.

There is no literary Viagra to combat this malady.

One cannot conjure Faulkner or Hemingway while selling light bulbs. Why, even dear Sherwood Anderson would have a difficult time hawking eggs.

Not much good can ever come from a paragraph meant to elicit compulsion in a reader; that he must throw on slippers and a housecoat and run to the nearest corner store to purchase some totem of marketing that would be otherwise intolerable to live without.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once claimed that advertising “is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”

There are no words.