This Department is where we keep track of individuals who spend long periods thinking about sentences and then change them anyway.
Subjects are monitored in their natural habitat, usually sitting very still while internally experiencing a dramatic range of emotions. Common behaviors include opening multiple tabs, renaming documents, and confidently declaring a piece “done” only to immediately edit it again.
We record writing rituals, many of which are believed to be essential. These include making coffee, not drinking it, making another five, and briefly considering a completely different project.
Progress is often reported in words, then revised downward for accuracy by Angela Marrant!
One of our writers, Olympia Tuff, has demonstrated increasingly complex behavior. Recent observations include rewriting the same paragraph in three different fonts “to check its attitude,” pausing mid-sentence to start a new project about the original sentence, and referring to earlier drafts as “former versions of truth.”
Another writer, Sil Proof, is harder to classify... His notes are minimal, his process unclear, and his drafts rarely seen in full. Fragments appear, then disappear. His stories also lack a clear beginning point. It is not always obvious what he is writing, or if the work was meant to be found at all!
Why are we here? We are here to examine the chaotic lives, questionable habits, and ever-changing styles of different writers — while confidently attempting to learn from them, despite clear evidence that no one fully knows what they’re doing.