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I'm Lou Franco and this is episode 39 of Write While True.

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Write While True is an infinite loop, and that's because I think of writing as an

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infinite game. A game I'm playing for fun and to get better at it, like a game of catch.

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So in each episode I'll tell you something I learned about writing and then I'll throw

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you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.

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In the past 11 episodes of season 3 I've been exploring writing exercises that are

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like practicing scales on a piano or making marks on paper with charcoal.

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You aren't playing songs or drawing objects, just learning the tools.

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I was at a life drawing session this week and I was trying out a new tool, a white soft

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pastel pencil.

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I draw mostly with charcoal, which can make a very dark black mark.

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You can smudge it or erase it to get it lighter, but you can't really get it to be back to

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white. The lightest areas are the ones without any charcoal at all on them, which is hard to

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control. And it's not white anyway since my paper isn't white to begin with.

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The white pastel pencil can draw white on top of the charcoal, so now I can make white

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marks, which can also be smudged and mixed.

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It's giving me a range of values I couldn't get before.

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Throwing white highlights onto a dark drawing is a way of directing attention and makes

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it more interesting.

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Black and white on a drawing are the extreme values.

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If I try to apply this idea to writing, it should also be a juxtaposition of opposite

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extremes.

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I've been thinking about this all week, trying to see if I can come up with an idea for a

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podcast about it.

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And then I thought of Jonathan Swift and his essay A Modest Proposal.

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It's a satirical essay written in 1729, where he proposed that the English could solve the

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problem of Irish poverty by buying and eating their children.

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The subject is dark and the problem is serious, but his solution and choice of words are

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ridiculous. The humor draws attention to the problem.

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I'm no Jonathan Swift, so I would not personally try to do this with an actual serious problem.

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But my niche is software development.

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Our problems are ripe for ridicule.

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I'll give you an example right after a message from our sponsor.

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Right While True is sponsored by me.

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In the first episode, I told you about how I start every day by doing morning pages.

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I do 20 to 30 minutes of stream of consciousness writing and it helped me learn how to write

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on demand. In episode 19, I followed that up with talking about prompted morning pages.

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Having a prompt gets me going because I don't have to think about what to write.

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So I made four morning pages journals.

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Each journal has 30 days worth of prompts.

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I think by the end of the 30 days, you'll learn what it feels like to write on demand

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and it will spill over into your normal writing.

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You can get to them by going to loufranko.com slash journals.

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Okay, let's get back to the show.

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The prompt this week is to write some satirical sentences, maybe a few paragraphs to address

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a problem in your field on a software developer.

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Some of our problems are undocumented code, code that's hard to read or change, slow

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builds or untested code.

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Here's a stab at a modest proposal to fix all of those.

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Large projects have thousands of lines of code that no one understands.

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To solve this, we should just delete them.

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Doing so would speed up our builds and bring up our test coverage percentage.

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If someone notices that a feature is missing, we can just reimplement it in a better way.

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Instead of begging for time to fix our technical debt, we'll just declare bankruptcy.

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Okay, so that's off the top of my head, so don't judge me.

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Try it for yourself. Try out the style.

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Mix the darkness of a problem with the lightness of a ridiculous solution.

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This has been Right While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they're

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fun.