Three sentences.

Four, if you want to be generous.

I stared at blinking cursor on my screen--I already filled in the requisite name and address and salutation that goes with a business letter--and the empty white space between the greeting and my boss's signature glared at me, mocking my inability to fabricate even the weakest line of bullshit.

It's one of the reasons that I like my job.  It's also one of the reasons why I hate it.  Sometimes there can be a massive divide between creative writing--the proverbial bread and butter of my very existence--and professional copy writing/letter drafting.  On a good day, however, there is no difference at all.

You see, when I draft a letter for my boss, it's full of such eloquent bullshit that it rivals even my most creative of scripts.  A letter, to a public official or to a constituent, painstakingly crafted to evoke a sense of urgency and importance; manufacturing a moral high-ground, relevant or not, that injects a previously unbeknownst level of importance to the letter ... these are the things that I relish about my job.

The bare minimum, however, is a different story.  When I have no material to work off of--no key phrases to highlight or an important reference sentence to establish a thesis--I must then cobble together a few sentences that convey some kind of meaning.  And it doesn't take much to make an effective, "bare minimum" letter.  Three sentences.

Four, if you want to be generous.

But again, when you have no material to work off of, whatsoever ... those three sentences are an impassable mountain.

I've already managed to put off this letter for a few days ... and then I got a weekend reprieve.  But now I need to get it done.

Three sentences.

Four, maybe.

At this rate, I'll probably write a goddamn novel before I pull these three sentences out of my ass.