"How I Wrote This Article" Article

"Couldn't think of any lyrics!
No, I never wrote the lyrics.
So I'll just sing any old lyrics.

That come to mind, child."

—"This Song Is Just Six Words Long", "Weird Al" Yankovic

When someone is contractually obligated to churn out regular humorous articles, they occasionally reach an inspirational dead end. Sometimes, to deal with this, they write an article about how they can't think of anything to write.

Stephen Fry mentions in the book collection of his articles that every humor writer is allowed one and only one of these.

Almost always a form of Self-Referential Humor. See also Writer's Block.

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Examples of "How I Wrote This Article" Article include:

Comedy

• Dave Barry does this every so often.

Comic Books

• This is how Under The Hood begins in Watchmen.

Film

• Adaptation is this in movie form — it's a film telling the story of adapting a book into the screenplay of what eventually becomes the film you're watching.

Literature

• In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut's narration frequently goes off to explain what he was going through when he was writing it.
• Belgian novelist Herman Brusselmans uses this trope on occasion, often as an introduction. The first sentence of De kus in de nacht (The kiss in the night) is as follows: "As usual I have nothing to say and I will do so for about 600 to 650 pages, we'll see."

Music

• In the song "Boat Drinks" Jimmy Buffett sang, "I should be leaving this climate/I've got a verse but can't rhyme it."
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "This Song Is Just Six Words Long" is about this.

Newspaper Comics

• FoxTrot: "This is my fourth sentence. This is my fifth sentence. This is my second paragraph..."
  • Jason calls his essay "a running first-person account of the process of writing a nine-hundred-word essay."
• Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes ended up writing this story for Calvin after he tried time traveling two hours into the future to retrieve his completed story, only to find it hadn't been written yet. Unfortunately for Calvin, the class loves it, but it makes him look like a laughingstock.

Web Original

• Here's another: an "incomplete" article on writer's block ^{[dead link]} with a footnote which details (with references) the many reasons why the paper is unfinished.
  • Also this.
• "This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself".