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Writer’s Diary #57: A Room, A Purse, and No Phone?

Daniel Tubb

I seem to have spent a few days reading and reacting to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It’s my third reading now. First thing. Four fifty-minute chunks. As I re-read it and my notes, I respond to it, and my notes, and I (re)write.

What to make of her description of a rather unsuccessful morning in the British Library, where all she finds is men writing about women? Obsessed it seems. She’s angry.

But then she goes for lunch.

A nice lunch. She has coffee too. And find a newspaper. To pay, she reaches into her purse. Five shillings and ninepence. Her purse produces 10 shilling notes. Her Aunt died, giving her 500 pounds a year. In perpetuity. (It was only 2500 pounds, in total, in reality.)

That’s 39.10 CAD for a lunch! A good lunch. Expensive, I imagine? How can she afford it?

Her aunt’s money. She doesn’t have to work.

It hits me in a flash.

When I was a student, I had no money, but I did have some. Not like my students today. I had scholarships and loans and easy student jobs.

First year, I lived with friends.

Later, I parlayed them into cheap rent and cheap food through global arbitrage. (I was a librarian, making minimum wage, in Ontario, working in Ecuador.)

I lived frugally, but rent and wine and food in Spain 2002 and Ecuador in 2005 were far cheaper than in Ontario.

Rent in Colombia as a graduate student doing ethnographic fieldwork, when I spent my days walking, thinking, eating good food, and reading, was something else. Less still, when I went the gold mines.

That fieldwork was funded by the Canadian taxpayer and Carleton University. To great expense. It was decent money. And, my accidental exercise in global arbitrage, made my purchasing power much higher.

Not deliberately, but accidentally. I moved where my money went further, and the scholarship and grants allowed me to spend two years wandering around Bogotá and the Chocó and letting my mind wander and writing.

(When the purse ended, I experienced the opposite. Moving to Yale, with a shrinking scholarship as the Canadian dollar collapsed.) I walked, and wrote, but was far more stressed about money. Anxious. I spent those three years trying to find a job. Which I did. Then, a decade worrying about money as one salary only goes so far.

But then, and maybe now again as Mercedes works, I have the equivalent for lunches.

(I used to go to the library, then walk and spend 40,000 pesos on a lunch in Bogotá now. That is one day’s minimum wage.)

But, for the last decade, my phone would have been in the way. Making the mind wandering impossible.

But, not as as student. As a student, I had no phone. So, many times, I did what Woolf describes—the thinking and daydreaming and writing and letting the mind wander and making connections. It’s this that Woolf’s famous essay is an exercise in. (It does it by showing, not telling.)

It’s fiction, to be sure. But there is an element of autobiography. What about calling it a fictionalized auto-ethnographic account of writing? The day dreaming by the river, the flash of insight lost by walking on turf, the lunch, and a walking into the evening thinking about the gold that went into the college, and a walk to the library and then the next day at the British Museum and then lunch paid for by her Aunt’s inheritance.

I think it is.

But, of course, she had no iPhone, computer, or Internet. Has all of this connection robbed us of our ability to let our mind wander and make connections?

Yes.

But, need it?

No.

Zadie Smith, an other famous English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, doesn’t have a phone.

These two facts might be connected.

Writer’s Diary #56: A room of One’s Own

Daniel Tubb

In the draft, I had an aside about the importance of a room of one’s own with a lock. My thought? A room of one’s own, with a lock, and without a computer, phone, or interruptions. But, yesterday morning, and again this morning, I re-read Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. Not only is it a feminist critique of the materiality of artistic creation and the ways in which women have been excluded for centuries. But in Woolf’s words, and in the story she weaves, you can also begin to see the glimmers of a method to fiction.

The walking and daydreaming, the trespassing on lawns, the lunches, the attempts to go to libraries, the walks before dinner and the remembering of snippets of ideas, of poems. The walks and strolls across in Oxbridge.

But it’s also the next day, and other days, of being in the room and taking books down and putting them back on the shelves, of going to the library and reading with a notebook, and of misremembered lines and lost quotations, and the concentration that goes into the work.

Even as I was doing that, I had my daughter behind me, asleep on the couch at 4 o’clock in the morning because she couldn’t sleep. She woke up early. I cuddled her. She fell back into bed.

And as I was writing, there were four or five messages. Running partners. Dentist appointments. Concentration.

But there’s also a bricolage in there.

Pulling down books. Looking at shelves. Going to the library for ideas.

Pulling down books. Looking at shelves. Going to the library to get ideas.

I read in the introduction to the 2000 Penguin edition that on the day she gave the lecture she wrote:

“My ambition is, from this very moment—eight minutes to six, on Saturday evening—to attain complete concentration again.”

Total concentration! It takes a room and money (CAD$70,000 in Canadian money, I’m guessing), and I know it helps to be white.

Total concentration! It takes a room and money (CAD$70,000 in Canadian money, I’m guessing), and I know it helps to be white and a man.

But a walk, and lunch, and time, and concentration are best achieved without the technology in my pocket. Which is its own difficulty.

Writer’s Diary #55: Just do it

Daniel Tubb

Today’s update:

I met a drummer friend yesterday, along with another artist—a goldsmith. My drummer friend has been trying to work steadily every day. Four hours. He writes it down. He inspired me to try again. If he can drum for four hours a day, maybe I can find time to write? Just do it. “Do it” He said

He works at night; I am a morning person. So, I did my four hours in four 50 minute chunks this morning. It’s nice to be done by 9:30.

The other friend, the goldsmith, said, “I only let myself start on something new once I’ve finished something.”

That is my challenge—always starting something new. Perhaps I can finish something, before starting on another big project..

Anyway, a nice morning on the bricolage chapter. Re-read the whole draft. Lots to do.

I ended on a side tangent re-reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. She’s talking about women and fiction; I think I’m talking about distraction and anthropology.

But anyway, I have to finish reading it again tomorrow.

For now, I’m done and of to a maple syrup sugar shack with the kids.

Writer’s Diary 51: In Praise of Mellel

Daniel Tubb

Mellel 6.3 just came out. I bought my first copy of Mellel as a student in 2006 or so; although there have been long periods when I haven’t used it and worked in Word. Every long‑form thesis, dissertation, or book I’ve ever written has been finished in Mellel. Yet, most of my daily writing is done in Markdown in Tinderbox.

Markdown is a text‑to‑HTML conversion tool for web writers. It allows you to write using an easy‑to‑read, easy‑to‑write plain text format, which can then be converted to HTML. Since John Gruber of Daring Fireball designed the spec in 2004, it has taken over the Internet. Perhaps it should be required learning for students?

Tinderbox is a tool for notes—a place to put down ideas, move them around, edit them, and revise them. It’s a personal information toolbox, a piece of software that I find indispensable for my scattered writing process.

But at some point, the messy notes and ideas have to turn into drafts and manuscripts. By the time a draft goes to a reviewer or publisher, it has to be perfect.

For the last half decade, I’ve long been enamoured with the idea of writing in Markdown in Tinderbox and then using tools like Pandoc and CiteProc to take that output and convert Markdown into blog posts, websites, and Word manuscripts. Indeed, I’ve even written a few scripts and a contextual menu in Finder that convert a Markdown file with citations into a DOCX file, and vice versa.

But as an academic writer, there is, of course, a challenge with citations. I’ve long used Bookends as a citation manager. I’ve used Bookends since the early 2000s. It’s a powerful app for keeping track of thousands of articles. It’s fast, unlike Zotero. It plays well with Mellel, but also lets you sync with a BibTeX file, which can be used by CiteProc.

So, I can write in Markdown in Tinderbox using MultiMarkdown formatting for footnotes, and then send it to Pandoc to convert to Word or wherever with citations. It works well. I love it.

Yet, for every truly long form article or project, I find myself turning back to Mellel for the final step because one thing that an academic writer knows is that by the time it goes to peer review, it must be perfect. What you send to the press, the editor, or the peer review will first be reviewed, and if you get the subtle things wrong in the writing or the formatting, you can be prejudged as sloppy.

Writing a book or article is, in part, an exercise in getting it right. Perhaps it’s premature perception. Yet, as I work on finishing a manuscript, I again turn back to Mellel, and it shines as a beautiful word processor designed for print and for writing documents.

There’s a cognitive relief in not writing in an abstraction, even an elegant simple one like Markdown.

Mellel bills itself as:

is a word processor designed from the ground up to be the ultimate writing tool for academics, technical writers, scholars, and students. Mellel is powerful, stable, and reliable; it is the ideal companion for writing documents that are long and complex, short and simple, and anything in between.

It’s all of these things. Worth a look.

I turned back to it, because the recent 6.3 version has a new notes feature that allows you to put notes at the end of a section or page range (that is, at the end of a chapter). This means I can write the way that my corner of anthropology likes to write, with notes at the end of chapters.

This new notes are notes done right.

While a subtle addition would be to have chapter‑end notes arbitrarily situated in a notes chapter at the end of a manuscript, as publishers in the humanities do it.

For now, I want to say that the thing with Mellel that I love is that, as opposed to Markdown, is that there is a much reduced cognitive load in getting it right, and then moving on.

As I move into it once again and get my book set‑up, I feel a relief that once I get it right in Mellel, it stays right. There are no further processing steps where errors can be introduced. It’s done. Tinderbox makes it easy to make radical changes. But, at some point, one has to stop, and get it done.

Rather than write in a markdown, Mellel lets you just work on the final form.

It’s nice.

I write by picking at things, tinkering, changing, and cobbling. At times, an Markdown’s abstraction and portability is best. At the end, Mellel is best.

Scheduling a syllabus

Daniel Tubb

It’s time to design a syllabus again. As each semester comes to an end and a new one begins, I always find myself redesigning and rethinking my syllabi. Why? A course is an opportunity to brush up on material, to think through new ideas, and to return to interests.

However, there is always the challenge of working out what to assign, what works, and what to think about. I often assign too much reading, for example. So, before I dive deep into designing my first-year course on economics and anthropology for this semester, I wanted to put down some thoughts on what I know works.

First, go slower. I look back at my syllabi from my first few years teaching, and they are far too ambitious. I know students don’t always read, but part of the trick is working out the structure and the framing of a course. The reading schedule matters, but because it won’t change, but because its rhythms and speed shape the experience of the semester, for myself and the students. There need to be moments of working hard, but also moments of slowing down and relaxing.

At the end of the last semester, it seemed that five four-class (M, W, F, M) modules, with a couple of classes between (W F) offers a way to frame the semester. Things in between might be an in-class exam, an in-class reading reflection, a few films, or an ethnography.

For an upper-level course, we could just read five books. Reading five books is too much for lower-level students. But, we can read, think, talk, and discuss bits of books.

I’m going to try this module framework this coming semester.

Writing Diary #53: Cleanup Reepeated Text

Daniel Tubb

What makes a book different from an article? What makes a book different from an essay? One thing: it’s long. In my case, what I thought would be one book, seems to be becoming two or maybe three. However, over the years I’ve been working on it, it has grown to almost a million words. This creates just a writing challenge. How to organize, cut, edit, and work with the detritus of various versions, drafts, initial starts, notes on an idea, and it just piles up in a chaotic, Escher-like jumble, that is so overwhelming as it leave me lost. One problem is the order. One is duplication.

Order can be solved by coding. Putting things about the same topic together. This solves the issues that writing different iterations of these books for quite a long time. This means that the ideas have sometimes flourished in different drafts, different versions of the same text, living in different places. I’ve long since lost track of where things are.

Pragmatically, they’re in a big Tinderbox file. But, how to turn that into a book?

When it comes to the final steps of editing, tightening, and turning rough ideas into book form, one step that is both banal and annoying is the general cutting of duplicate text.

There are different ways of doing this.

For a long time I’ve done it by hand. It’s not very efficient when dealing with so much text.

More recently, I have been using a script I wrote called structur.py. With structur.py I code text and send paragraphs and pieces of text to the right place. I put ideas together that are about similar topics. However, once structur.py has worked its magic, there is still a problem: I still have a lot of duplicate text? One way to deal with this is to keep coding until all the similar text is in the same place, then delete it. This is what I did. But it takes a long time just to read 10,000 words. Let alone 30,000 or 100,000, which is my problem. The problem is that I want a copy of a piece of text, and then any good sentences that I might want to put together.

A few days ago, I put together a script called DejaText.py that flags files, paragraphs, sentences and even words that are duplicated. This is super useful for identifying where text is being reused in multiple places. The result was somewhat shocking. My drafts were full of duplicates.

This morning, as I was trying to code six files to deal with the most egregious case of duplicated paragraphs and sentences, I realised that I was coding the same text over and over again. Why not write a script that deletes the second and subsequent instance of repeated paragraphs and sentences? It’s dangerous. But, point it at a temporary folder, and it works. I call it [dejatext_cleanup.py]. It’s on GitHub.

This combination of deleting duplicate text, and then coding with structur.py, allowed me to cut 35,000 words down to 13,000 words. The scripts will speed= things up considerably. How to proceed? The way forward is to work at the level of what I’ve already organised. Take a section, say a section on pencils. Delete duplicate text. Code the remainder. Put the codes in order. Then, I’ll have a complete section on pencils. Revise it a couple times, and then I’ll have a draft.

These are power tools. They’re dangerous. But, it iwll speed up turning a folder of notes into a book.

Writer’s Diary #52: Repeated Words

Daniel Tubb

Today was revision. Cutting and tightening a few sections on pencils. A week ago it was 6,000 words. Now, it’s 4,000. The task today was words and phrases that are superfluous. Overused. Bugaboos. It’s not that all repeats are bad. But, the trick is to be deliberate. My drafts are full of words and phrases reused, without deliberation. They can often be cut. The idea for this came to me from John McPhee’s Draft No. 4.

It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working
and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them. You could call this the copy-editing phase if real copy editors were not out there
in the future prepared to examine the piece. The basic thing I do with college students is pretend that I’m their editor and their copy editor. In preparation for conferences
with them, I draw boxes around words or phrases in the pieces they write. I suggest to them that they might do this for themselves.

This is an early step. Cut early, then revise with care.

I use tools: a script that lists repeated words, and Pro Writing Aid, which has a tool to list repeated words and phrases.

Writer’s Diary #51: NaNoWriMo

Daniel Tubb

This is a quick update. It’s November—time for NaNoWriMo, time for ambitious goals, audacious writing, even if the words themselves at the end will be ever contingent. The words end up being imperfect. Often, in many cases, so imperfect as to be nearly useless. But the aim is to get something done.

On Friday, my task was a “Finishing Friday.” I sent an article that I’ve been fiddling with for a long time. Is it good? No. Is it perfect? No. Am I happy with it? Not really. But I sent it off to a journal. It will get reviewed, sent back, and then I’ll try again. Finishing Friday.

I think this month is going to be something similar: Finishing November. Or, of course, NaNoWriMo. My goal this year? “Finish the Goddamn Book Writing Month.”

I have a small writing group with some friends. One of them, along with me, is adopting some goals. She’s going to write the first three chapters of the book she’s working on.

My goal? I will revise and reorder and magpie my way into a complete draft of the book by the end of the month.

What does that mean? At first blush, that means 90,000 words.

90,000 words is a good-sized academic book. Mien will be ordered, broken into scenes, with narrative and argument woven together, in support of a makeshift way of proceeding.

I don’t mean 90,000 words, perfect. I don’t mean done, for good. I don’t mean tight as I can get it.

But, I do mean that I want to take forward momentum, stop revising, and weave together a book of about 90,000 new words, organized, put into a temporary, contingent, place, lightly polished enough that I can get a feel for the whole things.

That’s the task.

What are the milestones?

Let’s see. First, a word budget can help.

90,000 words is a good-sized academic book, at least according to William Germano (2009, Getting It Published). Let’s break that down: take out 5,000 words for references and another 10,000 words for notes. That gets us to maybe 80,000. Add in some padding both ways. Say, 75,000 words. So, we’re left with getting a draft of about 75,000 words.

I’ve already got 5,000 words polished. So, that means my task for the November is 70,000 words.

I have 10,000 words from finishing Friday. So, that leaves 60,000 words.

60,000 words is the goal. It’s November 3rd today. Lets break 60,000 into 27 days. My goal is to write, revise, or reorder 2,500 words or so each day. Seems audacious. But, it’s doable. I’ve done it before. Quite a few times actually.

Crucially, my task right now is not write 2,500 words. Or at least, not most of the time. Rather, it’s to code, reorganize, gather, bring together, cut up.

The model is more like making a patchwork quilt, than knitting something from scratch.

But, the method is like a magpie. Taking shiny things, bringing them together, attacking them, seeing how they work.

Crucially, at this stage of the game, it’s not much thinking. It’s a manual work. Craft like. Physical labour.

Wish me luck.

I’ll do updates, daily.

Writer’s Diary #50: Become a Writer

Daniel Tubb

Writing is a craft; it takes practice. The evocative power of ethnography to convey understanding requires careful attention to words. Words matter. Notes, fragments and jottings are the opening gambit of anthropology. They give energy to anthropologists’ writing and give us subjects to write about. We often begin with stories, fragments, and ethnographic shorts. These are the building blocks of an anthropological enterprise. But, to write them, requires reflecting on the writing process. So, why not experiment. Play. See what works. Read to. Keep reading. Write about what you read. Publish before you are ready. Write more. Rinse. Repeat. Write is a practice.

Writing as a practice needs to be decolonised. Words are often a black box that undergraduates and graduate students and professors aren’t really taught how to do.

As students, we engage with finished pieces and rarely see the messiness of the writing process. Writing is messy. It’s so so messy. Write. Cut. Revise. Reorder. Move. Writing is done on the page. But, the work can be creative and playful. It need not be a slog. It can be a place to experiment. So, play. Play with with free writing, play with genres, write essays, research notes, book reviews, articles, blog posts, social media posts. Experiment with writing short. Play with writing long. Write to think. Experiment with collaborative and group writing. Experiment in the classroom. See what works. See what doesn’t. Failure is fine. Try again.

What I am trying say is separate the writing from the anxieties and emotions of academic work. Ideas are important, sure. But, for me, they always emerge, truly, on the page. It’s on the page where I can make them do wonders. Where I can test them out. Feel them. Taste them. Let the words sing.

As Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his memoir:

… You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend … I bow to them … I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I run after certain words … They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem … I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word… An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her… They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long … They are very ancient and very new… They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower …
— Pablo Neruda, “The Word,” in Memoirs. Penguin Books, 1978, p. 53.

Ideas that are unwritten cannot be made external, or thought about, or tested, or changed, or made to sing. Instead, they remain amorphous. Always a potential. Write them, reflect on them, rework them. Revise. Writing is fun. As fun, revising.

Don’t say, “What am I going to write about today?” Instead, go back. Ask “What have I already written about?

Try this exercise. Make a slip box. Put int it a collection of notes and essays and pieces of text you’ve already worked on.

Your task?

Engage with what you’ve already prepared. Reread it. Recycle. Work like British Marxiust Eric Hobsbawn did. Develop a willingness to go back into the well of ideas that are yours and rework them. Revise them into new forms. Test them in public. Write lectures, op-eds, letters, articles, book chapters, and books from each other.

Writing becomes a task of preparing for publication, rather than starting carte blanche.

The trick? Not to draft or write every day, but to prepare for publication. Preparing for publication short pieces, long pieces. Book reviews, articles, essays. It’s not the biggest and most complicated piece; it would be small pieces. What’s the smallest piece you could work on? Start with that.

Start with the words. See what comes from them.

I am working on a book that revisits particular moments from Colombia and which, for now, is also about writing. I say for now, because I keep changing the book. At times it’s both. At times, it’s neither.

But, its building blocks are ethnographic shorts. These are moments that let me build stories and place them stories in a wider context and makes more general claims. My method is inductive, relying on detailed description through elaboration and explanation, trying to make the particular speak to the universal. I boil moments down to their essence, return to field notes to expand and explain, develop one moment and link it to the next, supplement my accounts with others reports–newspapers and archives and videos and research. Decide what to focus on and whose voices to hear.

The words matter too, though. Play them.
Punctuate dialogue, consider verb choice, and revise for active voice unless passive voice is preferred. The words matter. I use transitive verbs to drive description and animate the inanimate. Strive for clarity. Write then rewrite to assemble moments and analysis. Consider exposition, character, scenes, narrative voice, point of view, time and rhythm. I move around, change perspectives, take different approaches and revisit the same theme from different directions. I remove myself from the action or take someone else’s point of view. I adopt an omniscient perspective and choose my approach.

Each is an ethnographic choice, a way of writing to describe and make sense of moments. The raw material for this slip box is the field notes, written on the laptop or in one of the journals or notebooks, as the beginning of a long, slow, sustained process of my becoming a writer.

As a graduate student, in the field, in the Chocó, when there was electricity–carried by an unreliable power line through the jungle and across at least two rivers—I filled a database on my computer with field notes. When there was no electricity because of storms, rain and fallen branches, I wrote longhand with a pen and the light of a candle. Writing the notes was part of my learning to write. The book I am working on reflects on that learning because I am convinced that the evocative power of ethnography to give understanding requires careful attention to words.

Writing requires thinking, but it also requires playing, experimenting, and refining different techniques and processes to discover effective ways of communicating.