On the principle that I should write only when I feel like it, I didn’t think I would write today. Too much family, too many mini-crises of my own and others’ making, and too much sludge work to do. But, I was re-reading Friction for class. It’s so good, and the opening gave me some inspiration. I’m sure I’ll revise it a lot, but it’s the start of an idea.
Reading is central to writing.
I knew that, you did to. But, sometimes we forget.
Today, I worked on coding a section for the introduction to Makeshift. It was about 3,000 words, very disorganized, repetitive, and in need of cutting and more focus.
I followed the process John McPhee described in Draft No. 4:
Structur exploded my notes. It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin). It created and named as many new Kedit files as there were codes, and, of course, it preserved intact the original set. In my first I.B.M. computer, Structur took about four minutes to sift and separate fifty thousand words. My first computer cost five thousand dollars. I called it a five-thousand-dollar pair of scissors (John McPhee, Draft No. 4, “Chapter Structure”).
I wrote a script six months ago that extracts coded text from a folder of text files.
I’ve been using the script for months now. It splits a text file into small chunks, based on codes I added. It’s almost a manual process—not too much thought. I coded 3,000 words, split them into 10 files, put them in order, and started revising them. Much easier.
When I ran out of steam, I posted structur.py to GitHub. It’s the first script I’ve ever posted publicly. Perhaps someone will find it useful.
An update on progress today. First, it’s Saturday. It took some effort to get started. Weekend. But as soon as I got going, it’s been steady. Nice. Moving around the document in a bit of a flow state. Picking away at different pieces, listening to Belle and Sebastian. Why write on the weekend? Why not take a break? I know where I am going, and I am not willing to give up the momentum every week.
What did I do? I picked away at the front matter. I adjusted the title and edited a blurb (371 words). Mostly, I edited a piece on makeshift (571 words). Then, I stuck into some notes riffing for the next section, on the epigraph I want to use from Pablo Neruda, which unexpectedly is a way to get into writing about the Orkney Islands, where I was first exposed to Latin America.
This will allow me to get into a bit of an autobiography that I wrote years ago about how I ended up working in Colombia. However, it’s 3,000 words and ought to be about 1,000.
I’m not sure digressing to Scotland and autobiography makes sense, but I read somewhere “Don’t be afraid to digress.”
But, since the book is about tools and a tool we all use to write is a computer, getting to Scotland for a little will let me spend time on my first computer, and learning how to write. It would beep at every spelling error, and had a wonderful pixelated font, not unlike the one I am writing on now.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been drafting in Tinderbox my book Makeshift using the fantastic Departure Mono font. It is a monospaced pixel font, reminiscent of the fonts I used to learn to type on in the 1990s command-line interfaces and that graphical user interface of the Atari ST, which I learned to write on. It’s a glorious, free font. Kudos to its creator Helena Zhang.
I’m a long time user of Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems. A Mac app, that is a Swiss Army knife for notes.
This summer, once again, I’m working on the book. I have hundreds (or more) of pages of notes. Now is a good time to find some order in my madness. For that, I really like Tinderbox’s brand new Gaudi view.
The Tinderbox Gaudí View — the first novel hypertext view in years — tessellates the idea plane to keep more notes in sight. Tinderbox continuously adapts the shape and placement of each note to give each a fair share of the available space, while avoiding unwanted distraction. Gaudí view is especially good for brainstorming and conferences!
It is great for brainstorming, for bringing notes that are related together by dragging them while the other notes slide smoothly out of the way, and for lingering and attending and playing with and getting a feel for the notes.
The thousands of new badges, via SF Symbols, are just really nice to have as well.
For example, this is a sample of the outline of the book.
Update July 22 at 1:50 pm.
I learn from Mark Anderson’s wonderful TBRef that with a force expression in the Guadi view control at the top, it’s easy to get related notes to come together.
$Tags==$Tags(that)
Notes with related tags, are drawn together. Super useful.
I’ve been a long-time user of Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox. At least since 2010, when I first bought a copy to do fieldwork. It’s a tool that I keep coming back to, even if I leave from time to time. Every time I come back, I am impressed, once again, by its steady, evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary improvements. Mark Bernstein has created a brilliant, powerful piece of software for knowledge workers. I think it’s criminally underused by anthropologists. But, that’s for another post. I’ve long thought of it as a Swiss army knife for notes. But that doesn’t really do justice to the software. Do check [Tinderbox] out.
For now, I just wanted to call attention to one of the little changes made over time that Mark has worked into Tinderbox, which make things just nicer.
Between the version I was using, and what I upgraded to yesterday, a small change, is that it is now possible to make the left-hand pane (map/outline/etc any arbitrary width. Before, there was a minimum size. It’s a change that perhaps most users will probably never notice.
But, I write books. And, often, when I am in the thick of writing, I want to make the text pane on the right as big as possible, and make the left hand pane as narrow as possible. This wasn’t possible to do to quite as narrow as I wanted before. It now is. Thank you, Mark. Just one more of the steady refinements that makes Tinderbox indispensable.
Here I am, once again, with my rules. Rules for writing. Temporary ones, mind. They never last more than a month. But, that’s good enough. Good enough to get some momentum. I know the book’s structure. I know the argument. With a little effort, I could make headway. My sabbatical is coming to an end, so why not finish on a high? So I’ve turned to rules.
I wrote them.
I have had some success with rules in the past.
To start my first book, I had a writing challenge with a colleague. To finish it, I did a writing challenge with other colleagues. Both worked. I have tried this other times, and it has not worked. No matter.
This time, the rules are my own. Just me, this time. The rules I will adopt for the next month, starting now.
The rules? The rules are not just about writing this time. Writing is part of it, but writing is an embodied activity. It is a thing we do in the world. Therefore, the rules are for writing and to be in a good place for writing.
Writing is often seen as a pursuit of perfection—the perfect sentence, paragraph, or article. But perfection is the result, not the method. Perfectionism tells us little about the process of writing. Instead, the secret is to embrace imperfection, and approach writing as a makeshift endeavour. It is something cobbled together. Words and ideas are improvised. Perfection, if it is to come, emerges out of an iterative imperfect process. This is the essence of what I think of as makeshift writing. A mode that is temporary, contingent, ever good enough. The point is not to achieve premature perfection, but to work into the words and let the ideas develop, on the page.
Too often, as writers, planning becomes paralyzing. What is the argument? What is the outline? What is the conceptual insight? Research becomes endless. So much so, that it impedes writing. To write this way, is to fall into a trap. The trap is the idea that a piece of writing comes out perfect, and that it must follow a strict, logical series of steps. The goal might be such a piece of writing. But, the getting there is far messier.
The makeshift writing I have in mind is a practical, embodied labor. It happens not in the realm of the perfect analytical structure and theoretical contribution. But in the countless moments of revisions on the page. To write through makeshift is to embrace messiness. A call for makeshift writing is a call to write, to get the words down on the page, and then to improve on them. To iterate. Makeshift is a riposte against the idea that words emerge perfect.
As an anthropologist, maybe one way to approach writing as craftwork is to approach it as an ethnographer might. To think about writing is to embrace an autoethnographic observation of ones practice. It is to consider writing as a process. As a labor practice. To think of writing as labor is to think of it less as intellectual labor, but as a practical, embodied labor of the countless steps and interventions made as a writer. Could focusing on this labor, on the actual practice of writing and fixing verbs and revising tens and making small changes and looking for repeated words and all the other little tricks of a writer’s toolbox help demystify the process?
This process of writing is, for me, ever makeshift. The trick is to begin then to make changes. To be being willing to cobble something imperfect and then improvise and iterate to improve it. To bring together ideas in unexpected ways, and then to work and rework them until they make sense. Makeshift is about approaching the words not as if they were the pursuit of perfection, but to do so as a practical kind of craft work that can be honed through imperfect, iterative hard work. Makeshift writing is a way to get the words on the page, to keep working with them, to keep moving, even in the face of imperfection. It’s about embracing the process, the labor, the craft of writing itself, and it is about how, through this embrace, that something good enough begins to emerge. Something that is meaningful and true, and just maybe, near perfect.
Today was my second day running. Today’s lesson? Take it slow. Appreciate the small victories. Not every day running needs to be your best effort.
Writing is the same. Not every session should be hard, or the fastest, or done at full tilt at hundred percent. Instead, it is in steady rhythm that the words emerge. Words come out of the accumulation of practice. It is through steady practice that, over time, leads to a certain sort of skill. There is no need for every piece of writing or day of work to be perfect and completed under duress. The challenge is to resist the urge to complete it big and fast. Resist. This takes effort. It leaves us exhausted and unable to contemplate doing anything like it again. The lesson? Start, but don’t rush. Be gentle. Don’t finish on full. Let the words come easy. Let them be.
Savour the minor wins.
This morning, with the mist over the hills, I went for a run for the first time in a few months. Last night, I started in on Lindsay A. Freeman’s lovely little book Running, from Duke’s series on Practices. Since I’ve not run in a few months, I decided to follow a training app and start at the beginning with the first one. It was a recovery session. I went slow. Easy. I was able to hold conversation. I held a lot back.
As I ran, for not a very long time, it struck me writing can be the same.
Too often, we write ourselves spent. We write ourselves to excess and exhaustion. Then, we stop for days on end. What if the way to approach words has more in common with running than it is usually given credit for? Haruki Murakami, of course, thinks about the connection between words and steps his memoir. It’s not a new connection. But, it is worth repeating. Not every sessions on a computer should be a mad sprint to the end. Maybe nothing should a mad sprint.
Go steady. Go slow. Don’t forget to breathe.