Writer’s Diary

Writer’s Diary #11: The Synapses of Writing

Daniel Tubb

As part of moving this blog to WordPress, I’m going through old posts. This one, from 22 November 2013, stuck with me:

Last night at a party, I chatted writing and rewriting with a friend visiting from Vancouver. She freelances as a copy editor. I told her about On Writing Well, and she echoed many of Zinsser’s suggestions—be short, use as few words as possible, and revise. She suggested an approach new to me: Look for hidden verbs by getting rid of ‘To Be.’ This morning revising a section on small-scale mining, I find the technique works well.

So, what is writing, at least for me, if it isn’t an exercise in applying various tricks and techniques like this? Revising to remove the verb ‘to be,’ removing the first person, eliminating the passive voice, cutting words, revising again, cutting, shortening—these are all tools.

Writing a first draft is one thing. But turning that first draft into something that sings and stringing it together with other texts into a longer piece is another. Part of the trick is the idea and theory. But, much of the trick, at least in the way I approach matters, is an exercise in the not-so-systematic application of a whole series of ticks and tricks.

Some I know and can explain, some are intuitive, some are embodied, and some are technical. My writing style, if I have one, seems to me to emerge in part from the application of these different techniques to writing. For example, a few days ago, I wrote about using online grammar tools—the serial application of tools: cut, edit out, rephrase, rewrite, add things, expand, read aloud, print out and mark up with a pencil. Over time, as the

Parul Sehgal describes George Saunders’ notes on writing in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

I’m making the book sound revoltingly technical. It isn’t. Saunders lives in the synapses—he looks at all the minute and meaningful decisions that produce a sentence, a paragraph, a convincing character. He offers one of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of the writer that I’ve ever read — that state of heightened alertness, lightning-quick decisions.

These tools and techniques, which I appreciate and use, are my grist for those tiny, meaningful decisions that I deploy in the synapses of writing.

Writer’s Diary #10: Writing is like Flying, You have to throw yourself at the ground and miss

Daniel Tubb

I used to over-plan each chapter—it had to be perfect, do everything, and be worked out in advance.

For Makeshift I’m more modest, each chapter is one thing done well, in 6,000 words or so. Rather than trying to do too much, each chapter is short and does one thing. A scene, linked to analysis, woven into an argument. Together, these will create the book.

The first chapter begins with a scene of me lying on the linoleum, sweating, hot, unsure of how to proceed and trying to work it all out in advance. There is too much information and no easy solution. My mistake was trying to work it out in advance. The solution? Write the book. Do the work. Think on the page.

The trick to writing is not thinking about writing to much. It’s like the trick to flying, that Douglas Adams describes in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.”
—The Guide.

I might rephrase:

There is an art to writing, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the page and write. … Clearly, it is this second part, the writing, that present the difficulties.

The Guide goes on:

“You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.”

I suggest:

You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about writing, or about the book, or about how much it’s going to suck if you fail to finish.

In other words, to write, you absolutely cannot think to much about the fact you’re writing. Writing is something done in the world, embodied, an act best performed without too much cerebral activity.

That’s the essence of the book’s argument: Writing is done, not contemplated.

I think, with some serious dedication this week, there is no reason I can’t finish the chapter, and move onto the next. But, of course, I can’t think about it.

Writer’s Diary #09: On Freewriting a First Draft

Daniel Tubb

For the first time in a long time, I woke up this morning and started writing at 5:30. It felt good. With a cup of coffee in hand, I sat at the kitchen table as the sun came up and the birds sang. I began working on the first draft of some notes that had come to me the day before and the day before that while I was occupied with other tasks.

I had wanted to write these ideas down the day before yesterday, but I let them linger as I went to bed. My concept for the introduction to the book is that writing is an apprenticeship. Just as my first book was an apprenticeship in gold mining, this book is an auto-apprenticeship in writing.

So I sat down at the keyboard and wrote freely, without forethought, without editing. I followed the method Peter Elbow outlines in Writing Without Teachers. At times, I do this longhand, but this morning I used an electronic typewriter, a rather embarrassing and expensive FreeWriter Smart Typewriter by Astrohaus.

After about five minutes, I had a very rough draft—raw material to work with.

Writers often think and talk about writing as a cerebral activity. But I’ve come to see it as a movement between the cerebral and the use of different tools. It’s as much a cerebral process as it is a manual one. Here, tools matter. Gabriel García Márquez, in his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, describes writing as a kind of carpentry, which requires a lot of technique and craft to hide the joinery. It’s a fitting metaphor. Carpenters use tools, and so do I.

I created a draft through freewriting; applied automatic copy and style editing; revised iteratively and intuitively; edited automatically; revised once more iteratively and intuitively.

Specifically, ChatGPT was a copy editor, DeepL Writer’s beta writing app changes some words, then ProWritingAid fixed grammar and style, and then I had a piece of text to revise using George Saunders, Swim in a Pond in the Rain idea of making iterative and intuitive edits on the page. That is, each pass, I made a myriad of small changes, based on gut feelings. After doing this three or four times, I had this draft, which I left it for a few days, before one more pass. I took screenshots, to illustrate the process. Crucially, automatic editors are helpful, but automatic writer are not. There is a distinction, I’ll write about sometime.

Draft #1: Freewrite

I free wrote the following, on a Freewrite Smart Typewriter by Astrohaus, an ridiculously expensive electronic typewriter, which, like a typewriter, has little distractions.

Note the typos.

Draft 1

Draft #2: Use Chat GPT as a copy editor

I pay for ChatGPT 4, and used the following prompt ti copy edit that first drafts. Here, ChatGPT 4 has replaced my own labour of fixing typos.

Imagine yourself as an AI copy editor, proof reader, and substantive editor. and I will provide you with a text between double quotes, and without making substantive changes, can you spell check, grammar check, punctuate, and split into paragraphs at logical places, and include other revisions in the body of the text in square brackets. Please do this using markdown, in a code block: “…”

Since, I am always concerned about ChatGPT inventing text I didn’t write, I compare it text carefully to the original, in BBEdit using the compare text function. The text is the same, but copy edited.

Draft 2

Draft #3: Use DeepL’s Write

There, I turn to DeepL Write’s AI editor, that will suggest stylistic revisions. They’re good.

Draft 3

Draft #4 – ProWriting Aid

Next, I turn to ProWritingAid, and accept all its style and grammar suggestions.

Draft 4

Draft #5 – Revise with a reader over your shoulder

Drawing on George Saunders book, I undertook a process of reading and as I read, revising as I went intuitively and iteratively.

Draft 5

Draft 6 – Automatic Copy Editing

Then back to ChatGPT, DeepL, ProWriting Aid, then revising through iterative intuition.

Draft 6

Draft 7 – Revise intuitively and iteratively

More intuitive revision.

Draft 7

Draft 8 – Automatic Copy Editing

More copy editing.

Draft 8

Draft 9 – Final Pass

Finally, a few days later, I revised, fixed the images, corrected the URLs, and gave it all a few more passes, without any automatic copy editing.

Done.

Writer’s Diary #08: Notes on Becoming a Writer

Daniel Tubb

My notes on Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (English, 192 pages, Tarcher, 1981). First posted on December 12, 2012, and revised June 21, 2023.

It’s five in the morning, with coffee in hand and sleep still on my mind. What to write? How can I encapsulate the feeling of fieldwork in mere words? As anthropologists, writing is our primary task, but sometimes, words are hard to come by. This is my morning ritual, writing twenty pages. We, as academics, are wordsmiths, writers to the core. Our tools of the trade are notebooks, pens and paper, and laptops.

For most of my adult life, I have been trying to articulate my thoughts into words for others. This endeavour has taken different forms: as a University student, sometimes as a newspaper editor, as a blogger, and increasingly, as an anthropologist. We write about research, we discuss the work of others.

As dawn is an hour away, my pen is already engaged in the task of meaning-making. Anna Tsing’s advice to ‘write early and write regularly’ is a ritual I’m trying to adopt. Write at five o’clock in the morning and force yourself to put pen to paper. It’s a process where words flow freely some mornings, but on others, like today, the journey is tortuous and tedious. My words feel irrelevant and, I fear, ordinary. My prose plods anxiously with little substance offered.

One thing that often goes unsaid is that when we begin fieldwork, we are not just becoming anthropologists but also writers. Writers draft the text, employing various tools and tricks of the trade. There are rhythms to our work that make it bearable. Our prose embodies our life, our sweat, and our tears. Writing is what I learned to do in the field, and if research methods are seldom taught, writing even less so.

Our evenings are often spent making sense of the morning, or our mornings trying to combine words to make sense of experiences, rumours, practices, and suspicions. Writing forms the essence of anthropological sense-making. The hermeneutic circle of life is the task of fieldwork. We are, in fact, novelists, albeit constrained by truth, fact, and reality. Our writing tasks are no less challenging.

Last week, I read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. Three pieces of advice resonated:

  1. Write early and write every day. Capitalise on the moments of creativity that dawn provides. Cultivate this time, use it judiciously. First thing, every day. Pay close attention to when these morning sessions yield the most, and try to replicate the conditions of those successful ones.

  2. Cultivate a rigorous mind. Not only should you train yourself to write early, but also designate a specific time to write – a time that invites your creative side. As Brande suggests, “Set a time, say 12:30, and write for half an hour.” Regardless of the circumstances, commit to writing.

  3. Avoid consuming other people’s work, discussing your writing, reading the newspaper, watching movies, and going to the theatre. While Brande would likely disapprove of blogs and Twitter as distractions, her point is that writers thrive on an internal dialogue—our conversation with ourselves. This dialogue can be cultivated with mundane and repetitive tasks but can be destroyed by words, read or heard.

The last piece of advice is the hardest to follow. I often find myself reaching for the radio, the internet, a newspaper, or even a cereal box every few hours. However, in the last few weeks, as I have adhered to this advice, the results on my thesis draft have been remarkable.

Writer’s Diary #07: On Starting

Daniel Tubb

How do you start writing each day? Getting started is often the hardest part—whether it is a book, chapter, article, section, paragraph or project. Procrastination can take as much time as the task itself. This is especially true with a writing project.

There is no magic bullet, but I remember learning a lot from reading and rereading Dorothea Brande’s [Becoming a Writer (1934)](https://www.amazon.ca/Becoming-Writer-Dorothea-Brande/dp/9389157196/ref=sr_1_2? crid=1QMUBDD68ZTEB&keywords=dorothea+brandt+becoming+a+writer&qid=1687262706&sprefix=dorothea+brandt+becoming+a+writer%252Caps%252C137&sr=8- 2&_encoding=UTF8&tag=danieltubb-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=70052a0d7f212c7c23ef20d57c7a06d1&camp=15121&creative=330641). Although it was written in the 1930s, its advice is often timeless.

One is to set aside time to write, and make a commitment to write at that time. It’s a method of being able to sit down and work on a schedule. At times, especially getting going, I’ve found this advice useful. But now I am more convinced that the trick is to write when you sit down to write, and then to make sitting down a habit. A routine. It takes commitment to get back on the page, but it’s a commitment to cultivate the habit of sitting and, as Brande suggests, to write when you set out to write.

This advice is less about scheduling—which, frankly, does not work for me unless other people are involved—and more about the commitment to do the work when the time comes to do the work.

That’s it. Write when it’s time to write and don’t write when it’s not.

Writer’s Diary #06: Writing and Routine

Daniel Tubb

Frankly, a challenge many of us face as writers is finding the time to do the work. Over the past ten days, with travel, students and the urgent tasks that have arisen, it has seemed impossible to find the time.

This morning, however, I am back at this Writer’s Diary. Part of the problem is that there are days when the routine changes drastically. Writing a book, I think, is an exercise in doing the work over and over again.

My father is building a house. He works on it almost every day, most of the day, except at weekends when he does other things. That’s his work. He doesn’t check emails during the day; he doesn’t use the phone; he doesn’t attend meetings; nor does he get pulled in a dozen different directions by emergencies that arise. Instead, he works on the house. The works has its own physicality, rhythm and routine.

As a professor with small children and a plethora of activities, the challenge is to find the time. My father’s method is inspiring. Do the thing. That’s it.

Writer’s Diary #05: Write every day, maybe not?

Daniel Tubb

A lot of writing advice for academics emphasizes the importance of writing every day. I am thinking, for example, of Paul J. Silvia’s [How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing] (https://www.amazon.ca/How-Write-Lot-Practical-Productive/dp/1433829738). Sometimes, I’ve tried to follow such advice—keep a journal, write daily, keep track of how much I write, forget my excuses, make the time, etc. Such an approach has its place. But a new book I’m working on takes a very different approach. As much as there’s a choice to write a lot, there’s also a choice not to write.

If a lot of advice boils down to “don’t break the chain” and write every day, make it a habit, there are some days that this makes no sense.

I’m about to go on a trip to New York City with some students to share our work. We’ll be driving all day and, frankly, I don’t think I’ll find the time to write. The approach that seems to come out of a lot of self-help literature for academic writers is to find the time, come hell or high water. Get up earlier, stay up later, or squeeze it in somehow. But sometimes this is just not possible.

For next week, I plan the opposite: a conscious decision not to write. Sometimes doing nothing is the right decision, and with moving house, holidays, some weekends, the start of term and other urgent matters, doing nothing is a better approach.

Write every day, unless it’s not wise.

Writer’s Diary #04: Getting Back on the Bus

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday, I fell off the writing bus. I didn’t write anything. After staying up too late writing the night before, I slept in. Instead of journaling and working on the book, as planned, I found myself distracted by one false digital emergency after another.

Today, without childcare, I’m planning to find time to write later in the day. But for now, I want to reflect on the idea that writing a book is an exercise in returning to the work, again and again.

A bad day, or even a terrible week, doesn’t matter. Writing exists in the here and now. If things don’t go as planned, the solution is to return to the writing.

I’ve come to see writing as similar to meditation and breath work. In some forms of meditation, the goal is to focus one’s attention on the breath. As the mind inevitably wanders after a few seconds or minutes, the task is return to the breath.

Writing follows a similar pattern. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it doesn’t. You write, then you drift. Getting upset only exacerbates the situation. The key is to come back to the words, just as one would return to breath.

Every day, I make a concerted effort to write. But, there are days, like yesterday, when it just doesn’t work out.

On those days, the solution is wait and come back the next day. Or next week. Start over, again and again.

Writer’s Diary #03: Linking Habits

Daniel Tubb

This morning, I wrote for 5 minutes while the coffee was brewing, and another 5 minutes while I drank it. I got an early start, and wrote at the typewriter. Inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits idea of linking a habit (coffee) with something you want to do (write this Writer’s Diary), I wrote this. The idea, which stuck in my mind when I read Clear’s book years ago, is of making things one wants to do stickier, and more likely to be done, by linking them to established habits.

The first thing I do every morning is drink a cup of coffee. Could coffee be used to create a habit of writing a journal, planning the day, posting an article, going for a run, and working on a book? It seemed ambitious, but this morning, it felt promising.

This approach to writing this diary raised a question: If I want to write more regularly, in this diary, is it better to work by hand, or to type, or to dictate? While there is no one way to write, I’ve found the methods are different. For me, writing by hand is slower, more fluid. Writing on a computer is faster, but I think and edit more as I go. Voice dictation, which I sometimes use while walking, is a good way to get an idea down, but it’s not so good to develop an idea. Each medium of writing is different, but whether I’m typing, handwriting, or dictating, I think linking to a coffee habit is promising.

This morning, I typed.

This evening, I revised.

Writer’s Diary #02: About Nutgrafs

Daniel Tubb

There is a concept in journalism known as the nutgraf, a portmanteau of the words “nutshell” and “paragraph.” It’s a paragraph in a news story, placed near the beginning, that summarizes what’s coming and explains the main point or purpose of the story.

So what does the ‘nutgraf’ of a book look like? It’s a paragraph, placed early on, that summarizes the book’s main purpose, argument, and structure.

My first book had two. The first, in the preface, was 450 words in and 162 words long.

How does a gold rush shape the lives of those who live alongside it? There is no single answer. Dwelling on the hopes and the dreams, the successes and the failures, the strategies and the tactics of those after el oro in the most impoverished region of Latin America’s second-most inequitable country tells unexpected stories of the production, accumulation, and transformation of value. I offer contradictory stories in three parts. In the first, gold is a high-value export commodity, which makes panning the core of a rural livelihood strategy and a complement to subsistence household production. In the second, the metal is embedded in a cash economy, which offers a way for miners from the Chocó and elsewhere to attempt to accumulate a little cash. In the third, gold is part of global legal and extralegal flows of capital, in which value undergoes processes of transformation, rather than creation. Together these three parts, which each consist of two chapters, create a study of gold embedded in informal and precarious shifting livelihood strategies.

The second nutgraph was in the Introduction, 450 words in, and 262 words long.

This book considers the ways Antonio and others experienced the boom times of a gold rush and the ways that this gold rush was embedded in wider legal and extralegal economies. It would be easy to fall into a narrative found in much writing about the commodification of nature and natural resource extraction, but I strive for a different complexity by weaving together stories about the lives of artisanal and small-scale miners and those who live in the communities where these miners work. Gold enables some forms of autonomous livelihood, even as it disables others. Mines create freedom and unfreedom; they are at once destructive and constructive. The conditions of extraction and the environments affected and the miners themselves matter at least as much as the mere presence of mining. This book offers insight on the contradictory ways that gold both liberates and subjugates as mines become sites of exploitation and emancipation. What results  is a twofold investigation: First, stories of lived experience drawing on the lives of a handful of miners on artisanal and small-scale gold mines. Second, stories of money laundering through gold by cocaine traffickers and speculation on mining projects by multinational corporations wherein gold facilitates other economic processes. These accounts, nevertheless, remain stories from the margins, because their setting is the poorest and most discriminated department in Colombia and because the stories focus on those who make a living through “precarious” and “informal” shifting livelihood strategies—strategies which themselves offer a certain freedom, especially when compared to the nonexistent alternatives.

Both are examples of a certain conciseness I was striving for in Shifting Livelihoods: they appeared early, were short, and explained the purpose and outline of the entire book. Each took, I suspect, weeks to write.

I am working on the introduction to my new book about Makeshift, and today I focused on the paragraph, which comes after the opening scene. As I thought about it, I thought it should be at the bottom of page two, about 350 words in, and about 300 words long. This paragraph should flow from the first scene, which I think of as an “ethnographic short,” and connect to the next. For the short, I’m on the floor, lost, trying to work out the purpose for a new writing project.

My task, for an hour this morning, was to revise a paragraph into something under 300 words that makes the point of the book and ends with a transition to the next section. I failed. While I am familiar with the formula, I ended up with 1,000 words.

This means either:

  • Makeshift doesn’t need a 300-word nutgraf;
  • Makeshift needs a 300-word nutgraf, and I need to move the 1,000 word on the purpose of the book to come later.

I’ll tackle this decision, first thing, tomorrow. I suspect the wright answer is the second.