nanowrimo

It’s 2 p.m. I’m driving home from the office without my computer. I got to campus at 8:30, went to a coffee shop, and wrote intensely until about 11:00. Then I went to my office, did some more, had lunch, worked a little bit with a student on a grant, then did some more writing on the book. I’m done for the day, and it’s only 2:30, which is good because I’m zonked. I’ll go home for a hike. It feels like cheating, stopping early. But, it’s already been a six-hour day of editing, cutting, quoting, polishing, revising, and rewriting. More manual than intellectual, really. The book’s argument is that writing can be a form of more manual labor, after all. The section, I picked at for years. Maybe five years? It’s an about fieldwork and feelings of anxiety, of being a spy, an outsider, out of place, doing something where they don’t belong. It’s a common feeling, I suspect, for anthropologists. It’s also about cane toads, gossips, tattletales, snitches, and spies. Its now 800 words or so. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but because it’s tight, it’s dense.

At the end of the day, before checking out, I did some rough notes for tomorrow using voice dictation. It’s about thinking about ethnography as both an extractive and an artisanal endeavor. Tomorrow I’ll tighten up the rest of what I’ve already written and then do a first pass on the notes. Friday I’ll finish the whole chapter. It will be about 7,000 words.

I have no idea how that will count for NaNoWriMo records. I’ve been doing a lot in the last few weeks, but haven’t updated or tracked word counts. The election derailed me a lot. Then, I did a bit of programming. Today and Friday, were pretty good writing days.

Today’s brief update: I went into my Cane Toad section and reviewed it. I worked on structure and coded my really rough notes into a draft outline. This meant putting pieces about the same thing together. I structur. Tomorrow, I’ll tighten each section down to remove all repetition, get the tense correct, make it short as possible. Wednesday, I’ll step back and look at the whole.

While I was at it, I put into order the section on places where I did fieldwork, and describe the work of writing in the field.

In total, I have 6,000 words that are in a tentative order. Is it a perfect? Good? No. Will it change, yes. But, it gives me something to work on tomorrow. I will take each small section of maybe 150 or 200 words and edit them individually.

Once I’ve done that, I can review the whole and see what I have on Thursday.

So far, 6,200 words. A win. I’d say. It’ll give me 2,500 words a day, give or take. On track for NaNoWriMo, I hope. But, word counts are somewhat silly if I think too hard about them. But, since my goal is not a word count, but a draft in a few weeks, it feels okay.

Update on Today’s Writing.

I was at my mum’s and started flipping through Kyo Maclear’s book Unearthing, about plants, gardens, and tangled roots. On the third page, there’s a line that left me wondering. In it, Maclear reflects on how her own failure to grow plants transferred in 2019. She describes the crucial change:

“When I stopped attributing every little event to my own doing and realized I did not have control (the opposite of a storyteller’s mindset), the plants began to grow” (p. 3).

I know the feeling, but I feel it with words.

I know the art of writing involves an attempt at control. Part of why words can be so torturous is because we’re trying to make them perfect. But in this book, I’m increasingly convinced that the trick is to give up control—to let things come, to recognize that there is agency in the words, in the fingers, and in the process that isn’t merely a reflection of the mind’s control. The result of all this hard work reads like something that comes out of control, but the output has little resemblance to the process.

I wrote a section on this. It’s a bit like Peter Elbow’s metaphor of “growing and cooking.” One grows a garden, where things are messy and uncontrolled. Later, one cooks a meal. But even in cooking, there’s a lot that is out of control. Or, maybe, much of cooking is based on practical knowledge. Certainly, this is De Certeau’s point. Writing is both embodied and practical, of course. The point, it’s not fully controlled.

With all that written in shitty first draft rough sketch, I then turned to a section on cane toads. I’d written five versions of a cane toad hopping into the room I slept in. I worked to cut and revise them into one canonical section.

My point?

Cane toads in Colombia are also known as sapos. Sapo is a colloquial term for snitch and spy, often spoken with venom. Sapos often die young in a country at war. Is writing ethnography an exercise in getting into places one does not belong? Are we not professional strangers, but spies, tattletales, snitches? Anthropologists are often mistaken for spies. But, I don’t think that feels fair. Yet, it does reflex a lot of our professional anxieties.

All in all, with about an hour’s work, little abstract thought, and certainly not much planning, I wrote 800 new words on writing as gardening without control. I also revised and condensed several drafts I’d written over the years bout a cane toad into a tighter scene of about 3,000 words. So, let’s say, Day Three of NaNoWriMo, I got about 4,000 words done. Makes up for not really doing much yesterday.