Writer’s Diary #35 – Craft Work, Detail Work, Steady Work

August 2, 2023October 19, 2024 Daniel Tubb

This morning I woke up at 5:45 and worked from 6 until about 8:45.

It was another good morning. I stopped when it got hard. But the work itself was very manual. It was craftsmanship—revising and cutting two sections into something good enough. When I finished the first section, I realized it fit better at the end of the chapter, so I moved it to the unwritten conclusion.

Then I turned to revising the second section, which I’d written three times in four rambling paragraphs. I cut it down to two, half the words, and nothing repeated.

Tomorrow I will move on to the next section of the chapter. Again, I will rewrite, combine, shorten, and polish. Later I’ll worry about its order and structure.

The work felt like knitting sentences or manual labor. I didn’t use tools. Just the keyboard.

Does it work? No. Change it. Is it better? Maybe. Keep going.

Changes so fast they’re almost automatic, made with hands on the keyboard. I write until I’m tired, and a piece feels finished. It is temporarily done, but only until the next time. Tomorrow, I will rework something else.

There was a moment that I felt overwhelmed. I had started a new piece, but didn’t know where it was going. I kept cutting, revising, deleting, adjusting, and fiddling. I fiddled with the text, and as I fiddled, I found my point and finished the edits.

Writing can sometimes just be the accumulation of words and slight changes, repeated, over and over.

If you asked me today and yesterday where I was going, what my point was, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me today, I still couldn’t. But I know I’m closer. I know that by the end of this morning, I will have arrived somewhere. A place from which I can start again tomorrow.

The work is craft work. Detailed work. Steady work.

Writer’s Diary #17: On Naps

July 5, 2023July 14, 2023 Daniel Tubb

This morning I revised two posts for this Writer’s Diary, rearranged the notes in the book of fragments, rewrote the first two fragments, and then tried to work on the makeshift book, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Looking at the introduction, and felt lost, not knowing where to begin. So I sent a chapter to my tablet and read it in bed. As I read, I saw areas that needed work. But I didn’t take notes. I was just reading. Soon, I fell asleep, then I awoke, read the news, slept some more, and thought about the chapter.

Sleeping is writing.

Later, I woke up, made a sandwich, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write. For an hour and a half, I revised and revised and revised, making small and large changes, tweaking and tightening all the while. Is it done? No. Is it better? Maybe. But that’s not the point. I lost track of time and almost hypnotized myself while working, and in the end, today was a great day of writing.

In part, because I feel asleep.

After all, writing can be fun. There is joy in the little, little decision that in the end creates a piece of writing. There is joy in a nap to think about it all.

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

June 26, 2023October 19, 2024 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