writing - soulcruzer

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You …

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere to stand, then asks whether you might look sideways.

This can feel dreamy at first. Then you realise the dreaminess has a method. Solnit slows the reader down long enough for the usual boundaries to become less convincing. Inner life and public life. Geography and memory. A walk taken alone and the larger histories written into the land beneath the feet. She lets them mingle until you can no longer quite separate one from the other.

For a mind that likes to move laterally, this is a relief.

So much writing now arrives already ashamed of taking up time. It declares its point, breaks it into obedient little units, and offers a summary in case you have a more important tab waiting. Solnit’s prose makes another wager. It trusts that a digression can be part of the thing itself. It trusts that the route towards an insight may matter as much as the insight.

Deleuze and Guattari used the image of the rhizome: a root system that spreads sideways rather than growing from a single trunk. No proper beginning. No clean hierarchy. A potato does not look much like a tree, but it knows something about survival, multiplication, and finding another way through the soil.

Solnit’s paragraphs often work like that. They wander, return, take an unexpected turning, and then land somewhere that feels both surprising and inevitable. You don’t feel that she has lost the thread. You feel like the thread was never a straight line in the first place.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost understands this better than most books. Losing your way is not merely an error to correct. It can be the condition in which another kind of seeing becomes possible. The familiar map stops working. You have to look up. You have to notice where you are.

Perhaps that is why her work feels so companionable to anyone trying to think their way out of a narrow life-script. Her prose does not demand efficiency from the reader. It offers permission to follow an association, to linger with a contradiction, to walk the longer road without having to defend the choice.

There are thoughts that only arrive when we stop treating every detour as a failure of direction.

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It’s constantly …

The brain is a meaning-making machine. It’s constantly trying to connect dots, predict what happens next, and turn scattered information into a coherent shape.

When everything is already explained, the pattern is complete. The brain can relax or get bored.

But when there is uncertainty like a missing piece, an unanswered question, a strange detail, or an unfinished story, the brain becomes more alert. It “leans forward” psychologically, searching for the pattern that will resolve the tension.

The uncertainty creates an open loop. We want closure, so we keep reading, watching, listening, or exploring.

In writing, this means you don’t always need to explain everything immediately. Sometimes the most compelling sentence is the one that creates a gap in the reader’s understanding:

I had walked down that street hundreds of times. This was the first time I noticed the door.

Now the reader’s brain starts working: What door? Why hadn’t he seen it? What is behind it?

I keep thinking about the idea of writing …

I keep thinking about the idea of writing an ebook that doesn’t perpetuate the expectation that a book needs to be read in a straight line. I know this isn’t a new idea; that’s what the hypertext movement was all about. But the idea of doing this resurfaced for me again this morning while reading Phil Smith’s book on mythogeography. He has embedded hyperlinks in the ebook that encourage you to go off on tangents.

I like the idea of a reader following whatever catches their attention and being able to move through the text by curiosity rather than obedience.

This interests me because I think many people buy books and never finish them. Maybe part of the problem is the old expectation that a book must be read from cover to cover. We inherit that model from school, from print culture, and from the physical shape of the book itself. But not every book needs to work that way.

Fiction often depends on sequence, especially when it follows a classical story arc. But essays, field notes, philosophical fragments, personal reflections, guides, and idea-books might be better served by a looser structure. A hyperlinked ebook could invite the reader to wander, return, skip, loop, and discover.

The point wouldn’t be to make the book easier in a shallow sense. It would be to make the book more alive to the way people actually read now: dipping in, following associations, chasing questions, and making their own route through the material.

A book like this wouldn’t simply contain links. It would be written as a linked experience. The hyperlinks would become part of the architecture of the text. They would let the reader participate in the journey rather than just consume the sequence chosen by the author.

Maybe the ebook is closer to a living map than just an electronic copy of a physical book.

Too Many Voices

I needed some inspiration today. I haven’t been happy with my voice lately. There’s too much noise in my head and too many voices competing with each other for attention. It’s kind of like the shell game, my voice is the pea underneath one of the shells, and no matter how confident I am that I’ve picked the right shell, I come up empty (unlike the cat).

On the very top shelf, I found Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It’s been at least 12 years since I spent any time with this book. I remember liking it at the time, but the only thing I remember from reading it is the story behind the title.

Her brother had a report due about birds. He had had all summer to write it but waited until the day before it was due to start working on it. As you would imagine, he was pretty stressed about it. He had all these books on birds, but he couldn’t get the words to flow.

Their dad, who was a writer, whispered to him by way of encouragement, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” That piece of writing advice stuck with me. Sentence by sentence and eventually you’ll get there.

The other bit of advice I remember is the idea of writing a shitty first draft because that’s the only way to get to a good second draft and a terrific third draft.

Anne’s voice in the introduction is exactly what I needed to hear today.

About her father:

I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.

Like her father:

Throughout my childhood, I believe that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organising it in my head.

I can relate to this:

I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in this places and time to which books took me…I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen.

I think I’ll spend the rest of the weekend with this book. Maybe it’ll help me get my voice back.

I was struck

I never know how this works to say he is a great man means what exactly? What makes one great? Not wars, at least not according to Yoda.

“I was struck from the very beginning that there is a totally independent and new voice in writing.”
Werner Herzog on Harmony Korine

And yet I can’t understand his scribbles, but at least I am having a cracking good time in this crazy mixed up town. Sleep wants me, but I don’t want sleep. It’s overrated at best, so I resist.

Channelling My Inner Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was a cool cat, at least in his prose. I adore him above all the other Beat Generation icons. His words speak directly to the soul of who I am. On the Road, a classic yes, but give me The Dharma Bums or the Book of Sketches to really get me going.

I’m calling on you now Jack. I want to feel the extraordinary in the ordinary, experience the wind howling across the fog drenched landscape as I walk mile after mile, drifting, searching (for what, for anything but certainty).

People kept asking you how you did what you did, so you laid it for them, and me, in way only you could.

Like Ginsberg did when writing Howl, I’ll post these on my wall:

Thanks for these Jack.

“Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.”

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The durable stuff

I stumbled upon the “stock and flow” conversation again today. Quite timely really as I’ve been reevaluating where and on what I spend my time on when I’m on the Net (actually as I wrote that last bit, I thought, hold on, the Net is always on…am I ever really off of the Net (as my watch just dinged me to let me know I have a new notification, but that is a discussion for another, I think).

Robin Sloan, the guy who wrote the original post, defines stock and flow as:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

*stock and flow btw is an economic concept that Robin adopted as a metaphor for writing in the connected world.

As Robin writes:

Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

That’s the situation I’m trying to avoid – having no stock – because I spend way too much time creating flow. And there’s a good reason for that. Flow is quick, as quick as a retweet or a share. Creating stock, on the other hand, takes time. Time to sit and think. Time to digest and make sense. Time to craft the sense-making into something readable to others. And, finally, time to share.

That’s a lot of time.

And who has time?

Of course, if I cut out the time I spend on flow, I’d have more time to spend on stock. But you ignore flow at your peril too:

This is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after years with your work in hand. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisite opus is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (get ready for it!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find those fans all over again next time you emerge from your cave.

Somewhere in all of this, there has to be some balance.

And that’s the trick isn’t it, balancing the two – stock and flow.

via GIPHY