Month: August 2024

Thursday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. – Arthur Schopenhauer

CNN had a story this week that reported that we age significantly at two points in our lives, ages 44 and 60.

That is very precise. And perhaps correct, from my own experience of the first significant point.

Robert Kiyosaki had this story of life being like a football game – you started the game, you got a quarter of the way through. Then there was half time. Then there was the final quarter. And then you were out of time.

Do you remember what’s happened in the game so far?

I have a terrible memory. I know people who remember everything but for me the past is a blur.

Except when I read my journal entries.

I have kept journals, on and off, in different mediums, for several years.

Perhaps going on two decades now.

They are intermittent, interrupted by life’s events but they capture moments in time. In particular, the mundane everyday, where we went, what we had for lunch, what the commute was like, what I was listening to at the time.

I don’t know what percentage of people keep journals. Perhaps the modern form is the social media feed – that’s where people go to find out what was happening back then.

But I wonder about the persistence of media, whether we will still have all this when we need to remember something.

Many of us have tens of thousands of pictures. But do we have the stories? We have videos, we can relive moments. But is that the same as remembering?

Does text still have a place in this world?

I think it does. Text, the written word, is an incredibly compact way to hold a story. We can relive stories through video, we can see the world as it was in a picture – but we can recreate the world through text.

And this is perhaps important, because a moment frozen in time is different from a moment that made you the person you are.

Thinking back to a time and reflecting on the words you wrote, a message from a younger self, a different person, someone you barely remember, feels like growth, feels like something that helps you learn and develop rather than simply see again.

Too much of anything is a problem. When you take too many pictures, have too much video, you have to live your life again to process that material. It’s time consuming and exhausting and, when the clock runs down, will probably just disappear.

A memoir, on the other hand, a book, a package of print on paper – that has a chance to last.

If I were to advise my younger self I would have said, take a few pictures but write down as much as you can.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 10.36pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. – James Salter

One of my favourite books is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

So, I was quite excited when I came across a clip of a speed he gave in Minneapolis in 1974.

The speech is also included in a posthumous book that came out recently called “On Quality”.

In Pirsig’s second and less well known book “Lila” the main character, Phaedrus, has a collection of around 11,000 slips of paper that make up the ideas he’s been working on for several years.

These slips of paper have self-organized over time into the material for a book.

In his speech, Pirsig describes how he wrote Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance using a very similar approach.

Here’s an important paragraph:

“I sat down and had to devise a way of keeping track of what were now very rapidly proliferating thoughts. Normally for a small article or a small essay, you’d use an outline, but you find that when you start getting into something big, the outline gets crossed out so fast that it becomes unusable. What I did for this particular outline was something I’d learned to do in technical writing, and that was to put down each idea on individual slips of paper and then compare them and see which went first. So my outline was always in a series of slips that went on, one after another. This is just a technique, a gimmick you might say, but it turned out, I think, to be a technique that gives Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a great deal of its complexity, its fundamental sweep and wholeness, and its unification.”

So, using slips of paper was key to his writing method.

Now, if you’re interested in this kind of thing you will remember that there is a similar idea called the Zettelkasten, a card box, which researchers have used for a while to organise their research and help with their publications.

Niklas Luhmann’s zettel is perhaps one of the most famous.

You’ve also probably heard of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his books on index cards, working a bit at a time on any part of the story rather than taking a linear path from start to finish.

This idea, a linear versus non-linear approach, could be important.

An editor, in a video on YouTube, talked about how she advises writers to start at the beginning and work through the manuscript.

Each time the editor and writer meet she wants to see progress in terms of pages.

But writing isn’t really like that, is it?

Can you just start at the beginning and work to the end in one unbroken state of flow?

Some people can – Terry Pratchett wrote that way, I understand.

Back to slips of paper. Who else uses that.

I came across a lesser known approach called the “Crawford Slip Method”.

This takes writing to the extreme level, writing each sentence on a slip of paper and then working with the slips to organise material into paragraphs, essays and books.

Two monographs published on the topic are:

Crawford Slip Method: How to mobilize brainpower

and

Productivity Improvement by the Crawford Slip Method

This does not seem like the easiest way to write a book.

Even a small book will have around 40,000 words, so that’s around 4,000 sentences, which will need 4000 slips of paper, or an entire ream of A4, cut into 8 slips each.

Not the easiest stack to handle.

After a brief detour round the CSM, I went back to Pirsig’s paragraph and noticed the word “technical”.

Did technical writing manuals really tell you to work out ideas on slips of paper?

It turns out they did.

“Technical Writing” by John M Lannon, published in 1990 and a previous book with the same name by Gordon H. Mills and John A. Walter (1978) both have sections describing this method.

Not that I didn’t believe Pirsig, of course.

And a modern equivalent of this kind of writing is also used by John McPhee, as described in his chapter called “Structure”.

McPhee’s process was to type up all his notes and then have a go at the whole lot (after taking a copy) with a pair of scissors.

He then sorted and resorted the ideas until he worked his way to a finished piece.

So, if Pirsig were around now, would he use slips of paper or use a computer?

He was a technical person so I suspect the latter.

He used slips of paper because it was too hard to move sentences around that were written on a single page.

Crawford had the same problem.

With digital tools we can move sentences around more easily.

Well, I say that, but a wordprocessor really doesn’t make it easy without some customisation.

A text editor like emacs, on the other hand, makes this a trivial job.

That’s why McPhee used a text editor rather than Word.

I suppose the takeaway is this.

The functional unit of writing is the sentence.

If you want to write, you need to be able to do two things.

First, write lots of sentences quickly.

Then, have a tool that lets you sort and replace your sentences until they tell a story.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh