Start before you think you’re ready

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Here’s Stephen Harrigan (talking about his book, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas) and a reproduction of one of Botticelli’s paintings of St. Augustine. (Like almost all writers, St. Augustine, too, wondered about the problem of how to begin. )

In my experience writing books, it isn’t just a “resistance” thing or a “perfectionist” thing or a fear thing, it’s more about research and wondering if you’ve done enough of it. Research becomes your way of procrastinating, because, let’s face it, research is just more fun than writing. (Me, personally, I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader.)

Steven Johnson says the answer is to “research as you go”:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat – particularly for non-fiction writers – comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

And here’s David McCullough:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Maybe that’s where fear comes in. As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces:

I began to poke around, and the more I found, the less I knew.

The biggest help to me with my books comes from something Stewart Brand said to Brian Eno, captured in his diary, A Year of Swollen Appendices:

“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

Look at your fish, part two

Sunday, September 23, 2018

I lost my voice this week, so my 3-year-old has been ~~reading~~ reciting his books to me at bedtime. Something about being read to distances me from pages I’ve read hundreds of times. (Literally — the book is in his hands, so I’m further away.) Tonight this page from Little Fur Family caught my eye:

then he reached in the river
and pulled out a fish
and looked at it
and then—Kerplunk!
He threw it back in the river.

“Look at your fish!” I thought.

Then I remembered Kio Stark telling me that back in 2012 Robin Sloan (author of Sourdough) published an app/essay called “Fish,” a “manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.” So after the 3-year-old was down for bed, I downloaded the essay and read it.

Robin notes that he returns to his absolute favorite books, music, and movies, over and over again: he re-reads, re-listens, re-watches. But on the internet, he “likes” something and moves on. It’s the act of returning, he suspects, that separates love from like:

And then he gets to the main point of the essay:

That’s right! Robin tells the story of Louis Agassiz’s “Look at your fish” lesson, which I read about in David McCullough’s Paris Review interview, but which is also in McCullough’s 1992 book, Brave Companions.

“We don’t look at our fishes,” Robin writes. “We catch and release.”

Here’s a page from Show Your Work!:

That’s exactly what the Little Fur Child in the story is doing on the page that caught my eye: catching and releasing.

So now I’m thinking about this metaphor of fishing and being on the internet, and it’s falling apart in my head, because catch and release means the fish stays alive — you take a look, then you throw it back into the river and somebody else downstream can catch it later and take a look for themselves. If you hoard the fish, or you eat the fish, nobody else gets to enjoy it. What you really have to do, if you want to really look at your fish is make a copy of the fish — clone the fish! — and then throw it back in the river.

(Ah, but now I might’ve spoiled the surprise (updated) ending of the essay!)

But, for writers, maybe it’s not just returning to the things we love… maybe it’s embedding the things we love in new things that we write that keeps those fish alive. Like what McCullough did with the Louis Agassiz story — he caught the fish, but he released it back into the wild in his book. And then Robin caught the fish and released it in his essay. And I caught it and released it… in this blog post?

~~Footnotes~~ Stray thoughts

1. Little Fur Family comes right before Goodnight Moon, both of which have to be two of the weirdest picture books ever written, both written, of course, by Margaret Wise Brown, who was pretty weird herself…

2. I probably noticed the page in Little Fur Family because I’ve been obsessed with the way of seeing shown in Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises. It occurs to me, only now, duh, that the fish story, too, is all about Agassiz’s “way of seeing.” (Those are the exact words McCullough uses in Brave Companions.)

3. We haven’t even talked about David Lynch’s Catching The Big Fish: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper…”

Look at your fish

Monday, September 17, 2018

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.”
—David McCullough

In his Paris Review interview, David McCullough talks about how important seeing is to the writer and historian, and how much his training in drawing and painting has been of great benefit to him in his work. “Drawing is learning to see and so is writing.”

He has a motto tacked above his desk: LOOK AT YOUR FISH.

He explains:

It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.

He tells that story in all of his writing classes, and then emphasizes that looking more closely helps you discover new things in old or ordinary material that other people have not:

The chances of finding a new piece [of the puzzle] are fairly remote—though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new—but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.

Filed under: looking

Hurry slowly

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

“The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time.”
—Junot Diaz

It was my pleasure recently to be interviewed by Jocelyn Glei for her podcast, Hurry Slowly. We talked about analog vs. digital tools, how space affects your work, working by hand, and slowing down. You can listen to our conversation here.

“Hurry slowly” has its roots in an old Latin phrase: “Festina Lente,” or “Make haste slowly,” or “more haste, less speed.” (See: The Tortoise and The Hare.)

Here’s Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, on the phrase:

Festina lente should totally be a model for our age. I came across it just reading about the early days of printing and Aldus Manutius—the great printer who of course figures in the plot of my book. It’s his motto. I’m sure that you could translate it different ways—but the one I liked best is “make haste slowly.” And I just love it cuz it seems like a contradiction, but in fact it’s exactly right. It seems to fit our time really well, but I stole it from a guy 500 years old. Oh wait, maybe this isn’t new, maybe this is not a new feeling.

Here’s Erasmus in his Adagia, 500 years before Sloan:

[Festina Lente] ought to be carved on columns. It ought to be written on the archways of churches, and indeed in letters of gold. It ought to be painted on the gates of great men’s palaces, engraved on the rings of cardinals and primates, and chased on the scepters of kings. To go further, it ought to be seen on all monuments everywhere, published abroad and multiplied so that everyone will know it and it will be before every mortal eye, and there will be no one who doesn’t hold it of greatest use…

Later, Erasmus writes, “Things that ripen prematurely are wont suddenly to go limp. What grows slowly and steadily can endure.” Echoing Erasmus, about 360 years later, is Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry for November 5, 1860:

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.

“Let’s slow down,” Steinbeck wrote in his journal while working on The Grapes of Wrath, “not in pace or wordage but in nerves.”

Some of my favorite writers use older technologies to force themselves to slow down: Lynda Barry used a paintbrush and red ink on legal paper to write the first draft of her manuscript for Cruddy. This page hangs in my bedroom:

“People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster,” says David McCullough. “Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.”

“The real issue with speed,” writes film editor Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Finally, here is one of my favorite works by Corita Kent, which she sent to LBJ in 1963 “after reading that his wife Ladybird had been telling him to slow down.”