Reflecting on Essay Style for The Meaning of Life

To start out, I would like to point out that even if a person is a full time writer they are not actually writing full time. They might be working full time on things related to getting the writing done. But, writing is, sadly, a much smaller part of getting the piece done than most people realize. On a good day, a writer might get an hour of actual writing done. On a really good day, two hours. There are rare days when you get three good hours of writing done. But, then you are spent and worthless for anything else.

Two obvious competitors for your writing time are rewriting and editing. I don't think there are any canonical definitions to explain the difference between these two. But, in my mind, rewriting involves substantive changes while editing focuses more style and grammar. Personally, I find it difficult to switch between these three modes (writing, rewriting, editing). So, I usually focus on one for any given day at the expense of the others.

Unless you write by hand and then hand it off to somebody, there are endless technical problems, some of which I have grumbled about before such as converting a document to Kindle format, or dictating hand written notes into a MS Word document. This blog entry is an example of the kinds of technical problems that crop up. I have drafts of several months worth of blog posts which I finish up when I need to post something. I do this so I don't have to start from scratch each month and come up with an idea. Something happened to this draft. I am not sure what. I know that Google changed the interface, although I don't see how that would affect it. But, somehow it got garbled. Perhaps, I was possessed by a demon one day and garbled it myself. Maybe I did a poor job of dictating. Whatever happened, some chunks were missing.

Some tasks associated with writing are even more difficult for people who do not write to understand. For example, if I am trying to figure out something like a plot turn, or a character element, or the best way to explain something, I will need some time to think about it. But, this isn't the same kind of thinking you might apply to selecting a stock to buy or how to balance your budget. It is almost nonthinking. I will usually stop and do something entirely unrelated to what I am writing until an inspiration occurs to me. (Surprisingly, it always does although the amount of time required varies greatly)  Let's say I decide to vacuum the living room while I ruminate on a style issue, which brings us neatly back to the point of this post. If someone were to call me on the phone and ask what I was doing at the moment, what should I say. Should I say I am vacuuming (a task which can easily be interrupted) or should I say I am writing (a task that can be ruined by stopping at the wrong time).

Moving on from the grumbling and refocusing on style, it took me a while to find my style for The Meaning of Life. Ultimately, after agonizing over it for longer than I wanted to, I came up with the following. 

I decided to keep my essays short, roughly 300 to 700 words, with an average word count of about 400. I think this worked well for that book, but did not work at all well for Predicting the Future. But, nothing is wasted. I have several hundred short essays which I wrote over several years for writing practice. I will select some of the best, punch them up a bit and release a collection of 100 or so in a volume entitled Things that Passed Through My Mind, or something like that. That won't be for a couple of years as I have several things in the pipeline. But, that is how I work. I always plan way ahead. 

I also decided that I want the essays to be accessible and never pretentious although if I have to use a big word or a complex sentence to represent a complex idea I will do so. I am going to stick with this idea in other books as well as some fiction I am working on. I am not writing for scholars. I had enough of that as an academic. Having said that, I try to write for people who have different levels of interest. So, most of my essays and hopefully my upcoming stories will be interesting to people who want to enjoy more than think. But, I don't want to turn off people looking for something deeper, so I try to have things for them too. In the essays, there are comments along the way which most readers will just ignore. But, some will see them as pointers to something more. In the fiction, there should be a good story for those that only care about entertainment. But, there should also be deeper levels such as symbolism, metaphor and meaning for those who are looking for more.

I like to begin with a strong, often provocative, opening sentence that will make the reader want to read more. I try to end each essay with a sentence that will give you the reader something to think about which hopefully is what the reader will do before reading the next. If the essays are related the last line in one should link in to or create interest in the next.

 I have finished the first draft of Predicting the Future and it resembles this style with the exception that it is chapters of about 2000 words each and hence a longer volume. But, I am still not writing for experts. Currently, I have several book ideas that will be more like Predicting the Future. However, this 300-700 word model will still be useful. I have about 300-400 more essays written in the same style as The Meaning of Life. When the mood strikes me, I will start to package the better ones into short topical volumes of about 50-100 essays each which will sell for 99 cents as a Kindle book. Although I do like long books (Stephen King's The Stand and James Michner's Hawaii come to mind)  it think short books for a buck are the way of the future, sort of back to the days of Penny Dreadful.

More on Imagination

Several decades ago when I finally finished my dissertation and completed my PhD, I found that the process of writing my dissertation had severely and negatively impacted my imagination. When writing scholarly work you must insure that each small step in your reasoning rests solidly on previous steps and that any claims made are supported by references to other scholarly work. If someone on your dissertation committee says "I think you have gotten a little creative on a few points", it is not a compliment. It means you have to fix something. Since I have always been imaginative and creative, I actually felt the loss of these abilities after the rigors of my dissertation. It was as though the bright colors of life had dimmed to a barely tinted black and white. I didn't like it and pondered ways in which I might fix it and return to being imaginative again.

I was reading a lot of Stephen King at the time and decided that I would try to convince myself that one of his books (I don't recall which one, at the moment) was actually non-fiction and that the government didn't want the truth to come out so they covered it up and allowed the book to be published as fiction. Yes, I know, this sounds preposterous! But, what is even more preposterous is that I managed to do it. I managed to convince myself that the book was true. This is not as remarkable as it first seems. You can convince yourself of almost anything and people often do.

But, the experience of thinking something is true when you know it is not was very enlightening. I realized how people who believe in conspiracy theories can be so confident about things which otherwise seem ridiculous. It also helps explain why people with polar political views can be so intractable. And, it also made me wonder how many other things that I believe are true might just be things that I have convinced myself of. I actually went through several of King's books and found that it became easier to convinced myself the more I worked at it. And, I found that the exercise restored my imagination and creativity along with some humility about the truth. Shortly after embarking on this exercise, I started writing fiction.

I talk about imagination more extensively in my upcoming book on Predicting the Future as this is a quintessential exercise of the imagination. The construction of reality is also a product of the imagination. In Yuval Noah Harari's wonderful books Sapiens and Homo Deus he observes that humans are the only species who's reality is a product of their imaginations and attributes this in large part, although not exclusively, to our dominance of the planet. This takes some explaining and I would encourage you to read these well written and fascinating books in which Harari attempts to explain how we got to where we are and where we might be going.

How healthy is your imagination? Are your creative muscles flabby and useless or pumped and ready to take on challenges. Here is a way to tell. If you think there is an objective reality and an absolute truth you are probably suffering from a calcified imagination. You might be OK with this and it is not up to me to judge whether or not this is OK. However, if you want to write some interesting fiction or even creative non-fiction, you may want to exercise your imagination a bit more so you will be up to the task.

I would also point out that an under explored benefit of the imagination is that it can help you deal with chaos and change.  If you can anticipate something (which is an act of imagination) you can brace yourself. Alvin Toffler gave a name to the psychological stress that occurs when the future comes at you too fast. He called it Future Shock. A healthy imagination can be something of an immunity to Future Shock.

Your Mystical Muse

I am well underway with my second book which will be entitled Predicting the Future. Yes, I am really writing a book about predicting the future. And, as with The Meaning of Life, I intend to deliver on the promise.  So far I have about 10,000 words in rough draft. When finished it will be about three or four times that long and I hope to get it out as a Kindle book in the Fall. I mention this, not only to plug an upcoming book, but because there is a tie in between writing and predicting the future. Both require a developed imagination.

Where is the future? Movies like Back to the Future would lead one to believe that the future is a place that you can visit and return from, in a souped up flying DeLorean no less. While this premise makes really entertaining movies, it can be a serious problem when predicting the future. To cut to the chase, the future is entirely in your imagination. And, getting better at predicting the future requires that you develop your imagination. If you want to know more about the future, you can read the book when it comes out.

The tie in with the topic of this article is that your imagination plays a large role in writing as well. To cut to the chase your ideas, arguments, characters, plots and even your words come from your imagination. Your muse does not exist in some mystical or occult realm where it feeds ideas and inspiration to you. It resides entirely in your imagination. But, before I get too far ahead of myself. Let me back up and lay a little groundwork.

People often ask writers where their ideas come from. This is a stock question for book interviews. They know the audience, which includes numerous writers and wanna be writers, are dying for an answer. Instead, the writer fumbles around, sputters out a few statements of far less quality than the writing, about which they are being interviewed, and dodges the question. The answer is that they come from their imagination. If the interviewer presses a bit and asks how they get into the writers imagination the answers become a little more standard. You have to read a lot. You have to write a lot. You have to play with ideas.

When you are reading or writing you are creating bits of raw material in your head. They even have a name for it. They call it fabula and fabula is the stuff out of which stories are made. I was watching an interview a few days ago with Donna Tartt the author of The Secret History who said that she always carries a  notebook with her to jot down ideas. She said her notebook is like an artists sketch book. That is a great description. Rather than relying on her memory to house her fabula, she writes it down in her notebook. Not a bad idea at all. I personally have dozens of notebooks where I jot down ideas. But, I don't carry one around with me like Donna Tartt. Still, she is one of the most revered writers working today and I am just cranking out a blog page. Maybe there is a connection there. Maybe I should carry around a notebook.

Let us try, for the sake of this discussion, to think of the imagination as a real thing. We do this all the time. We think of intelligence (as measured by IQ), body mass index, and charisma as real things, even though they are not. We might say somebody has the gift of gab and nobody says "Wait! Is that real?" Treating concepts as though they are real is just a convenience, a legal fiction so to speak.

The imagination is a place where you can put ideas, perhaps even picture them, modify them and evaluate the modifications. Imagine a horse. Now make it blue. Next make it fly. Perhaps you want to push it and make it talk. Let's say you can ride this flying horse. Will it talk to you while you are riding it? Does that make you nervous? What if the horse can talk but not speak English? What if it can speak English but is always correcting your grammar and does that horse snorting thing when you use too much slang? See how it works? We have an idea for a story, not a great one, but an idea nonetheless.

How can you improve your imagination? Well, how do you improve anything? You use it. You exercise it. By reading and writing you already exercise your imagination. Take something you've read and start tinkering with it. Stephen King wrote an excellent book called The Stand in which a flu virus that was being worked on in a military lab escaped and started killing everyone. (Hmm... sounds familiar) Anyway, what if the virus, instead of killing people, turned some people red and some people blue. Would the blues and reds go after each other? What if it turned some blue, some red and some yellow. Would coalitions form? We could go on with this or go in different directions or use a different book.

You can develop your imagination doing exercises like this. You can add to your fabula by reading and exercise your imagination by writing. You could take five minutes out each day, take a news story, turn it into something utterly ridiculous, and then see if you can convince yourself that it is still true. I think this is what we call journalism today. Perhaps, I'd better not go down that path. 😎

The Meaning of Life

Finally! My first Kindle book The Meaning of Life is available on Amazon. It took a lot longer than I expected that it would (as I grumbled about in the last post). I hit some further snags, and still have a few to get past. None the less it is done and the next one will be easier. I still have to create a paperback version which is snagged at the moment. And I plan to read it myself (and edit the audio) for the Audible version. No doubt more snags are awaiting there. Grumbling aside, this is a lot of fun and will be more fun as I figure out what I am doing.

I should also point out that I did the cover art myself (in case that isn't obvious) for a reason. I plan to publish several books and thought the sketched cover art would allow me to express ideas that might be more difficult to express through a real graphics artist. Further, I thought the unprofessional looking sketch would be a signature element of all upcoming covers. And, I thought it would stand out on Amazon, which it does. We will see if that was a good idea or not.