almost finished

Now only 7 pages to go in Prince of Networks… Authors may not be the most insightful critics of their own books, but my sense is that the final chapter is the best and most important, but also the most difficult.

But this fits the usual pattern of my books, as described several times on this blog already. Generally, I want to get readers up to speed on my previous works, whose ideas are needed to understand the new things I will talk about. Over time and with practice, one obviously becomes faster and more eloquent at describing past insights, just as the bottom layers of Troy or Byzantium become simpler and more compressed as new layers of the city are gradually built on top of them.

The later chapters are always the front line of battle for me, which usually makes them more exciting than the earlier chapters (at least for me) but also not as polished. Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which was once worth hundreds of pages to me, now flashes for a couple of paragraphs like a lightning-bolt before fading away into darkness.

Another reason for this effect (compressed and lucid early chapters, exciting but difficult final chapters) stems from the accident that I continually revise existing book drafts from start to finish in order to keep momentum going.

In other words, when ready to write Section 2 I will revise Section 1 to get into the right frame of mind for writing Section 2. When writing Section 3, I will first revise Sections 1 and 2 in order to build up a full head of steam for Section 3, and so on. The result is that my early chapters have often gone through two dozen or more polishings, whereas the later chapters may have gone through five or six.

This situation also means that I am always highly motivated to write the next book. For instance, I look at the final 80 pages of Prince of Networks and think: “this is really important material, but no undergraduate could ever sit through this in its current form. It ought to be simplified and clarified so much more than this, reduced to the point of being memorably formulated on a single index card.”

In other words, it’s good to finish a project feeling just a little bit sick and tired of yourself. It’s a good impetus to move on.