Composition of Philosophy. July 16 B.

I’ve written less than 700 words of a 43,000-word book, but already my planned methods have changed, under pressure from the word-count constraint. (Or rather, character-count, as per the French system, but I will not worry about that until later. Counting words is good enough for now.)

Having decided to split the 43,000 words into 10 chapters rather than 9, this gave a length of 4,300 words for each chapter.

Since the first chapter has four sections, I decided to try an average of 1,000 words per section, leaving 300 words for a brief overview at the start of the chapter.

Problem: 300 words is a lot shorter than you think it is. I wrote what I thought was a fairly minimal two-paragraph overview. It took 25 minutes (I was pausing frequently for thought this time), was split into 2 paragraphs rather than the initially planned 3, and totalled a horrifying 471 words.

I then took 12 extra minutes to shave excess words off of the paragraph, but there were still 388 words.

That’s when I started doing the sort of thing described in the previous paragraph, trying to slim every sentence down by an extra 3 or 4 words, as well as deleting certain whole sentences as completely unneeded. This took 6 additional minutes.

In all, that totals 43 minutes to write a pretty-much-final version of just a page. Normally it should go a bit faster than that, but this isn’t just any page: it’s the first page of the whole book, other than the Introduction. So, it was well worth the extra care and the extra pauses.

A few lessons resulted…

*To fit this book within the allotted length, my style is going to have to be much leaner than usual. That’s fine by me; I’ve wanted to move in that direction anyway, since I think there are times when I overexplain at points where quick allusion would be perfectly fine for most readers. It’s the teacher in me, wanting to make sure that absolutely no one misses a reference.

*When writing the Zagreb lecture, I said that it’s best to write a whole lecture/chapter/article in rough form, and only then go back to give it stylistic polish. In the present case, I feel inclined to do it a bit differently, treating each separate section as an autonomous article. In other words, after writing the Introduction I immediately went back to revise it, and the same with this now single-page overview of Chapter One.

In both cases, I didn’t have to go through the usual “polish the prose” stage, because the word-count worries already did that for me. Merely by shaving words from the first draft, the style was already improved to nearly final form.

My guess is that the prose will have a slightly more austere feel than my writing usually does, but that actually meets one of my subsidiary goals, which was to write in a style that would work well for a French readership. In English we do have the advantage of a famously immense vocabulary compared with French, but this advantage easily turns into a disadvantage. There is a real power to the focused precision of good written French. Who was it in the blogosphere who called Meillassoux (aptly) a “gem-cutter”? Maybe it was Nick (my apologies if it was someone else). Though I don’t really have the gem-cutting temperament, it’s probably a good idea to be be forced to act like one for this particular project.

*So, that’s my new plan… To deal with this work as a series of sections rather than chapters. Since the sections are only 3-4 pages apiece throughout the book, this means I’ll write the entire thing in the same manner as the Introduction and the Chapter 1 Overview. That means, a quick first draft, followed by a mere word-cutting exercise, and this mere act of word-cutting ought to put the style in nearly final form.

The danger with this sort of word-chopping allusiveness, of course, is that certain portions of the argument may turn out to be nearly incomprehensible, with too much being cut. But I’ll deal with that when rereading the whole manuscript at the end.

*Here’s another advantage to working with bite-sized sections rather than chapters… If you’re in a tired mood but feel like you need to write a whole chapter, it’s easy to think “well, no point starting that chapter this late in the day. I just don’t have the strength to finish, and it should all be written at one go.”

By contrast, when dealing with smaller units of prose, there is no good excuse to go to sleep early before finishing at least one more of those little sections. We’ll see how long they take to write.