Composition of Philosophy. July 31 (A).

The post title above says July 31 (A) because I’ve only finished off the difficult Section 4D so far. I’ll give a final report after finishing 5D, which will end the first half of the book on July 31 as hoped, leaving all of August to write the more difficult second half.

Chapter 4 took a total of 4 hours, 44 minutes (how appropriate) from zero to completion. That chapter also happens to be on the fourfold, but I swear I didn’t do that deliberately, or even know it was coming.

In any case, this yields the following statistics so far:

Introduction- 1:06 1,982 signes
Chapter 1- 6:31 24,713 signes
Chapter 2- 3:50 24,587 signes
Chapter 3- 4:36 24,293 signes
Chapter 4- 4:44 24,436 signes

As you can see, I’m doing well with length. These chapters are all just as long as they need to be: just under 25,000 signes apiece.

The tricky section 4D came together as soon as I remembered the constraints! That’s been the major lesson reinforced by this exercise: writing, like thinking, means recognizing the constraints of a situation and finding ways to open doors and windows nonetheless.

In the case of 4D, I was simply expecting to do too much in less than one thousand words. I was trying to outline difficult theoretical problems that are already going to be covered in the second half of the book in considerable detail. That having been recognized, 4D was reframed more in the spirit of “easing the reader toward what’s coming,” and once that phrase came to mind it only took and hour and fifteen minutes to finish off that previous beast of a section.

5D won’t be as tough as 4D, and of course now I am highly motivated to bring this stage of the project to a close.

In the next post a few hours from now, I’ll have some general reflections about the past couple of weeks. My initial impression is still that the actual writing hours were fairly efficient, but there were surprisingly few such hours per day, certainly far less than the norm for me during writing periods.

The reason that came to mind earlier was “I just haven’t been into it; I’ve done my best in forcing myself to move along despite being strangely not in the mood to be doing this right now.”

There’s a bit of that, sure. I came back from England unusually tired, and the summer can mess with sleep schedules. But now I think it’s more something else… Namely, the act of miniaturizing ideas is exhausting. You all know the length constraints on this project and the reasons for them. I’ve had to compress a lot of ideas into these first five chapters, and have had to compress most of the chapters far below their initial length.

And I’ve come to realize that, despite the great value and hopefully great outcome of this exercise, it is extremely tiring. You have to choose your words very carefully, and risks have to be taken with cutting certain transitions and user-friendly language. The Montfort/Bogost Atari book keeps coming back to mind because I am most identifying right now with those programmers who had to use every trick in the book to create interesting, playable games for a surprisingly weak machine.

More specifically, I identify with those programmers they discussed who had the unenviable task of porting known arcade games to the Atari. There were already numerous fans of Space Invaders and Pac-Man in the arcades, and the poor souls who had to do those games for the Atari had to recreate them using far feebler hardware. In the case of Space Invaders it worked well; in the case of Pac-Man it was rushed (just 6 weeks!), and generally viewed as a terrible failure.

I think the analogy is a good one. Compressing the existing ideas of all my published books into 70 double-spaced pages is about as tough as porting Space Invaders to the Atari (I won’t mention the Pac-Man port, because I want this one to turn out much better than that). Every possible trick has been needed to make those ideas leaner and crisper than they are in my existing books, so that they can fit into a small space, and still without losing anyone (most French readers won’t know the first thing about any of my writings).

In any case, I’ve never had to do anything like this before, and I think I was condemning myself too harshly on the “number of hours per day” front. Every time I finish revising just one of these sections (and they’re only about 3 pages apiece), I have to crash on the couch or go out for a coffee. It’s that demanding.

By contrast, with normal projects it’s possible to rip out 20-25 pages on a good day. Not with this one.

See you in a few hours, with a report on the finale of this stage of the project.