an early advice post

supplementary advice
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

Late start today, and I mostly plan to let myself and others catch up. I was hoping to post that whole Leibniz carnival fragment for morning entertainment, but it’s not on my hard drive anymore. I now remember that it was way back in 1996 when I typed it out for my friend, and for reasons I no longer recall, my current hard drive has nothing on it before `97. (I think there’s a Zip drive somewhere with the earlier stuff, but I’m too tired to look through boxes for it.)

I have a few pieces of supplementary advice, related to the long post on writing. The first is actually well-known, and constantly offered by professional writing coaches.

1. Get something on paper immediately. The source of anxiety is nothingness. If you’re afraid to speak before an audience, it’s on some level the fear of being completely destroyed by it, when in fact you’ll still have plenty of things going for you even if you make a total fool of yourself. Even a catastrophe will be finite, and that’s important to remember. The analogous insight in writing is that the anxiety comes from a fear of having *nothing at all* to say. Even getting one or two paragraphs down on paper will embolden you to do the rest. Zizek described this process quite movingly in the conversations with Daly… how he has to trick himself into writing books, pretending that he’s only going to write one paragraph, then that paragraph has a loose end that forces him to write another, and so forth. I wouldn’t say I trick myself in this way, but do find it important to merely posit the opening of an article by fiat, soon after the idea comes to mind. I’ll be writing that review of Brassier’s book, for instance, and have no time to review my homework on it right now. But the very moment I was asked to do it, I sat down and wrote the first three pages. That was important, because now it’s not a terrifying burden of nothingness in the back of my mind, but is already the stub of a finished article. Most likely when I go back those pages will be a little scrappy, but there’s no question that it will be an effective nucleus of a paper. Also, immediately after being asked to write something is usually the moment when you get most excited about it, so it’s good to do an outline right then. There will come a later time when the article is almost due, but you’re feeling tired and no longer think you even have one thing to say about the topic. I’m confident that my basic reactions to Brassier’s work are already contained in those first 3 or 4 pages, and for this reason it feels (probably correctly) like something I can polish off with two days of reviewing his book and two days of writing the rest of the article. It’ll be a rewarding long weekend project, not a burden. Also, there’s a real pleasure in creating a chain of ideas out of nothing.

2. Write first, edit later. I hated this advice as a student, because it seemed like what all the dull teacher’s pets were doing. Seemed too much like a busywork tactic. But it’s not. If you stop and edit yourself while writing, you’ll become your own enemy. Lingis told me something similar… he said that every student he knew who had problems finishing a dissertation sank into a sort of staleness with their project. In order to avoid that staleness, he finds it necessary to write with a certain speed. He even has a theory that all the great ideas books in philosophy were written surprisingly quickly. I’ve since thought of a few counter-examples, but the basic idea turns out to be powerful. Lingis said that of course he goes back through and polishes his drafts many times, but the things he wrote down quickly and unthinkingly always turn out to be the most valuable.

3. “Always delete your first paragraph– especially if you’re proud of it.” I was given this advice by my former music teacher at St. John’s, Mr. Elliott Zuckerman. As time goes by you start to internalize the rule and hence you never even write that delete-worthy first paragraph. But the opening paragraph will generally be the site of excessive hesitation, self-undercutting excessive modesty, self-undercutting excessive cockiness, and general overwriting.

I’ll give one example from my favorite fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft. Though I think the first two pages of “The Dunwich Horror” are among the finest prose in the English language (the critique of excessive adjectives misses the point in this particular case), there is another case where I think Lovecraft should have followed the Zuckerman Rule: always delete your opening paragraph, especially if you’re proud of it. The story in question is “The Whisperer in Darkness,” where I usually just skip the first paragraph and pretend that it doesn’t exist.

I wouldn’t say that it’s horribly written or anything. It begins: “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual shock near the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred— that last straw which sent me racing out of the Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night…”

What bothers me is the somewhat forced gimmick of the in media res. A frantic narrator has obviously emerged from a horrifying situation (in this case, crab-like winged fungi from the planet Yuggoth who want to remove his brain from a skull and take it through outer space in a metal cannister).

But the story is more controlled, and in my view more sinister, if allowed to begin with the second paragraph:

“The whole matter began, as far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in the swollen rivers…”

It would be hard to top this as the opening to a story. It’s lucid, conveys lots of information that situates us in time and space, gives some sense of the personality of the narrator, and moves quickly through a natural disaster to hints of something far more sinister. Lovecraft is a master, but if I could go back in time and tell him one thing (other than, “don’t worry, you will be appreciated one day”) it would be to excise the first paragraph of that story.

This bolsters a point I made earlier when speaking of outlines. What makes this second paragraph better, I believe, is that the drama is coming from the sheer structure of the thing. The reader is unprepared for the opening screams of the true opening paragraph, which may provoke a mood of alarm, but offer no anchor for this alarm to take on concrete form. Quite the opposite with the second paragraph, where a gentlemanly professor anchors the story in the calendar and in geography (even though Arkham and Miskatonic do not exist, which is another part of Lovecraft’s technique related to Miéville’s observation.) The heavy Vermont floods, unusual but not unknown, then push us one step further– to strange objects in the river. The reports of the objects describe them as monstrous, humanoid-looking things, and to soften the innate incredibleness of the reports, the Lovecraft professor character fends them off with a wryly skeptical anthropological critique. And so forth. One thought leads to the next, until finally you have moved from some rather banal initial statements about dates on the calendar and academic positions to the wildest conclusions about alien races and the structure of space-time. That’s why the opening paragraph is so flawed, in my view– it merely posits unnatural events before preparing us to believe them.

A work of metaphysics ought to function as the same way as “The Whisperer in Darkness,” but you have to get rid of that opening paragraph.

Remember, it’s not boring to start by stating the facts, like his second paragraph did. No one sees or states the facts in the same way, and your opening statement of the outlines of a philosophical problem will be drenched with personality even if you don’t realize it– as long as you’re just speaking in your own voice, and not trying on all sorts of affectations.

Of course, it can take years to separate the affectations from one’s own voice, since we all learn at first through imitation.