Comp. of Phil. postscript

I’ll probably just do one more section of Chapter 3 tonight, and then call it a day. The reason is that the remaining three sections of Chapter 3 are all too short, which means I want to put a bit of early-morning fresh thought into what is missing from them right now.

That means that, by day’s end today, I’ll have around 35 pages of the book more or less ready for press. That’s about a week behind where I wanted to be, but things are still moving fairly quickly, and there is now nearly zero risk that the book won’t be finished on schedule. And that’s important for a number of reasons. As late as July 15, not a single word of this book had been written. Ten days later, it’s well on course for completion.

There’s a certain stylistic spice missing from the completed pages so far, but the spice is the easiest thing to add.

It occurs to me that writing with all the constraints that exist on this project is almost like writing with a co-author. That’s not a bad principle, in fact… Every book should have a co-author, even if not a human one. Why? Because left to our own devices, we all tend to repeat ourselves too much. We all know only a certain number of jokes, hang out in a certain number of restaurants, and have read only a certain number of books. It’s from translating our own concerns into those of others, or vice versa, that we jump out of the ruts that fate always prepares for us if we aren’t careful.

Composition of Philosophy. July 25.

It’s only 5:30 PM, so there’s still plenty to be done today. But here are some statistics. (It can be counterproductive to worry too much about this in your own case, but having never before “timed” myself while writing a book, I was curious to know exactly how many physical hours of writing it takes.)

For those who missed some of the earlier posts, when the French use the term signes they apparently mean the number of characters including blank spaces. And luckily, my old American version of AppleWorks is able to count in that currency.

Introduction
writing time from zero to final draft= 1 hour, 6 minutes
length= 1,982 signes

Chapter 1
writing time from zero to final draft= 6 hours, 31 minutes
length= 24,713 signes

Chapter 2
writing time from zero to final draft= 3 hours, 50 minutes
length= 24,587 signes

If it’s hard to intuit the meaning of a given number of signes, Chapters 1 and 2 are both around 14 pages in double-spaced Times New Roman.

A couple of things worth nothing…

*The Introduction was by far the least efficient in terms of words per minute. That is to be expected. We (meaning most humans) are always cautious and careful with Introductions. We want to set the right starting note, and we haven’t built up momentum yet. Besides, it was only an hour and six minutes out of my life, so even if inefficient the damage isn’t too severe.

*Notice the big difference in time elapsed on Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 2 will probably be the fastest of the entire book. It’s the Husserl/Heidegger chapter, I know my take on those two exactly, have done it many times, and generally enjoy the topic. So, little surprise that it went so quickly.

By the end of the book, it’s possible that a few of the difficult chapters will take 10 hours or so from zero to finish.

Total elapsed time so far (counting only finalized chapters) would be eleven and a half hours for nearly thirty pages of pretty good writing. Not great yet, but already presentable.

The key point here is that there’s no shame in approaching polished work by stages. Trying to write really good material directly from zero is much more stressful than the method I now use: write correctly arranged slop, then clean up the slop, then polish a few more times. Morale is always higher if you have something done, even if it’s not yet fully cooked.

Think of it this way… By the end of the week I should have right around 70 pages of pretty good “final” material. By “final,” I mean I wouldn’t be embarrassed if others read it. But it could still be even better. And over the next month, whenever I have some free time, I can reread those pages and continually improve them, trying to make them an actual pleasure to read, rather than leaving them as a sufficient fulfillment of dutiful academic rigor.

I also want to emphasize that this method, of approaching excellence by a series of many drafts, is completely counter-temperamental for me. That is to say, at a younger age I frowned on it and was even incapable of it. I used to wait for inspiration, and used to expect perfect wording on the first try.

The problem was, that instinctive method is the one that led me to spend 3 years continually rewriting the first 50 pages of my dissertation. Project that level of productivity over the course of a lifetime, and it wouldn’t have been the sort of life I had in mind.

It should be remembered that “productivity” does not refer primarily to filling lines on a c.v. It refers to forcing yourself into confrontation with surprising and difficult subject matter. If a specific author confuses or bothers me, the first thing I think is: “I need to write an article about this.” Why? Because that’s the best way to force yourself to figure out what’s going on with the material.

Coming up: the Chapter 3 revisions. The last three sections of that Chapter are actually too short right now, which means I’ll be adding new material while going along, and of course that will be a big slowdown. This Chapter may take even longer to finish off than Chapter 1 did.

Composition of Philosophy. July 24.

Let me quote a few numbers from Chapter 1 of the book, which is now in final form. By “final” I don’t mean that I will never make further changes to it. “Final” simply means that if I had to submit Chapter 1 to press right now, I’d feel pretty good about it.

Chapter 1 is now an even 4,100 words, exactly the target.

It took a total of 6 hours and 31 minutes to write. At first that seemed like too much for what is essentially a mere 14-page article, but then I realized that this is pretty reasonable… The Chapter had no existence whatsoever as anything but an outline, and now, after a total of six-and-a-half hours of work, it’s ready for press in my opinion. That’s less than a full work day, so I guess it was fairly efficient. But it’s not clear that the other chapters will go so quickly.

Now, on the all-important question of the French signes… Even though my French version of MS Word counts only caractères, which means blank spaces are not counted, my old American version of AppleWorks does count the blank spaces, giving me the number of signes that PUF uses to pay the translator.

In the phone call the other night, I was told the book should run to 250,000 signes, as opposed to the 262,000 I’d been told earlier.

Forgetting the very brief introduction for now, with 10 chapters in the book, each one should have the approximate length of 25,000 signes.

AppleWorks tells me that Chapter 1 has 24,713. Good.

I’ll post again on this topic if by some chance I finish off the revisions of Chapter 2.

so far…

I’ve started the revision process of the book chapter drafts.

It’s still early, but already a pretty consistent mathematical pattern has emerged. It is taking only about 20% as much time to revise the sections as it took to write them. That’s the beauty of just plowing through a rough draft– they are generally a lot better than you think they are. The content is usually exactly where it needs to be, and in the right order. All that remains at this stage is to make the content convincing.

It is wrong to think that content, propositions, arguments, are convincing or unconvincing in and of themselves. Propositions and arguments skate along the surface of a topic, as McLuhan knew. Your subject becomes convincing only when the reader sees why it must be so, and walks amidst your words as if in a wonderland.

Naturally, the current 20% figure will expand a lot once I get to the sections that are too short rather than too long, because I’ll need to add additional content in those sections and in a few cases do a bit more thinking about things.

Nonetheless, if that ratio holds up, I’ll have perfectly polished versions of Chapters 1 and 2 by lunchtime tomorrow.

speed = morale

this, I wouldn’t emulate

But it may be of interest anyway.

I just printed out a chart showing how many words each section of the book draft is, and how much time it took to write them. It helps give me an overview of where the strong and weak points are in the existing draft.

All told, there are 26 sections in the draft. 17 of them are too long, 1 is just right, and 8 are too short.

As a general rule, the long sections are the ones where I know with absolute clarity what I want to say, and just need to discover how to say it a bit more concisely.

The short sections are either places where a couple of mild puzzles remain (the bigger puzzles are in the still undrafted second half of the book), or where I did know exactly what to say but was very tired while writing and hence satisfied myself with a few passing notations.

I think I’ll dig into some revision tonight instead of leaving it until tomorrow.

Once all of this is done, I’ll post the promised table showing the length of each section and exactly how much time each one took to write. But I can confidently state that it’s a lot easier to revise existing junk drafts than to try to create new prose ex nihilo.

Existing rough drafts are a safety net to protect you from the horror of the zero. They can also put vanity to work in your favor, because when you read these rough passages you’ll find yourself saying: “man, I’m so much better than that. What is this junk?”

Chapters 1 and 2 are going to need significant cuts, but that’s always easier than lengthening, so those could be finished relatively quickly if I wake up feeling on a roll.

Oh yeah, an obvious point… You have to make lots of backups for safety reasons. You don’t want to shoot yourself after losing 300 pages of dissertation. Send your drafts to gmail. Print them at a certain point. Whatever it takes. Nothing is more devastating than losing a whole bunch of writing.

My worst-ever story with lost work isn’t as bad as many people’s worst-evers… In order to audition for one of the book translations I did, I had to send a sample translation of 25 pages of the book (to the publisher’s credit, they paid me immediately for the sample at their normal translators’ rate; it wasn’t a scam on their part to get free translation work). I finished the sample, and was just letting it sit for a day or so to fine-tune the style before sending it to the publisher.

And guess what happened? My computer simply erased the whole document. I wondered at first if I had accidentally deleted it myself, but that same computer would pull similar tricks over the next year or so (but I had learned my lesson from the first incident and had turned into a fanatical maker of backups).

Luckily, I was in a very good mood at the time for other reasons, and this little disaster rolled off my back with a fairly easy laugh. But translating 25 pages from German to English is not so fast an exercise, and when having to redo pages I had already done it was highly frustrating.

There must be some unspeakable tragedies out there with graduate students and erased dissertations. Don’t add your name to the list.

Composition of Philosophy. July 23.

The draft of the first half of the book is finally done.

It’s somewhere under 70 pages, meaning it’s just about the right length already. But there’s some unevenness– Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are too long, while Chapters 3 and 5 are too short. The entire draft is also fairly poorly written, but you all know I don’t care about that in the initial stage. The witchcraft that turns flat propositions into alluring riddles is best practiced near the end.

General remark: this was one of the toughest weeks of writing I’ve had in quite awhile, meaning that it wasn’t especially enjoyable, and thus I often had to force myself to work. The difference between 2009 and 1995, for me, is that in 1995 if I were having a tough writing week I would have done nothing and just read books while waiting for the mood to pass. These days, I don’t wait for it to pass. I’m able to put something together even when not especially feeling like working, and that something is always good raw material for when the special mood really does hit.

There seem to be two different schools of thought about the value of “inspiration.” Some find it essential, while others scorn this notion and think of writing as a craft that can be done for a specified number of hours per day.

So far on this blog, it might sound like I’m an advocate of the second approach. But that’s not quite true. I also think that inspiration is important. I simply don’t think you need to have it on the first draft. I’ve chosen to downplay inspiration on this blog simply because dissertation writers are guilty of waiting for inspiration far more often than they are guilty of the opposite extreme of soulless production. I do think there should be a spark of magic in any piece of writing, but I also think it can come at one of several different stages in the project.

The first draft can be a fairly flat aggregate of poorly written paragraphs strung together in a reasonably good order based on a preliminary outline. And then it can be recrafted from that form into something much better. Sometimes you get lucky and the Muses are with you from the start. But that isn’t always the case. And if you never try a first draft of anything until the Muses arrive, you’re often going to go for months without doing anything, because sometimes that’s how seldom they arrive.

Do you think Michelangelo or Rembrandt moped around at home waiting to be inspired? Not really. They went into the studio and worked. Which isn’t to say that it’s only a practical craft, just that a lot of the preliminaries can be done in the manner of a craft, and then maybe one night the spirit returns and you are able to breathe life into the whole thing. That’s the point when you really start to fall in love with a project. But you don’t need to be in love with a project yet just to work on it.

So far, I’m not in love with this draft. But I’ll surely be in love with it by the end of August. You’ll start to notice the change in tone once I reach that stage.

Now, what’s next? My new goal is still to have a completely polished first five chapters by July 31, which would give me all of August to write the second half.

Shall I start tomorrow? Or shall I press the reset button with a day-trip to Alexandria? I’m thinking the latter, but if I’m in an especially good writing mood then I’ll stay home and do that.

signoff

Part of me wants to stay up later (it’s nearly 1 AM now) and finish off this draft. But the experience of recent days has reminded me of the virtues of a sane sleep schedule, so I’m going to do the normally unthinkable and kill off a good writing mood with sleep. Usually I do that only if there are obligations the next day involving other people, but I’m making an exception this time, simply because I felt much better today once back on a normal person’s schedule.

Composition of Philosophy. July 22.

I’ll do this one early tonight.

One scheduling fallacy of which many authors are regularly guilty, including me, is the assumption that you need a big block of uninterrupted time in which to write. Quite often, the opposite is the case.

Remember, the feeling of infinity is usually a hindrance rather than a help to any writing project. And the feeling of a vast block of free time can also be a hindrance. I was reminded of that earlier this week, when my total lack of obligations made me waste too much time on breaks between section, and eventually even ruined my sleep schedule.

Today, I had obligations that took me to campus early in the morning, which also involved forced sleep last night before I was ready to sleep, meaning that almost nothing got done yesterday. But the effect has been wonderful. Having only a half-day at my disposal rather than a full day has been a tonic in terms of productivity, energy, and enthusiasm.

Also, my phone talk tonight with Paris, while unnecessary and based on the false worry that I had been given incorrect information, also helped re-create a link to reality for this project. If you’re writing alone as if in a monastery, especially in the middle of the night, a certain fundamental insanity begins to creep into any project. The more the project stays linked to constraints of any kind (and interactions with other people are always a mild form of constraint on the seemingly infinite thoughts within) the more real the project becomes, and the happier you will feel about it.

What’s my new plan, after a few days of falling behind? I’ll have the draft done tomorrow. Then it seems reasonable to have it all polished up by July 31. The original plan was to have it all polished up by today or tomorrow, and the next plan was to have the polished first 65 or 70 pages done by the end of the coming weekend. So there has already been slippage from the ideal schedule– but, it doesn’t matter. There will still be a full month to write and polish the second 65 or 70 pages.

Once that’s all done, I’ll need to think about the “possible” second half of the book. Remember, the length of the book can be doubled if the matching grant is received from France, but that will not be known until at least late 2009, it seems.

The way I think I’ll handle that problem is to just go ahead and write the second half, throughout Fall Semester. This book will appear in English as well, after all, and there is no constraint on length with the English publisher. That way, the second half will be ready to go for the French version as well, if funding is obtained.

contingencies

This evening I received a wonderfully (because harmlessly) urgent call from the people on the French end of this book project.

For some reason they thought, to their horror, that they had misinformed me about the length of the book and had accidentally requested something much much shorter than they wanted. It was actually quite charming, because they hadn’t misinformed me at all.

Well… the original estimate was just a tiny bit off the mark. It’ll need to be about 5% shorter than I originally thought.

But at least I now understand the French terminology for these things:

signes includes blank spaces

caractères does not include blank spaces

I’m now told that I’m working in signes, not caractères, and that clears up the final remaining ambiguities.

It was a fun call, patched from a mobile phone in the Paris metro to my flat in Cairo by way of the AUC switchboard. And we got cut off once, just as the familiar Paris Metro “doors closing” sound went off in the background.

Composition of Philosophy. July 21.

What a (relatively minor) mess. My transition to the hateful, archaic, all-night schedule was completed when I woke up at noon today– a pattern I detest, but which so often happens to me during summertime. My all-night days are over. They don’t bring happiness.

Out of necessity, however, I was preparing for another all-night writing session tonight, but then something happened: a minor administrative crisis requires my presence on campus first thing in the morning. This means that I need to go to sleep right about now, even though I feel like staying up for another 6 or 7 hours and writing.

Downside: today is a complete writeoff on the book.

Upside: this will force me to get back into a reasonable schedule.

These things happen, which is why working close to deadlines is never a good idea. Try to finish weeks ahead of any due date, if possible. If the deadline for this book were July 31 rather than August 31, I would now be in a terrible state of panic.