Sunday, July 7, 2002

a pool of polished writing chunks #

Off and on since my early teen years, I have kept a journal.  All the jotting in journals have resulted in a large volume of writing.  Although it's been extremely helpful to have a place to do a braindump/heartdump, I feel as though I should end up with more refined pieces of writing coming out of this production.   Moreover,  I struggle a lot with focus, being interested in too many things for me to ply the materials with any depth.  The question regularly comes to me:   is there any way that I can order my writing (and writing process) so that I can accumulate writing that will add up over time, so that my thinking/feeling/action can converge rather than just diverge or go on and on in circles.  In other words, how can I train myself to produce more polished pieces of writing that can constructed or mined or refined from the pool of journal (and other) writing.  I do write a lot - but there's a lot of dreggy stuff.  Nothing wrong with dregs - but I think that I can produce more than just dregs.   This afternoon, I am starting a somewhat new experiment of "living more deeply through writing more deeply"   I want to consciously work on moving beyond just journaling or creating yet more long lists of ideas that never get passed the conception phase.  Journaling is still valuable to me -- and my list-making ain't stopping no time soon.  But I want to create a pool (database?) of polished writing on the ideas/things/people I care about that represent accurately, succintly, and perhaps eloquently, a state in my thinking/feeling about that subject. I do not know how successful this experiment in polished short pieces will be.  I do draw inspiration from one example in own life.  In 1996, I took about three months to compose a 7-page "manifesto" in which I worked out where I was heading after graduate school.  The manifesto, in which I made a brief but well-crafted statement of my passions and interests and values, remains an incredibly helpful piece of writing to me.  Writing it made me work through tough issues with a rigor I would not have applied if I had just dashed out another journal entry.  And now, six years later, some parts still represent cogently what I still value and ponder. In the year or two after writing the manifesto, I attempted to write version II of the manifesto -- a meditation on life that I conceived on a book length scale.  I never finished it, partly because I tried to write about way too many things at once  rather than focus on individual pieces to get them right first.  I lost focus and did not have the energy to get too far.  It felt that once I half-finished one chapter and moved on to another, that the first chapter was no longer accurate. This little "chunk" of writing about the writing experiment is perhaps the first product of this experiment.  This afternoon, I want to do a survey of the different aspects of my life and maybe brainstorm a list of writing pieces to work on.  I want to make sure that I don't go overboard and make yet another  list (this time of chunks to write)  that totally overwhelms me.  But let's see what I come up with.  Then, after arriving a some ideas, I want to do a bit of preliminary writing and see what happens.  Now in this list of chunks to write, I will probably want to capture the idea (in a polished sentence), note the audience for this writing (myself?  friends?  a more general audience?), the genre that would be best fit, the scope, and perhaps the venue (my blog?  my journal?  letters?  magazine article?) Before I end, I feel that I would be remiss in not writing a bit about the technology that I would love to have to support this type of "chunked writing".  There's much more to say than the few sentences I'll write here.  Anyone who knows what I do for a living will immediately understand my interest in chunks of writing, especially chunks that can be reused.  I'll naturally want to be able to store, markup, and search through my collection of writing (and other writings that I collect) so that I can find, rewrite, assemble, and re-interpret and publish what I have written in different forms.  My current writing systems (Ecco + Microsoft Word + LaTeX + Manila + Radio) is inadequate for the job -- but I need to start somewhere.  I hope that as I do more of this type of chunked writing and develop some success with the mechanics of such writing that I'll also be finding and creating supporting tools. (I want to note that my idea was probably inspired to a great part by something I read a long time ago in one of my favorite books, Ronald Gross' Independent Scholar's Handbook (p. 35)  Gross writes about keeping a journal of project ideas, which start as a simple sentence -- and then may evolve into large scale projects.)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/7/02; 7:41:55 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss