Topic: Writing

Over the past few weeks, I have developed (redeveloped?) the habit of pushing through a few hundred words of fiction writing a day on the train. If nothing else, this means I get a few pages done a day. I sometimes wish that I were able to write more, writing something is better than nothing, and I’m within a chapter and some change of the end of this beast, so I’ll take it. Some, dare I say most, days the writing is pretty easy, but it can get a bit rough. The problem is really when the writing is impossible. After all, if writing were easy, than we wouldn’t really think of it as work.

Most of the time, I don’t feel “blocked,” but I got close last week. I got to the end of a section and I realized I was in a bit of a corner. I’d changed the order of a few little events, and I didn’t think it would change much.

Except it did, which left me pretty stuck.

It wasn’t an unsolvable problem, but because I was faced with writing a scene under a different set of assumptions than the one I’d been thinking about, I didn’t know how to proceed. My solution was to take a step back, think about things, and then redesign the next scene so that it accomplished what I needed. This took a day or two.

Most of the time the only real marker for progress in writing is in “number of words recorded,” but the truth is this is the fun part of writing. The hard part is, and the part that I had gotten stuck in was, figuring out what’s worth writing. Here are some interesting lessons about writing for your consideration:

• Sometimes the most productive thing you can do as a writer is to not write and spend time figure out what doesn’t need to be said. It doesn’t make your writing longer, but it does make your writing more clear and more useful as a result.

• As a corallary, sometimes the most important thing you can do to a text is remove stuff that is distracting.

• Although having too many “open projects” on your plate can make you feel like you’re spread too thin, it’s true that having a lot of things in the air increases your chance of getting thigns done, because having multiple projects in different stages lets you get more work done in general.

  Sometimes the best way to solve these kinds of problems with writing is to take a break and go for a walk. Or a couple of walks. This is difficult to do on the train and can be hard to practice effectively in more conventional situations life. What’s the difference between taking a break to clear your mind, and breaking your writing ritual/habit? It’s hard to say.

If you do it right, the great thing is that after a break and some serious thinking time, a clear mind makes it possible to get past bigger challenges accomplish something important. I’ll leave the judgements of “how much time away is enough,” and “how much time is too much,” to the reader (and myself!) as an exercise, but don’t always be afraid of taking a break.

And if you won’t, I won’t either.

Onward and Upward!

I’m a writer. I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer, with an open text editing program, and I write things that hopefully--after a bit of editorial work--will be useful, enlightening, and/or entertaining as appropriate. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager and frankly it never seemed to be particularly notable a skill. The fact that I came of age with the Internet a member of its native participant-driven textual culture had a profound effect, without question. This is a difficult lineage to manage and integrate.

Obviously I’m conflicted: on the one hand I think that the Internet has been great for allowing people like me to figure out how to write. I am forever thankful for the opportunities and conversations that the Internet has provided for me as a writer. At the same time, the Internet, and particularly the emergence of “Social Media” as a phenomena complicates what I do and how my work is valued.

Let’s be totally clear. I’m not exactly saying “Dear Internet, Leave content generation to the professionals,” but rather something closer to “Dear Internet, Let’s not distribute the responsibility of content generation too thinly, and have it come back to bite us in the ass.” Let me elaborate these fears and concerns a bit:

I’m afraid that as it becomes easier and easier to generate content, more will start creating things, and there will be more and more text and that will lead to all sorts of market-related problems, as in a vicious cycle. If we get too used to crowd sourcing content, it’s not clear to me that the idea of “paying writers for their efforts,” will endure. Furthermore, I worry that as the amount of content grows, it will be harder for new content to get exposure and the general audience will become so fragmented that it will be increasingly difficult to generate income from such niche groups.

Some of these fears are probably realistic: figuring out how we will need to work in order to our jobs in an uncertain future is always difficult. Some are not: writing has never been a particularly profitable or economically viable project, and capturing audience is arguably easier in the networked era.

The answer to these questions is universally: we’ll have to wait and see, and in the mean time, experimenting with different and possibly better ways of working. My apologies for this rip-off, but it’s better to live and work as if we’re living in the early days of an exciting new era, rather than the dying days of a faltering regime.

Perhaps the more interesting implication of this doesn’t stem from asking “how will today’s (and yesterday’s) writers survive in the forthcoming age,” but rather “how do these changes affect writing itself.” If I don’t have an answer to the economic question, I definitely don’t have an answer to the literary question. I’m hoping some of you do.

As an interesting peak behind the curtain, this post was mostly inspired as a reaction to this piece of popular criticism that drove me batty. It’s not a bad piece and I think my objections are largely style and form related rather than political. Perhaps I’m responding to the tropes of fan writing, and in retrospect my critique of this piece isn’t particularly relevant here. But that article might provide good fodder for discussion. I look forward to your thoughts in comments or on a wiki page.

Onward and Upward!

I spent a lot of formative time in high school and college listening to writing teachers and would be mentors tell me that I was too sloppy or too disorganized to write effectively. They were probably right. Furthermore, this is probably not something that I think I’ve been able to keep secret from anyone who has read my blog for any measurable period of time. (Though I do think most of my more recent entries are better than nearly all of my early entries.) What no one really dared to tell me, are probably the most important things I’ve learned as a writer:

• First, that editors are not only essential to the writing process, but that there’s something fundamentally wrong if something leaves the original author and is handed to final readers without passing through at least one editor, and often more.
• Second, the skill of writing isn’t necessarily being able to write artful sentences, or being able to perfectly apply all of the rules of grammar (which, aren’t detrimental to the craft of writing). No, writing is about being able to get things written. Writing is pobably about being able to do research while keeping in mind the parameters of the project and ending up with a few paragraphs on a given topic that make sense and enlighten more than they confuse. That is considerably more rare.

The problem, and I wish I had a solution for this, is that there is no real way to teach people to write and to love writing. Exposing people to lots of examples of writing (i.e. literature) is helpful in teaching people to read and cherish the practice of reading. Unfortunately, I think reading and writing pull on vastly different skills. And while readers have a useful and required prospective on the text, readers who don’t write often provide ambiguous and difficult to assimilate feedback.¹

Fundamentally, I think, readers live on the plane of words, and writers--at least writer’s like me--live on the plane of paragraphs. And then there’s the whole issue of confusing a love of reading with a need or desire to write, but that’s another story for another time.

The way, I think, to learn how to write better is to write a lot of crappy stuff and learn how to “fail” better and more gracefully. Blogging has and is a great tool for me in this regard, but it’s not a cure-all, and I think integrating blogging in the writing curriculum is a difficult project that requires a very nuanced view of blogging, and the right set of learning objective. Beyond this, the project of learning to write and learning to write “better” is one that I’m not sure how to properly facilitate in myself or in others.

At the end of the day, I think it’s important to realize that growth as a writer isn’t the kind of thing that happens quickly. Being a writer is a life-long project with slow and steady improvement, minor regressions, stunning breakthroughs, dashed hopes, and tactical successes.

Onward and Upward!

I don’t read romance literature.

It’s not my thing, which isn’t saying much: there’s a lot of literature that I don’t tend to consider “my thing,” for one reason or another. I don’t really read fantasy, or horror, and I’m even picky within science fiction. There are enough books out there and there is only so much time. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Nevertheless, Susan Groppi wrote a great post about coming out as a reader of romance that I found useful. I’m also reminded of comments that N. K. Jemison made about the in progress merging of the fantasy and romance genres (sorry if I’ve miss-cited this), and I’ve been thinking about how I view Romance fiction, and perhaps a bit more generally about genre fiction ghettos.

In general, I think Romance has merit, both because it’s entrancing and I think fiction which captures people’s imaginations and interest I worthwhile and important to not dismiss because it’s commercial, or the readership/writers are largely women. There are potential problems with romance, at least insofar as we typically envision it: with strong hetero tendencies, an idealization of monogamy as a social practice and marriage as an institution, and the potential to accept a very conventional conceptualization of gender. I’m sure some romance literature has been able to engage and trouble these troupes productively, but I think it’s a potential concern.

Having said that, I’m not sure that Romance has a lot of future as a genre. This is to say that I think many of the elements of romance--female characters, and an engagement with sexuality and relationships--will increasingly merge into other genres. Romance as an independent genre will linger on, but I think the “cool stuff happening in the Romance field,” will probably eventually move out into corners of other genres: thriller, fantasy, maybe science fiction.

Actually, as I think about this, it’s probably backwards. I think it’s less that Romance doesn’t have a future, as it is that the future of most popular literature lies in engaging with romance-elements and other aspects of romance stories the context of non-romance specific styles. This kind of thing is happening, and I think it’ll probably continue to happen.

I wish I could speak with greater certainty about the reasons why romance literature enjoy higher readership, or what elements of romance stories can be transplanted to other genres, but I think these are probably questions which are beyond the scope of this post. Thanks for reading!

I agreed to work on an article for a friend about the collaborative technology “stuff” that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I don’t have an archive that covers this subject, but perhaps I should, because I think I’ve written about the technology that allows people to make things with other people a number of times, though I have yet to pull together these ideas into some sort of coherent post or essay.

This has been my major post-graduation intellectual challenge. I have interests, even some collected research, and no real way to turn these half conceptualized projects into a “real paper.” So I’ve proposed working with a friend to collect and develop a report that’s more concrete and more comprehensive than the kind of work that I’ve been attempting to accomplish on the blog. Blogging is great, don’t get me wrong, but I think it leads to certain kinds of thinking and writing (at least as I do it,) and sometimes other kinds of writing and thinking are required.

Regarding this project, I want to think about how technology like “git” (a distributed version control system) and even tools like wiki’s shape the way that groups of people can collaborate with each other. I think there’s an impulse in saying “look at the possibilities that these tools create! This brave new world is entirely novel, and not only changes the way I am able to complete my work, but how I look at problems, and make it so much easier for me to get things done..” At the same time, the technology can only promote a way of working it doesn’t necessarily enforce a way of working, nor does any particular kind of technology really remove the burdens and challenges of “getting things done.” More often perhaps new kinds of technology, like distributed version control, is responsible for increasing the level of abstracting and allowing us (humans) to attend to higher order concerns.

Then, moving up from the technology, I think looking at how people use technology in this class allows us to learn a great deal about how work is accomplished. We can get an idea of when work is being done, an idea of how quality control efforts are implemented. Not only does this allow us to demystify the process of creation, but having a more clear idea of how things are made could allow us to become better makers.

The todo list, then, is something like:

• Condense the above into something that resembles a thesis/argument.
• Become a little more familiar with the git-dm (“data mining”) tool that the Linux Foundation put together for their “state of Kernel development.”
• Develop some specific questions to address. I think part of my problem above and heretofore has been that I’m saying “there’s something interesting here, if we looked,” rather than. “I think w kind of projects operate in x ways, where y projects will operate in z ways.”
• Literature review. I’ve done some of this, but I’ve felt like I need to do even more basic methodological and basic theory reading. And even though an unread Patterns of Culture is on my bookshelf, I don’t need to read that to begin reading articles.

That’s a start. Feedback is always useful. I’ll keep you posted as I progress.

I’ve been toying around with the Notmuch Email Client which is a nifty piece of software that provides a very minimalist and powerful email system that’s inspired by the organizational model of Gmail.

Mind you, I don’t think I’ve quite gotten it.

Notmuch says, basically, build searches (e.g. “views”) to filter your email so you can process your email in the manner that makes the most sense to you, without needing to worry about organizing and sorting email. It has the structure for “tagging,” which makes it easy to mark status for managing your process (e.g. read/unread, reply-needed), and the ability to save searches. And that’s about it.

Functionally tags and saved searches work the way that mail boxes in terms of the intellectual organization of mailboxes. Similarly the ability to save searches, makes it possible to do a good measure of “preprocessing.” In the same way that Gmail changes the email paradigm by saying “don’t think about organizing your email, just do what you need to do,” not much says “do less with your email, don’t organize it, and trust that the machine will be able to help you find what you need when the time comes.”

I’ve been saying variations of the following for years, but I think on some level it hasn’t stuck for me. Given contemporary technology, it doesn’t make sense to organize any kind of information that could conceivably be found with search tools. Notmuch proves that this works, and although I’ve not been able to transfer my personal email over, I’m comfortable asserting that notmuch is a functional approach to email. To be fair, I don’t feel like my current email processing and filtering scheme is that broken, so I’m a bad example.

The questions that this raises, which I don’t have a particularly good answers for, are as follows:

• Are there good tools for the “don’t organize when you can search crew,” for non-email data? And I’m not just talking about search engines themselves (as there are a couple: xapian, namazu), or ungainly desktop GUIs (which aren’t without utility,) but the proper command-line tools, emacs interfaces, and web based interfaces?
• Are conventional search tools the most expressive way of specifying what we want to find when filtering or looking for data? Are there effective improvements that can be made?
• I think there’s intellectual value created by organizing and cataloging information “manually,” and “punting to search” seems like it removes the opportunity to develop good and productive information architectures (if we may be so bold.) Is there a solution that provides the ease of search without giving up the benefits that librarianism brings to information organization?

I’ve done a little tweaking to the archives for dialectical futurism recently, including creating a new archive for science fiction and writing and being who I am this has inspired a little of thought regarding the state and use of archives of blogs.

The latest iteration of this blog has avoided the now common practice of having large endless lists of posts organized by publication month or by haphazardly assigned category and tag systems. While these succeed at providing a complete archive of every post written, they don’t add any real value to a blog or website. I’m convinced that one feature of successful blogs moving forward will be archives that are curated and convey additional value beyond the content of the site.

Perhaps blogs as containers for a number of posts will end up being to ephemeral than I’m inclined to think about them, and will therefore not require very much in the way of archives, Perhaps, Google’s index will be sufficient for most people’s uses. Maybe. I remain unconvinced.

Heretofore, I have made archives for tychoish as quasi-boutique pieces: collections of the best posts that address a given topic. This is great from the perspective of thinking about blog posts as a collection of essays, but I’ve started to think that this may be less less useful if we think of blogs as a collection of resources that people might want to have access to beyond it’s initial ephemeral form.

Right now my archives say “see stuff from the past few months, and several choice topics on which I wrote vaguely connected sequences of posts.” The problem with the list of posts from the last few months is that beyond date, there’s not a lot of useful information beyond the title and the date. The problem with the topical archives is that they’re not up to date, their not comprehensive even for recent posts, and there’s little “preview” of a given post beyond it’s title. In the end I think the possibility of visiting a topical archive looking for a specific post and not finding it is pretty large.

In addition to editorial collecting, I think archives, guides, or indexes of a given body of information ought to, provide some sort of comprehensive method for accessing information. There has to be some middle ground.

I think the solution involves a lot of hand mangling of content, templates, and posts. I’m fairly certain that my current publication system is probably not up for the task without a fair amount of mangling and beating. As much as I want to think that this is an problem in search of the right kind of automation, I’m not sure that’s really the case. I’m not opposed to editing things by hand, but it would increase the amount of work in making any given post significantly.

There is, I suspect, no easy solution here.

Before a road trip a, by now, a couple of months ago, I installed a copy of nginx on my laptop on the hope of doing some web development and working on other projects when I was in the car. For the uninitiated (you mean you don’t all write technical documentation for web developers and systems administrators?!?) nginx is an incredibly powerful web server. As of June 11th, foucualt the server that hosts the Cyborg Institute and tychoish.

This is, almost always, I think, a loosing proposition.

I never get any sort of substantial (or insubstantial) work done during my road trips up-and-down the north east corridor. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I also expect that there’ll be more awake-time when I’m not driving or gossiping.

And there never is.

So the web server sat unused for a long time on my laptop, but recently I’ve been playing with it a bit and I’ve finally gotten a number of cool things set up. I have a local “git web” instance which makes it easier to track progress on local and private projects that are stored in git. Perhaps more importantly, I have set up quick local ikiwiki instances for a number of projects. They’re easy to configure, quick to setup, and while I suppose I could hack something together in nifty for myself, there’s something nifty about being able to take an alternate view of some content and also being able to really preview changes to you work before publishing them.

Also, and the real reason for this post, is that by virtue of this development, I have revisited a few projects that had been lingering in the home directory of my computer for far too long. Which has been a powerful and useful exercise.

By which I mean, it’s been painful.

Besides “the novel,” which has been the lingering and dragging front burner project for a year, there are a number of quasi-serial stories that have lingered in some state of incompleteness for a couple of years now. I’m kind of amazed both at how foreign these stories seem to me both in terms of the style (good to know that I’m a better writer than I was a few years ago,) and also how quickly I can fall right back into the story and tell you every little thing about the world, situation, and moment where I left off.

The mind is, indeed, an amazing thing.

Where my strategy for the past year has been to “plow through and finish the novel,” I think my tactic this summer will be to move all of my projects forward in some way. Small daily writing goals for the novel, combined with somewhat less regular (but more specific) goals with regards to other projects. In the next two months I want to have a fairly active and varied writing schedule worked out that isn’t based around the monthly (or so) weekend binges that I’ve been using for most of the last year.

That’s the plan at any rate.

I’ve been working with a reader and friend on a project to build a tool for managing information for humanities scholars and others who deal with textual data, and I’ve been thinking about the problem of information management a bit more seriously. Unlike numerical, or more easily categorized information data, how to take a bunch of textual information--either of your own production or a library of your own collection--is far from a solved problem.

The technical limitation--from a pragmatic perspective--is that you need to have an understanding not only of the specific tasks in front of you, but a grasp of the entire collection of information you work with in order to effectively organize, manage, and use the texts as an aggregate.

“But wait,” you say. “Google solved this problem a long time ago, you don’t need a deterministic information management tool, you need to brute force the problem with enough raw data, some clever algorithms, and search tools,” you explain. And on some level you’d be right. The problem is of course, you can’t create knowledge with Google.

Google doesn’t give us the ability to discover information that’s new, or powerful. Google works best when we know exactly what we’re looking for, the top results in Google are most likely to be the resources that the most people know and are familiar. Google’s good, and useful and a wonderful tool that more people should probably use but Google cannot lead you into novel territory.

Which brings us back to local information management tools. When you can collect, organize, and manipulate data in your own library you can draw novel conclusions, When the information is well organized, and you can survey a collection in useful and meaningful ways, you can see holes and collect more, you can search tactically, and within subsets of articles to provide. I’ve been talking for more than a year about the utility of curation in the creation of value on-line. and fundamentally I think the same holds true for personal information collections.

Which brings us back to the ways we organize information. And my firm conclusion that we don’t have a really good way of organizing information. Everything that I’m aware of either relies on search, and therefore only allows us to find what we already know we’re looking for, or requires us to understand our final conclusions during the preliminary phase of our investigations.

The solution to this problem is thus two fold: First, we need tools that allow us to work with and organize the data for our projects, full stop. Wiki’s, never ending text files, don’t really address all of the different ways we need to work with and organize information. Secondly we need tool tools that are tailored to the way researchers who deal in text work with information from collection and processing to quoting and citation, rather than focusing on the end stage of this process. These tools should allow our conceptual framework for organizing information to evolve as the project evolves.

I’m not sure what that looks like for sure, but I’d like to find out. If you’re interested, do help us think about this!

(Also, see this post `regarding the current state of the Cyborg Institute <http://www.cyborginstitute.com/2010/06/a-report-from-the-institute/>`_.)

I’ve been trying to figure out wikis for a long time. It always strikes me that the wiki is probably the first truly unique (and successful) textual form of the Internet age. And there’s a lot to figure out. The technological innovation of the wiki is actually remarkably straightforward,¹ and while difficult the community building aspects of wikis are straightforward.² The piece of the wiki puzzle that I can’t nail down in a pithy sentence or two is how to organize information effectively on a wiki.

That’s not entirely true.

The issue, is I think that there are a number of different ways to organize content for a wiki, and no one organizational strategy seems to be absolutely perfect, and I’ve never been able to settle on a way of organizing wiki pages that I am truly happy with. The goals of a good wiki “information architecture” (if I may be so bold) are as follows:

• Clarity: It should be immediately clear to the readers and writers of a wiki where a page should be located in the wiki. If there’s hierarchy, it needs to fit your subject area perfectly and require minimal effort to grok. Because you want people to focus on the content rather than the organization, and we don’t tend to focus on organizational systems when they’re clear.
• Simplicity: Wikis have a great number of internal links and can (and are) indexed manually as needed, so as the proprietor of a wiki you probably need to do a lot less “infrastructural work” than you think you need to. Less is probably more in this situation.
• Intuitive: Flowing from the above, wikis ought to strive to be intuitive in their organization. Pages should answer questions that people have, and then provide additional information out from there. One shouldn’t have to dig in a wiki for pages, if there are categories or some sort of hierarchy there pages there shouldn’t be overlap at the tips of various trees.

Strategies that flow from this are:

• In general, write content on a very small number of pages, and expand outward as you have content for those pages (by chopping up existing pages as it makes sense and using this content to spur the creation of new pages.
• Use one style of links/hierarchy (wikish and ciwiki fail at this.) You don’t want people to think: Should this be a camel case link? Should this be a regular one word link? Should this be a multiple word link with dash separated words or underscore separated words? One convention to rule them all.
• Realize that separate hierarchies of content within a single wiki effectively create separate wikis and sites within a single wiki, and that depending on your software, it can be non-intuitive to link between different hierarchies.
• As a result: use as little hierarchy and structure as possible. hierarchy creates possibilities where things can go wrong and where confusion can happen. At some point you’ll probably need infrastructure to help make the navigation among pages more intuitive, but that point is always later than you think it’s going to be.
• Avoid reflexivity. This is probably generalizable to the entire Internet, but in general people aren’t very interested in how things work and the way you’re thinking about your content organization. They’re visiting your wiki to learn something or share some information, not to think through the meta crap with you. Focus on that.
• Have content on all pages, and have relatively few pages which only serve to point visitors at other pages. Your main index page is probably well suited as a traffic intersection without additional content, but in most cases you probably only need a very small number of these pass through pages. In general, make it so your wikis have content everywhere.

… and other helpful suggestions which I have yet to figure out. Any suggestions from wiki maintainers?