Writing is a craft; it takes practice. The evocative power of ethnography to convey understanding requires careful attention to words. Words matter. Notes, fragments and jottings are the opening gambit of anthropology. They give energy to anthropologists’ writing and give us subjects to write about. We often begin with stories, fragments, and ethnographic shorts. These are the building blocks of an anthropological enterprise. But, to write them, requires reflecting on the writing process. So, why not experiment. Play. See what works. Read to. Keep reading. Write about what you read. Publish before you are ready. Write more. Rinse. Repeat. Write is a practice.
Writing as a practice needs to be decolonised. Words are often a black box that undergraduates and graduate students and professors aren’t really taught how to do.
As students, we engage with finished pieces and rarely see the messiness of the writing process. Writing is messy. It’s so so messy. Write. Cut. Revise. Reorder. Move. Writing is done on the page. But, the work can be creative and playful. It need not be a slog. It can be a place to experiment. So, play. Play with with free writing, play with genres, write essays, research notes, book reviews, articles, blog posts, social media posts. Experiment with writing short. Play with writing long. Write to think. Experiment with collaborative and group writing. Experiment in the classroom. See what works. See what doesn’t. Failure is fine. Try again.
What I am trying say is separate the writing from the anxieties and emotions of academic work. Ideas are important, sure. But, for me, they always emerge, truly, on the page. It’s on the page where I can make them do wonders. Where I can test them out. Feel them. Taste them. Let the words sing.
As Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his memoir:
… You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend … I bow to them … I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I run after certain words … They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem … I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word… An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her… They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long … They are very ancient and very new… They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower …
— Pablo Neruda, “The Word,” in Memoirs. Penguin Books, 1978, p. 53.
Ideas that are unwritten cannot be made external, or thought about, or tested, or changed, or made to sing. Instead, they remain amorphous. Always a potential. Write them, reflect on them, rework them. Revise. Writing is fun. As fun, revising.
Don’t say, “What am I going to write about today?” Instead, go back. Ask “What have I already written about?
Try this exercise. Make a slip box. Put int it a collection of notes and essays and pieces of text you’ve already worked on.
Your task?
Engage with what you’ve already prepared. Reread it. Recycle. Work like British Marxiust Eric Hobsbawn did. Develop a willingness to go back into the well of ideas that are yours and rework them. Revise them into new forms. Test them in public. Write lectures, op-eds, letters, articles, book chapters, and books from each other.
Writing becomes a task of preparing for publication, rather than starting carte blanche.
The trick? Not to draft or write every day, but to prepare for publication. Preparing for publication short pieces, long pieces. Book reviews, articles, essays. It’s not the biggest and most complicated piece; it would be small pieces. What’s the smallest piece you could work on? Start with that.
Start with the words. See what comes from them.
I am working on a book that revisits particular moments from Colombia and which, for now, is also about writing. I say for now, because I keep changing the book. At times it’s both. At times, it’s neither.
But, its building blocks are ethnographic shorts. These are moments that let me build stories and place them stories in a wider context and makes more general claims. My method is inductive, relying on detailed description through elaboration and explanation, trying to make the particular speak to the universal. I boil moments down to their essence, return to field notes to expand and explain, develop one moment and link it to the next, supplement my accounts with others reports–newspapers and archives and videos and research. Decide what to focus on and whose voices to hear.
The words matter too, though. Play them.
Punctuate dialogue, consider verb choice, and revise for active voice unless passive voice is preferred. The words matter. I use transitive verbs to drive description and animate the inanimate. Strive for clarity. Write then rewrite to assemble moments and analysis. Consider exposition, character, scenes, narrative voice, point of view, time and rhythm. I move around, change perspectives, take different approaches and revisit the same theme from different directions. I remove myself from the action or take someone else’s point of view. I adopt an omniscient perspective and choose my approach.
Each is an ethnographic choice, a way of writing to describe and make sense of moments. The raw material for this slip box is the field notes, written on the laptop or in one of the journals or notebooks, as the beginning of a long, slow, sustained process of my becoming a writer.
As a graduate student, in the field, in the Chocó, when there was electricity–carried by an unreliable power line through the jungle and across at least two rivers—I filled a database on my computer with field notes. When there was no electricity because of storms, rain and fallen branches, I wrote longhand with a pen and the light of a candle. Writing the notes was part of my learning to write. The book I am working on reflects on that learning because I am convinced that the evocative power of ethnography to give understanding requires careful attention to words.
Writing requires thinking, but it also requires playing, experimenting, and refining different techniques and processes to discover effective ways of communicating.
