Daniel Tubb

Writer’s Diary #19 – Morning Choice

Daniel Tubb

This morning’s a choice, the choice of what to work on.

There are a lot of urgent things to do—visas to apply for, emails to answer, websites to set up, and lots of fires to put out.

But that’s what we’ve been doing for the last three days, diving into all of that. Back from vacation, it all seemed prudent. But it’s the summer. I don’t want to spend my summer of my sabbatical not writing.

Nobody will judge my success by my ability to send one last reply, one last email, least of all my sick self. So maybe there’s a conscious choice—it doesn’t take long to write a post. I want to do them regularly, then I can turn to fragments and makeshift.

So it’s a village walk, sitting down, typing this up, turning it into a podcast, and then doing fragments in the book—after the lunch meetings and a visa.

Writer’s Diary #18: Elizabeth Gilbert on Elusive Genius

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday I watched a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about elusive genius. I came to the talk via a Paul Krugman article asking if Taylor Swift is underpaid. (Short answer: she is). To build his argument, Krugman notes Swift is the real deal, as evidenced by this Tiny Desk concert. It’s good. Listen.

A few minutes in, Swift observes:

Writing songs is strange because it never happens the same way. But sometimes, it happens in a way that feels like this weird, like a haunting that you can’t really explain. Like you don’t know where these ideas came from, and you feel like you didn’t work at all to write it. And that’s the best kind of song. There are most days you show up and the idea doesn’t, and that’s where craft comes in. You have to know the craft of it, and you have to try to scrounge your brain for something to write. It’s not always going to be inspired, and that’s okay. There is a really good Elizabeth Gilbert TED talk about that. It’s one of my favorite things to cry while watching.

I may have gotten my transcription wrong. Anyway, I dropped everything, and listened to Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk. It’s good. Watch. I took notes. I may have gotten them wrong, as well.

Gilbert begins by reflecting on the success of Eat, Pray, Love. The problem? What comes next? How do you top that? Or maybe you can’t, and that’s why we become tortured artists.

Norman Miller once said, she says, “Every one of my books has killed me a little bit more.” This idea, the idea of artistic creativity, leading to untimely death and depression.

“That’s the kind of thought that could drive you to drink a glass of gin at 9 in the morning.”

She rejects the idea of the tortured artist. “I want to keep doing the work I love. The question is, how?”

How do you keep doing the work without killing yourself? One way, Gilbert’s TED Talk explores is to create a protective psychological construct between yourself and your writing. She’s looked for models of how to do this, and turned to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The Greeks and Romans, she explains, didn’t see creativity as coming from humans. Rather, they saw it coming from divine companion spirit, a daemon, for the Greeks, and a disembodied spirit, a genius, for the Romans. Rather than seeing genius as an embodiment of a person, the Greeks saw it as something outside: a magical, divine entity. Ancient artists were protected from too much narcissism when they made great works. Everyone knew there was a disembodied genius helping them, a daemon in the background doing the real hard work. If the work bombed, it was the genius’s fault, not the artists. Useless daemon.

This was the case until about the Renaissance, Gilbert explains. In the Renaissance, with rational humanism, creativity became seen as coming from the self, from the individual. From then on, the artist was a genius, rather than the artist had a genius. For the artist, this lead to the idea that you are the source of the creativity of the unknowable mystery, rather than just being helped along a genius in the studio walls. That’s a lot of pressure. Did this pressure led to tortured artists for 500 years?

The creative process is not rational. Sometimes it’s something that happens to you. There is an American poet, [Ruth Stone] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Stone), Gilbert explains, who told a story of growing up in Virginia, working in the fields, and then feeling and hearing a poem coming from a distance. It would come crashing down on her in the fields, shaking the earth, and Stone knew she had to run like hell to the house, get a paper and pencil, and write the poem. Sometimes she would walk slowly and miss it, and the poem would pass her by.
Gilbert describes her own process as different. Her approach is more mule like.

Mine is too.

We sweat and we work and we do the work. But sometimes we come up against that elusive genius.

How do you relate to Genius outside yourself?

Gilbert thinks of Tom Waits, that most famous struggling artist facing his demons. But as Waits got older, he calmed down, and he was driving, and a song came to him. Instead of getting anxious, he stopped that whole mental process of getting anxious and said, “Excuse me, can’t you see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write? Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

He saw, for the first time, that the creativity was external. This shift in perspective, Gilbert said, changed the way she thought about her work.

Writing Eat Pray Love, in the pits of despair, thinking this project was a disaster. Ready to throw it away, she remembered Waits, and she tried it.

She stood at the empty corner of her room, and said: “Look, we both know I am putting everything I have into this. If you want it to get better, you have to show up and do your part. My job is to keep writing.”

Did it work? Did it make her feel better? What if genius and creativity were outside of the self? What if the truly divine, the presence of God, the transcendent, were not the product of the individual, rational, human genius, but something other than oneself, something beyond our own control, something like the Greek daemon or the Roman genius. Not something you are, but something you have, sometimes. Mostly not.

This morning, on a walk, I tried it.

It was a terrible morning.

A morning not of writing, but of laundry, child care, and meetings, when I had a conversation with what I have come to think of as a knobbly, gnome-like creature assigned to my case who is an often unhelpful little creative spirit daemon who is never really there to help.

His name: Knobbly Toes.

“It’s not a good day, is it Knobbly Toes?” I say.

Knobbly Toes does not answer, of course.

It’s raining and I’m walking. I have a sore shoulder. I think I looked at the screen too much yesterday.”

“None of this is writing, is it?”

I imagine my gnomish genius Knobbly Toes walking in the grass where a few nights ago there were a thousand fireflies.

Silence.

“So you know what I’m going to do? Genius,” I say to nobody. “I’m going to go home; I’m going to make a decaf espresso; I’m going to go upstairs; I’m going to write this Writing Diary as well as I can in an hour and a half, and then I’m going to have my meetings this afternoon and then I’m going to make toast and go for a walk.”

Nothing.

I do what I say.

I’m not genius, and I’m usually not tortured, but maybe talking to the little bugger will make things better.

It did.

Writer’s Diary #17: On Naps

Daniel Tubb

This morning I revised two posts for this Writer’s Diary, rearranged the notes in the book of fragments, rewrote the first two fragments, and then tried to work on the makeshift book, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Looking at the introduction, and felt lost, not knowing where to begin. So I sent a chapter to my tablet and read it in bed. As I read, I saw areas that needed work. But I didn’t take notes. I was just reading. Soon, I fell asleep, then I awoke, read the news, slept some more, and thought about the chapter.

Sleeping is writing.

Later, I woke up, made a sandwich, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write. For an hour and a half, I revised and revised and revised, making small and large changes, tweaking and tightening all the while. Is it done? No. Is it better? Maybe. But that’s not the point. I lost track of time and almost hypnotized myself while working, and in the end, today was a great day of writing.

In part, because I feel asleep.

After all, writing can be fun. There is joy in the little, little decision that in the end creates a piece of writing. There is joy in a nap to think about it all.

Writer’s Diary #16 – Everything is a cut up

Daniel Tubb

The last few days I have been experimenting with a digital cut-up method. I’m inspired by Taussig’s book on oil palm in Colombia, which is inspired by William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method. Until yesterday, I had not looked into what that method is.

I think of it as a way to introduce a little bit of randomness into your writing. Take two pages of text. Cut them into quarters. Then mix the quarters from one half of the paper with the other half. This seems like an exercise in creating randomness based on material. But Burroughs then adds that he uses all the tricks of revision, composition, and all the rest for the cut-up method. That changes it for me. It’s a writer’s techniques. It’s a way to get material differently, to change perspective, to see connections, to make new connections, and, ultimately, to get raw material to work with.

And, what’s wrong with that?

Artists have long used montage, scissors, paper, glue, juxtaposition of words to make their work etc. Filmmakers work with juxtaposition and editing. Hip-hop makes music by mixing different material together. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith mixes text with image brilliantly in the exhibition at the Whitney museum.

On the one hand, what is a word processor but a machine to facilitate the editing process? But why not do it more consciously? Why not print, cut, and paste? Why not treat everything as a cut-up?

Perhaps the AI experiment of the last few days was a twenty-first century experiment in a cut-up method. But, maybe retyping and reworking texts is a good way to go, too.

I think cut-up will work for the fragments book—the makeshift book is different.

Writer’s Diary #15: Programming Challenge: Ordering a book of fragments?

Daniel Tubb

An update on the beach idea. It works, I think.

What was it? What problem does it solve?

I have a draft of an incomplete manuscript in Tinderbox: a book of ethnographic shorts. The idea? Get a sense of a place and time along the vein of Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects. It’s got some gems, but the whole draft has been stalled.

The problem? How to order the fragments. 255 fragments, 85,000 words. I do not know how to organize them all. The problem, trying to think about the whole, which is too much.

Some fragments I’ve spent weeks polishing. Others are very rough. But, every time I’ve tried to get into it, the whole seems further away.

I’ve tried various solutions: randomizing notes, linking them and following the links, reading and reorganizing them, etc. But, it’s still too much. The question of order has impeded the actual work that is required. I could probably edit a short to make it good in about 30 minutes. Do that a hundred times over a hundred days, and I have a book. But the second I try to do the whole thing, it falls apart.

A few days ago, while walking on the beach after reading Word Virus, an anthology of William S. Burroughs’ work, I had an idea for a twenty-first century cut-up method using ChatGPT?

At the time, I didn’t quite understand the cut up method, in its nuts and bolts. But, suffice, it’s a way to bring in the random to the writing. More on that tomorrow.

My question on the beach.

Could ChatGPT order the fragments into a book?

I tested the technique with ten fragments, by hand. The results were intriguing enough to make me think it could work.

Round 1: Doing it by hand

What did I do?

First, I asked ChatGPT to create a TITLE, TAGS, and SUMMARY for ten fragments, and return it as a spreadsheet.

Then I asked it to order them.

You are my writing assistant. Help me organize the text fragments. I am using the cut-up method of William S. Burroughs. So I will give you a CSV spreadsheet with a TITLE, TAGS, and SUMMARY. Please give me back a better order. This is for an ethnography. It’s a book of fragments. All I want is the order you suggest. And then a paragraph explaining the order. No need to give a summary or anything. Just the order, then a short paragraph explaining why.

After some tinkering, ChatGPT spit out a plausible order. I tried it out and liked the result.

Round 2: How to do it programmatically

The challenge, how to do this with 258 fragments? The answer, mostly programmatically. But the devil is in the details.

So, first in Tinderbox, I connected Tinderbox to ChatGPT via a Python command line script I’d written in the Spring, with the aid of ChatGPT. After a morning of work, I am able to ask Tinderbox to use ChatGPT to generate a $SubTitle, $Summary, $Tags, and $WritingStyle attribute for each note, automatically.

It took a while for all the agents to run.

But, after playing catch with the kids for a bit, I came back, and each fragment had these updated attributes. (There are some bugs I need to fix. But it’s a personal project, so I’ll just fix them by hand.

What I did next was export a subset of these to a CSV file, using the $ID to keep track of each fragment. I did twenty or so.

I then asked ChatGPT to work its magic.

It returned an order of IDs and an explanation. It seemed plausible. The order was intriguing, and frankly, better than I had. It’s good enough for me to want to keep working on it.

The next challenge was how to import the new order back into Tinderbox.

Round 3: How to reorder notes in Tinderbox

What’s the situation? I have a Tinderbox document with a draft container comprising all the fragments. I have a list generated by ChatGPT of a new order, comprising the $ID.

The question? How to get the latter back into the former so that the fragments were reorganized.

Since everything is a hammer, e.g. use the tools you know, my first thought was to use agents. I could create an agent that took as its own name a search query, and I could use that to find each note, and then update the $Order for each note from the text of the agent. But it felt clunky. Was there a better way?

Dicitonaries. A dictionary can hold a series of paired values:

$MyDictionary=dictionary(“cat:animal; dog:animal; rock: mineral”);

I’ve never used them. But, why not?
It worked. First, I used ChatGPT’s output to create a list in the form of $ID:$Outline.
1:1688302519; 2:1688301878; 3:1688301879; 4:1688301880; 5:1688301899; 6:1688301893; 7:1688302517; 8:1688301881; 9:1688301887; 10:1688301886; 11: 1688301888; 12:1688301890; 13:1688301891; 14:1688301892; 15:1688301894; 16:1688301895; 17:1688301896; 18:1688301897; 19:1688301898; 20:1688301900; 21: 1688301901; 22:1688301902; 23:1688301903; 24:1688301904; 25:1688301905; 26:1688301906; 27:1688301907; 28:1688301908; 29:1688301909; 30:1688301910; 31: 1688301911; 32:1688301912; 33:1688301913; 34:1688301914; 35:1688301883; 36:1688301884; 37:1688301885; 38:1688301882; 39:1688301889; 40:1688301900;

Then I use the following function to reorder the notes:

function fChatGPTReorderNotes(){ var:string vIDString
var:string vIDString;
var:integer vOutline;
var:string vPath;
$MyString=;
$MyDictionary=;

$MyDictionary=dictionary($Text);
$MyDictionary.keys.each(x){ vOutline = x
vOutline = x;
vIDString = $MyDictionary[x];
vPath = $Path(vIDString);
$ChatGPTOutline(vPath)=vOutline;
$MyString=$MyString+vOutline+":"+vIDString + “ [“ + vPath + “]; “;

};
};

That is, the function updates the $ChatGPTOutline for each note, using the imported dictionary held in the $Text field of a note.

I then simply run an agent that searches for ChatGPTOutline0, and is sorted by the ChatGPTOutline. Bingo, I’ve got the book of fragments in the right order.

I now have the fragments, reordered according to ChatGPT’s recommendation. That’s good. The challenge now is how to reorganize all 258 notes.

Round 4: 258 Notes

Here, it’s tricky. ChatGPT has limited memory and can’t iterate on 258 items at once. It seems to be able to do about 20 to 40 at a time. I see three ways to approach this.

  1. Try to get access to ChatGPT’s gpt-4-32k-0613 model which has the ability to work with 32,768 tokens. I’ve signed up for the waiting list. But, I suspect I’m small potatoes.
  2. Use ChatGPT to create a list of 250 notes, but in which each row is much shorter, with ten tokens per line at most.
  3. Programmatically iterate through the all the fragments, comparing each one to the next, and asking what order they should go in. This would be a bit like Tinderbox’s dance feature. The order would evolve over time. I could probably safely do five at once and then run it via agents. I’m not sure, but this is probably the right answer.

In any case, since #1 is beyond my control and #3 is a harder programming challenge, and I’m running out of steam, I’m going to give #2 a try. Cut down the data to something very short. I suspect this means it will be not as a strong a result. But, at this point, the goal is less perfection, and more does this work. I can then come back and try to do the third option another time.

Suffice to say, if you can get the list short enough, it works. Is the list useful, I’m not sure. But, I’m going to try it out, and then get to writing,

Writer’s Diary #14: Wait, Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

Daniel Tubb

Sorry for the riff on a remembered song lyric, but I’ve been thinking all day about waiting, slowing down, and not rushing as part of writing.

Let me take a step back. Yesterday, on the beach, I had an idea—a good one; I think. The cut-up method, a la William S. Burroughs, but modified for the 21st century.

(Or maybe it’s a terrible idea.) I don’t know yet.

In either case, it involves some programming magic in Tinderbox. But, I’m not a programmer, I’m a writer, so it’s going to take some time to make this idea work. A bit of fiddling, trial and error, and time.

What I would do in this situation is start working on this project and drop everything else. I would work so hard, and then about 2/3 of the way through, I would burn out, stop, and never finish. I would get grumpy, and not be nice to be around.

This morning, however, I only had about 30 minutes before I had to pack up for a beautiful day at the beach.

So, I finished the first step, and got far enough to know it would work, and then I realized that the way to move forward would be to work on it a little at a time, rather than all at once. Instead of my quotidian unfinished big blitz, the way forward would be to slow down, and work, and then stop in the middle while the going was good.

Tomorrow I’ll figure out what the steps would be to finish the idea, and then I’ll work on it again the next day. Either I’ll figure out it’s a stupid idea, or it’s an idea worth working on.

Although I’m only a novice runner, I think running is similar. It’s pretty clear you can’t train at full sprint all the time. You’ll burn out. Writing is the same way. Sometimes writing is a marathon, especially at the end. But other times it’s just a slow recovery run.

The trick, sometimes, is to hold off and slow down.

Writing Diary #13: Make Writing Fun, Again?

Daniel Tubb

My sabbatical starts tomorrow, so I have some time to get some work done. It feels like I can focus on the Makeshift draft. Yesterday, though, I tried to work on it all day, and after two hours I lost steam. Got grumpy. Tried to push through. Got nowhere.

I’ve been writing this journal for a few weeks now, and I’ve found that part of the trick is to make it a habit. It takes about 30 minutes to write a post, and I’ve been doing it. It’s been fun. I’ve been able to do this and also work on Makeshift. I’ve been able to do this, because it’s a different voice and because it’s plain old fun.

Which leads to me to ask: Can writing be fun?

But I’ve been thinking about how I tried to do too much on the book yesterday. At some point, my focus left me. In previous projects, I would work harder—more coffee, more time, and more effort. But this morning, as I leave for vacation and wait at the mall for family to finish shopping, I wonder if I should borrow a technique from Alan MacFarlane and David Graeber.

Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist who died in September 2020, once tweeted that he worked by having multiple projects on the go. (Of course, I might have misremembered, as I can’t find the tweet. But no matter.) Graber had the thing he had to do (Project A), the thing he wanted to do and was procrastinating on Project A by doing (Project B), and then all the things he didn’t want to do but had to do, e.g. reference letters. I may have misremembered all this, but the gist of it is that he would cycle between projects when one got hard. I like to think, when one got not fun. But, maybe I’m wrong.

Alan MacFarlane has an excellent video on all of this, and talks about doing the easy stuff first—I think he’s drawing on C. S. Lewis’s comparison between writing and eating fish. (The trick, do the easy stuff first.)

What about doing the fun stuff first? What about only doing the fun stuff?

Is it possible to get serious writing done by only doing the project when it’s fun? I’m not sure. But, I’m going to try it for a while.

For now, I’m going to set aside the mornings for writing. But instead of feeling obligated to write only one thing, if one project gets hard, I’ll switch to another. Making writing a chore just leads to grumpiness. And I don’t want to be another grumpy middle-aged white man. There are enough of those.

Writer’s Diary #12: Finishing a Draft

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday I finished a draft of the Introduction, printed it, and re-read it with an eye for editing. Now, with a draft, the question is what’s next? Bits are great. Parts suck. The chapter is unfinished. But, I need a change. The question for the diary: should I stay with it or should I go?

In my experience, writing is iterative work: slow, fast; hard, soft; work, pause. Work hard then leave a piece for a week or a month or more and come back to it.

This morning, my job is to do the big picture carving and then the little editing. Both, the micro and the macro, but the whole thing. With hard, focused work on the whole, and the removal of the big structural pieces I leave the entire chapter ready of a time, and then I can do something else.

Finishing is hard, but I never finish until much later. But along the way, I need space so that when I come back I can see ways to make the words better, shorter, tighter, cleaner, and clearer.

For this, distance is necessary.

Today is the last day of the introduction.

Writer’s Diary #11: The Synapses of Writing

Daniel Tubb

As part of moving this blog to WordPress, I’m going through old posts. This one, from 22 November 2013, stuck with me:

Last night at a party, I chatted writing and rewriting with a friend visiting from Vancouver. She freelances as a copy editor. I told her about On Writing Well, and she echoed many of Zinsser’s suggestions—be short, use as few words as possible, and revise. She suggested an approach new to me: Look for hidden verbs by getting rid of ‘To Be.’ This morning revising a section on small-scale mining, I find the technique works well.

So, what is writing, at least for me, if it isn’t an exercise in applying various tricks and techniques like this? Revising to remove the verb ‘to be,’ removing the first person, eliminating the passive voice, cutting words, revising again, cutting, shortening—these are all tools.

Writing a first draft is one thing. But turning that first draft into something that sings and stringing it together with other texts into a longer piece is another. Part of the trick is the idea and theory. But, much of the trick, at least in the way I approach matters, is an exercise in the not-so-systematic application of a whole series of ticks and tricks.

Some I know and can explain, some are intuitive, some are embodied, and some are technical. My writing style, if I have one, seems to me to emerge in part from the application of these different techniques to writing. For example, a few days ago, I wrote about using online grammar tools—the serial application of tools: cut, edit out, rephrase, rewrite, add things, expand, read aloud, print out and mark up with a pencil. Over time, as the

Parul Sehgal describes George Saunders’ notes on writing in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

I’m making the book sound revoltingly technical. It isn’t. Saunders lives in the synapses—he looks at all the minute and meaningful decisions that produce a sentence, a paragraph, a convincing character. He offers one of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of the writer that I’ve ever read — that state of heightened alertness, lightning-quick decisions.

These tools and techniques, which I appreciate and use, are my grist for those tiny, meaningful decisions that I deploy in the synapses of writing.

Writer’s Diary #10: Writing is like Flying: You have to throw yourself at the ground and miss

Daniel Tubb

I used to over-plan each chapter—it had to be perfect, do everything, and be worked out in advance.

For Makeshift I’m more modest, each chapter is one thing done well, in 6,000 words or so. Rather than trying to do too much, each chapter is short and does one thing. A scene, linked to analysis, woven into an argument. Together, these will create the book.

The first chapter begins with a scene of me lying on the linoleum, sweating, hot, unsure of how to proceed and trying to work it all out in advance. There is too much information and no easy solution. My mistake was trying to work it out in advance. The solution? Write the book. Do the work. Think on the page.

The trick to writing is not thinking about writing to much. It’s like the trick to flying, that Douglas Adams describes in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.”
—The Guide.

I might rephrase:

There is an art to writing, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the page and write. … Clearly, it is this second part, the writing, that present the difficulties.

The Guide goes on:

“You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.”

I suggest:

You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about writing, or about the book, or about how much it’s going to suck if you fail to finish.

In other words, to write, you absolutely cannot think to much about the fact you’re writing. Writing is something done in the world, embodied, an act best performed without too much cerebral activity.

That’s the essence of the book’s argument: Writing is done, not contemplated.

I think, with some serious dedication this week, there is no reason I can’t finish the chapter, and move onto the next. But, of course, I can’t think about it.