In which the Author muses on the
mutually defining nature of work and tools . . .
I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions
And I'm giving you a longing look
Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book
Chapter One we didn't really get along
Chapter Two I think I fell in love with you
You said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter Three
But you were up to your old tricks in
Chapters Four, Five and Six
And I'm giving you a longing look
Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book
The way you walk
The way you talk, and try to kiss me, and laugh
In four or five paragraphs
All your compliments and your cutting remarks
Are captured here in my quotation marks
--Elvis Costello, "Everyday I Write the Book"
Recently, I've been pondering a corollary to all of those form/function variants. Regardless of whether you maintain form follows function or--like Frank Lloyd Wright--believe form is function, each of these design-meets-Oscar-Wilde aphorisms is self-referential: What's being analyzed is the form and function of X--be it house, furniture, or user interface for a computer application. But I've been wondering about less insular interactions of form and function: Can the form of creative tools impact the function of the work itself?
Think of this as the obverse of the dusty observation that a man with hammer sees nails everywhere. What if the temptation to see phantom ten-pennies was resisted? A hammer would then force the worker to parse a project in terms of the actual nails--just as a screwdriver would effectively filter out the nails and shift the focus to threaded fasteners.
I've been thinking about this because over the past few months a shift in my own creative tools has resulted into in a corresponding morphing of my workflow and, ultimately, interaction with my
own work . . .
(1)
To many friends, my brand identity is inextricably entwined with digital nomadism--my stints as a Internet-predicated Communications Ronin comes in a close, complementary second. I'm therefore causing mild cognitive dissonance with my backslide into The Analog: The unpredictable way bits and pieces of the novel have splashed outside of my neatly (and fruitlessly) imposed "hours of creative operation" have driven me to Moleskine notebooks in a
Big Way.
As I busily scribble in an oil-skin, cardboard and paper notebook as a satchel bulging with a phone, PDA and PowerBook sits at my feet, I seem to be making some deeply disconcerting and retro point that no one can quite work out. Brows are so tightly knit about this, I've half-expected an intervention by true believers in binary code. Cut to that first, enforced support meeting: "Hi, everyone, I'm Kevin (Hi, Kevin!) For a while now, I've been using--er--paper . . . (Hang tough, man; we're here to help!)"
In truth, I've carried a Moleskine for years--the pocket-sized model with gridded pages--which I most often used in the context of magazine design, when convincing various art directors about the efficacy of certain cover concepts and layouts over less-thoughtful sketches. An occasional password and phone number also found their way into it. But in those days, the notebook usually stayed in the aforementioned satchel, while I worked with the phone, PDA or PowerBook. (On unfortunate Borg Occasions, all three were wielded at once--far from geek chic, it's simply nerdy as hell, and should be avoided at all costs.)
However, I was increasingly driven to the Moleskine Way by the annoying way paragraphs remained resistant to doing my bidding in my office at 8:00 AM, only to suddenly relent in the middle of the Whole Foods produce section at 4:48 PM. It was there I discovered my little bound-paper friend kicked the shit of of my Clie in terms of instantaneous, no-fuss, permanent capture of quicksilver insights--and also trounced the rest of my digital gizmos. (Plus, the whole Ah-Ha Moment was far less melodramatic with my Moleskine. Granted, standing next to the avocados and furiously writing in the notebook made me look precisely like the pompous ass I am. But it could have been made so much worse by breaking out a piece of expensive electronics and trying to locate an uplink--as if a covert op was occurring across from the turnips.)
The continuing devolution of air travel has also contributed to my personal revival of paper. For travel, I use a 12-inch PowerBook, but it has increasingly become impossible to use it on my seat tray when the inevitable Fat Bastard in front of me selfishly decides to do the Lazy Boy Recliner Thing. It's simply more efficient and productive to reach for my thoroughly analog Moleskine. Its compact size also allows a cup of coffee--nectar of the creative gods--to simultaneously occupy the tray. (An additional, highly dubious consequence is that the notebook has consistently proved itself a chick magnet--who knew low-tech retro could be sexy? Which strongly suggests Luddites are getting laid more often than Digerati.)
Do my Moleskines make me born-again about dead-tree media? Not a chance. Like Louis in Casablanca, I'm merely situationally practical. The problem, as with many other chained technologies, is that last effing 10 feet--whether it's getting iPod music to the stereo amp or video into the television--or, demi-technologically, notes from a Moleskine onto my computer's hard drive. Most solutions for The Last 10 Feet range from can't-be-done to better-than-nothing. At this point, truly fast, seamless and transparent data exchange is rare for private citizens--especially if it's affordable.
Unfortunately, my Moleskine's linkage to the world beyond itself is clearly an example of an Impossible Last 10 Feet. And so I'm faced with my own version of Sophie's choice: Either lose critical insights and ideas about my novel or resign myself to the sadly redundant world of dual entries--the transcription of my analog notebook into my digital notebook. Thus, like the Enron accounting department, I'm keeping two sets of "books." (And yes, I avail myself of all sorts of clever Moleskine "hacks"--which are helpful in organizing the notebook, but only up to its necessary and mindless transcription.)
Should some company--hopefully Apple--solve my problem with The Last 10 Feet in the form of a digital tablet with the footprint of a small Moleskine, flawless handwriting recognition, 6-week battery life and automatic data storage to a private server on the Net, well, I'm there, Baby . . . But until then, it's me, my Little Black Book and perhaps an advanced piece of wetware known as a research assistant--if I can find one who can read my handwriting.
Such is the saga of Moleskine and Me. The novel is currently being revised and amplified via five topical notebooks carried everywhere in a messenger's bag. As each is filled, another volume in the topic area is added. (I recommend using a silver Sharpie to label and number Moleskine spines.)
(2)
But this post isn't about paper notebooks per se: It's about the way working in analog mode has sensitized me to the cyclical nature of the book's evolution.
The cycle made clear on the pages of the notebooks is comprised of this workflow: planning; improvisation within the bounds of the plan; crafted distillation; improvisation during revision; revised planning, crafted distillation within the bounds of the revised plan.
These improvisations closely parallel spontaneous, live jazz explorations and, from the beginning, I've always viewed my approach to writing in terms of jazz--witness my frequent depiction of these one-take blog posts as improvised solos from the bandstand. Compared to digital revision, the Moleskines do a better job highlighting the play of improvisation in writing the novel and, also, its two iterations.
Improvisation can be used to build or deconstruct. The songs on Miles Davis' KInd of Blue are the result of players improvising within modal parameters determined by Davis. The music on Davis' Bitches Brew was shaped through the extensive editing of hours of jamming by Mile's assembled group of musicians. In both instances, improvisation--in one way or another--created the final compositions.
On the other hand, consider Davis covering standards: His collaboration with Gil Evans on Porgy and Bess improvisationally deconstructed the Gershwin score in new and breathtaking ways. Reacting to the songs and Evans' scored orchestral arrangements, he alternately used the music as a point of departure for new explorations and as a landscape to be remapped according to
his sensibilities.
Working on the novel, I've found improvisational construction and deconstruction have formed a repeating pattern. The outline guiding my writing is dense with structural and thematic detail, but noticeably less so at the sequence level. There, I've determined where the scenes need to go, but--by design--not how to get there. Certain points need to be made in a scene; perhaps certain conversations need to occur; and, of course, geographical transitions (sometimes with attendant travel descriptions) have been determined in advance. But these are way-stations and check-in points along a highly improvisational creative journey through the scenes. Providing less structure at the sequence level is way I'm attempting to unify the disparate kinds of writing which seem to be my strong suites--the loose-limbed and the meticulously planned. As might be expected, these significantly different approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses, and I'm trying to use each to offset the drawbacks of the other.
At early-draft stage, when fleshing-in the outline, my scene-level planning works very much like Miles Davis' modal parameters guided the creation of the music on Kind of Blue: Overall direction is provided and the creative parameters are indicated. But how the prescribed destinations are arrived at is left to artistic judgments in their respective moments.
Middle-draft revisions of the book frequently work on the mostly improvised raw material in the same way Teo Macero spliced into existence the four sides of Bitches Brew--by combining pieces of sometimes different sessions to form song structures none of the improvising artists could have foreseen as the music was
being made.
However, at the later-draft stage, the nature of my improvisation shifts gears, becoming more like Miles' approach to Porgy and Bess. The shape of the manuscript has firmed-up, become a known entity--and in this, it's analogous to the Gershwin score: filled with already-familiar songs. At this point, I find myself improvisationally reacting to the manuscript, using it as a point of departure which results in the addition of new material, or the reconfiguration of existing material in order to tease-out new or buried meaning. In short, I often find myself intuitively deconstructing aspects of my
previous work.
Something else happens at this stage--the scope of improvisation morphs. In the deconstruction phase, conceptual and strategic fluidity also become possible. For practical and obscure reasons, a shifting conceptual reaction to the material almost never occurs in the early-draft stages.
This is where the Moleskines function as perfect-bound leaves of litmus paper: While notebooks from the early-draft period are filled with raw prose passages and occasional authorial notes, the later-draft notebooks are almost exclusively reactionary: Brimming with course corrections and/or clarifications, punctuated by rare shards of new material. This stage is about intellectually stress-testing the writing--asking brutally hard questions about the manuscript and seeing what chips off.
For example, seven pages of one notebook are devoted to the examination of the "bright-white heart of darkness" image found in the most recently posted excerpt. Not only did it need to conceptually slot into the larger story arc, I also had to ensure it worked as a hybrid image and not merely a cultural portmanteau. The seven-page exploration wound up impacting earlier and later passages in the book, and the novel's better for it. Intriguingly, a much earlier notebook contains the actual formation of the image, tracing all of its implicit references. But there, I luxuriated in the improvisational creation of an image. It was much later that I was able to intuitively remap parts of the work in terms of it.
At this point, my little black books have also become talismanic: Their elegant, Italian presence prompts and empowers me to keep asking basic-but-critical questions about the work at a time when I might be predisposed to stop banging on the ice and just give myself over to gliding through figure-eights. Carrying a messenger bag filled with the notebooks is an intentional bother--it simultaneously reminds me to keep working, no matter where I am, and challenges me: What am I doing with this damn thing? The answer, of course, is refining and questioning.
And sometimes, free-associative answers to spontaneous questions give me new handles on the work--further distilling the vision or suddenly providing new idea-objects to play with (which pleases the bricoleur in me). Recently, I counted the number of sequences in the book and then forced myself to explain why it was not an episodic story. Here's the resulting, verbatim notebook passage:
Humans make (or revise) memories by imposing a linear narrative on possibly unrelated events. We turn memories into stories--with beginnings, middles and ends; we build-in causality and closure; we weave meaning (possibly temporary) out of the (conceivably) meaningless . . .
Ultimately, all this "narrativity" creates episodes--our memories become the individual cuts on a concept album we call our lives.
The novel's further processing of these episodes after their creation is what keeps the book from being "episodic" in the traditional sense. Episodic novels are obviously built from episodes; this novel uses these sequences as its fuel--colliding them like a cyclotron and then tracing the smoke-trail trajectories of the resulting memory shards as they recombine in new ways, however briefly . . . Question: What's the half-life of revelation? Milliseconds?
The roll-up of the various episodes into a meta-narrative: The novel as a vast concept album. This is an additional, useful vantage for me; especially given Tony's one-time profession. The book-as-cyclotron: Smashing self-myths into each other and examining the new, recombinant stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. It's yet another way to test the authenticity of the novel . . . I like these concepts a lot, and admit they were only arrived at because of ongoing, improvisational deconstruction of the work--the other 180 degrees of a creative mandala that started with the arc of improvised, interstitial story details.
(3)
Would this cycle of constructive and deconstructive improvisation exist if I were not currently trafficking in Moleskine pages? Undoubtedly--my Analog Self hasn't developed new talents or discovered untapped ones. For better or worse, I'm the same writer on either side of my notebook dalliance. But what it has done is make me more aware of the critical middle-gears of my
creative process.
I think this more readily occurs with the analog approach because--for me, a least--there is a distinct, real-time sense of building on something--the version of prose being worked on is understood as the latest extension of an intellectual mansion--the addition, say, of an east wing. Carefully parsing words here, it's the latest changes to a project, and not the newest version of it. There's a universe of difference between these two concepts.
Working digitally--and understand I'm still 80 percent computer-based in terms of the novel and its research--something much more archival seems to be going on. As noted above, it's much more about superseding than evolving. Oddly, it's the feeling (and the dynamics) of working and reworking an oil painting--the earlier versions disappear under the newest brushwork. It's more an ongoing procession of changing realties, rather than merely changes.
And yes, of course my digital work, organized and flowed properly, could be made as evolutionary as the bits of the book strewn across the Moleskines--more so, perhaps. I could avail myself of versioning, annotations, temporary manuscript hyperlinks, change-tracking and text comparison tech. But--for now--it seems an awful lot of work to approximate what intuitively happens as I interact with ink-and-paper notebook pages.
The romantic in me has concluded the Moleskines are merely more psychologically appropriate to the work at hand: Most famously used by a travel writer, these notebooks are currently being used to capture important places during a creative journey; a voyage around two people in order to map matters of the heart. Perhaps this is why these low-grade luxury items so strongly resonate with me.
But then, it may have everything to do with non-existent boot-up times and the fact they're crash- and virus-proof. As Tony discovers in the novel, the most complex problems can have very simple answers . . .
