Progress Report 2: February 2023

The second month of my one-year attempt to write a non-fiction book has passed. It’s time to look back and see if I have learned anything.

As I wrote in the previous (link)progress report, I have selected the topic of the book, done some initial research, and drawn up a basic structure.

Just a reminder: The topic of the book is problem-solving. The structure of the book rests on a foundational mantra: Center, Enter, Turn. I wrote more about this in a previous progress report.

Briefly, what did I do in February?

I was mostly reading, taking notes, and drafting various outlines. (I will write more about the research process in the next progress report.)

There were a few complications along the way. In the middle of the month, I started to couch and had strange headaches. Yes, coronavirus, it finally found its way into my system.

So, that was a slight stumbling block along the way. Writing, reading, researching, working with my notes — I couldn’t do any of that; the only comfortable position was horizontal, in my bed.

Picking a Model Book

There are some books that I love, not so much because of the content, the message, or the design of the book; I love these books because of the structure: how they feel in my hands, the thickness, the length of the chapters, sections, and paragraphs.

When I embarked on the journey to write a book, I started to think how my book should “feel” like.

Do I know any non-fiction books that I like the “feel” of? As I said, it’s not so much about cover design, or font, or content of the book. What I mean by “feel” is structure, the form of the book, something that can’t be explained by the words, only experienced.

What are some other non-fiction books I could use as a blueprint for my book?

Let’s call this a model book: A book, written by someone else, preferably a book that you love; a book that you use as a model for your book.

At first, I picked Deep Work by Cal Newport. But then I switched over to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I remember browsing books in the bookstore (like an actual store with paper books on the shelves), saw this book by a pure chance, opened it, read it here and there — and almost instantly knew that this is the model book.

It felt right: The structure, the length of the chapters and subchapters, paragraphs, and the use of language. I can’t explain it, but I just knew, without reading the whole book, that I will use it as a skeleton. So, I bought the book and went home to so some math.

I calculated the number of words per page (300), looked at the page count (263), multiplied things (300 times 263 = 78,900 words). Now I had a rough estimate: I knew how long my book should be.

I also looked at the approximate length of one chapter — around 5,400 words (let’s round it to 5000), and the length of the sections inside the chapters (usually around 1000 words).

1,000 per section — that is doable, I thought. Because what is a non-fiction book, really? A collection of essays. A 1,000-word essay is something I can wrap my head around.

And what is a chapter, really? Four, five such essays combined. And I need in total 12–15 chapters — more or less. So, that means: to write a book, I need to write around 60 interconnected essays.

Writing asynchronously

I’m not planning to write this book from start to finish — synchronously —, meaning: starting from the Introduction and writing one chapter after another until I’m finished.

No. Instead, I’m planning to write the book asynchronously. I will be writing different parts, different chapters, different sections at the same time. If I have enough notes on the last chapter of the book, I will write the last chapter before the first.

If a book is a collection of essays, I can write multiple essays at the same time from different parts of the book.

To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable writing — yet. I’m forcing myself to write at least something so that I would not forget that this is a writing project, not a research project.

Telling myself: I’m not yet writing

Slavoj Žižek talks about his writing process in a YouTube video:

I have a very complicated ritual about writing. It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down and do it, so I have to trick myself. I elaborate a very simple strategy which, at least with me, it works: I put down ideas. And I put them down, usually, already in a relatively elaborate way, like the line of thought already written in full sentences, and so on. So up to a certain point, I’m telling myself: No, I’m not yet writing; I’m just putting down ideas. Then, at a certain point, I tell myself: Everything is already there, now I just have to edit it. So that’s the idea, to split it into two. I put down notes, I edit it. Writing disappears.¹

I have the same problem as he does. I can’t just sit down and write a book. I need to trick myself into believing that what I’m doing is only a “rehearsal”. I have to convince myself that whatever I write down will not end up in the actual book, it’s just a “brain-dump” that I will later use to write an actual text.

And this is one place where Analog Zettelkasten can work miracles. I write down “notes”, more or less coherently — using full sentences, clear thoughts. These slips of paper are the content of my very first “draft” — the draft is being written without me noticing it. You keep adding new notes to a section in your Zettelkasten, and soon you realise you have a skeleton, a structured argument, a subsection of the book, waiting to be retyped.

Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge

Another approach to writing is described in an article called “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” by Betty S. Flowers.²

What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked horn to horn, pushing against each other. One is the energy of what I’ll call your ‘madman.’ He is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm or anger, and if really let loose, could turn out ten pages an hour.

The second is a kind of critical energy-what I’ll call the ‘judge.’ He’s been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, ‘That’s trash!’ with such authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right-after all, he speaks with the voice of your most imperious English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can’t create anything.

When writing our very first draft, Betty S. Flowers suggests letting the “madman” loose. The judging part can come later, but at first, we need to let the madman express everything he wants to express.

Like Žižek, we need to fool ourselves into believing that the first draft is supposed to be crap (and it most likely is).

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