Monday 20 July 2021

Two weeks have gone roaring by. I’ve written quite a bit, but not diary entries.

I’m developing a sense for my writing ecosystem. At the lowest level, I am recording fragments. This mostly happens during and after my run. During my run I capture thoughts as reminders on my iPhone, and then after the run, when I am back at the car cooling down, I record them at greater length in a notebook I keep there; I then take a picture of it with my phone, so I can leave the notebook in the car. It is sobering to see that I can only recall about half of the fragments, and have to look at the reminders to get the rest.

Sometimes, after I return home from my run, I’ll go up and write. This isn’t common, and only happens if I’m excited about something that bubbled up during the run, and there’s not some other activity that I’d rather do. Often, for example, working in the garden distracts me. As long as I’m sweaty, I may as well get more sweaty and add a layer of dirt to it. There’s an unexpected advantage of capturing blubs as reminders, and that is that, well, the pop up as reminders. Obvious, I suppose. but one possibly less obvious aspect is that when I make a reminder, I assign a time to it, like 4:01pm. 4:0x has become a customary time, because it is the most likely time I’d write during the day: after garden work, but before dinner prep. Also, when I capture thoughts, I try to number them by assigning them to consecutive times: 4:01, 4:02, 4:03, etc., just to keep track of how many thoughts are bubbling up. But that also means that when four o’clock rolls around, I get a steady stream of reminders bubbling up, which somehow works better than isolated pings.

So I’ve gotten very good a capturing the reminders, and have started a document of fragments, lightly organized, to keep them in. I use a special style of the title or first line of each fragment, and then I generate a table of contents for the document, which allows me to see an overview of fragments and jump to one via a hyperlink. It looks like this:

I have ambitions to put them in a database, with more attributes, but for the moment I don’t want to be distracted by creating too much infrastructure.

The second part of the writing ecosystem, and the one I need to work on the most, is to expand on the fragments. There are several things I have or will experiment with.

• First, if there is enough ‘grist’ in the fragment, I’ll edit and expand it a bit and ‘publish’ it in my writing experiments blog (thisspaceleft); I’ve done that for some fragments.
• Second, if somehow I feel some momentum behind the fragment, I may expand it into a longer piece: a scene or passage or something — this has what I’ve been doing more of later. These scenes will eventually, I think, make their way into thisspaceleft.
• Third, I envision using these fragments of prompts for freewriting (or perhaps structured writing). I haven’t done this yet, but it seems reasonable.

The final part of the writing ecosystem is that when something begins to feel like it has enough coherence and momentum to be a freestanding entity — i.e. an essay or a story or a chapter — then it gets its own document and will live in a folder on my computer. Eventually, it will be published on latereviews, the blog that I will try to publicize and grow an audience for.

So, in summary, in my ecosystem there are captured fragments, an intermediate stage where fragments are expanded and edited, and a final stage where expanded and edited fragments (or occasionally just raw fragments) expand into a coherent piece. I worry that this is too complex, and will require too much overhead to maintain as it scales, but we’ll see.

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