Writing with scissors and tape

Today was a good reminder to me of my own childhood training as a writer. I was taught the sunflower approach to paper organization: a series of notecards arrayed in a lovely pattern surrounding my seat on the floor. Ah, beauty. At the center, I sat with the thesis. Topics ran along each of the outward-bending rays. I could sort the order within each line of cards before picking them up to move to the typewriter. What emerged was (supposedly) a logical progression of ideas – happily generated by the simple act of sorting.

You would think in these days of computer-assisted writing practices that I would have outgrown such practices, but at heart, I’m a geographical thinker. I like to put things into spaces where they belong. This piece belongs on THAT side of the table. (Yes, I’m older now; I sometimes use a table and chair instead of sitting for hours on the floor. Not without some regret.)

I have learned to work faster in at least some ways. I come at that whole “gathering of information” with a different set of tools – notes in files, especially spreadsheets (see my notes on managing bibliography by spreadsheet); rough drafts on computer with comments in the margins; slidedecks and tables for managing visual information, and so on. I sometimes write (in ink) on cards the size of business cards, but not the 3x5 card, my once-upon-a-time most favorite tool. In other words, my information comes in various sizes and textures, and you would think that I’d just plug each bit into a proper outline and move on.

But no, that doesn’t fit with how my brain works. No, I like to use externalities to represent the internalities of my thinking. Which brings me to this morning.

I have a continuity draft of a collaborative article – the complete article, with footnotes, and I am fairly sure that I agree with our conclusions. (Always a positive step.) The argument, however, tended to spin from idea to idea since they all intersect with one another. Clarity? Missing in action! Bits of detail would pop up in one part of the discussion, and we’d have to mention them again over there. Bah. I’ve read plenty of articles like that, but would prefer not to inflict one of my own on the reading public.

To be honest, I put two afternoons into trying to tackle our edits in a mature scholarly way – with comment boxes and line edits. I’ve had dental surgery that was more fun.

So I gave into my impulses, pulled out the coffee pot, and hefted my lovely kitchen scissors. I took our draft and cut it into strips. Each sentence or two became a “thing,” and the “things” moved around the table. I got to about page four and realized that I actually could start seeing a shape to it.

I grabbed some of those business-card blanks and started jotting notes. Again, it was one note per card, so those could join the fray, moving hither and thither. I looked. I pondered. And then I grabbed my computer and wrote up the hook paragraph. It *resembles* the first paragraph that we’d had in the rough draft, but it gets at the content with a different tone and a clearer purpose.

I celebrated this early-morning productivity with a social-media toot, as one does, and then took my walk and tended to the day’s weeding.

In the second sit-down of the day, I moved a bunch of papers around. The completed bits went face down on the table, and then moved down to the bench. I sorted out content areas and used my lovely blue felt-tip pen to write cards about our findings. What were key topics? What caught my eye? What phrases stuck in my memory? This was largely an “away from the draft” process – my goal was to understand what my morning brain thought was most important about what we’d done. 

I think this kind of process is important. They say the devil’s in the details, but I wanted to know the choreography of the paper, not its flutter of words and details. For instance, a large chunk of the paper was represented by the word “Chart.” Right? I know exactly what content that covers, and what it does for the paper. I didn’t need to workshop its words, or even its paragraphs. I just wanted to know where in the paper it needed to emerge for the reader’s attention.

So I played a weird kind of scholarly solitaire, moving this strip onto that card, and shuffling those three cards into a different order, and looking through the remnants for that fact that was cool but didn’t belong but could illuminate this bit over here. I didn’t do the whole paper – like I said, I’d stopped cutting strips around the end of page 4. But I felt like this gave me control over the broad outlines of what we were doing.

At this point, I did two things. First, I made a list in an open document about what points I thought were mission critical, in the order in which I’d decided they probably should go. Now if a windstorm came up and blew through my open screen door and messed up my beautiful collage – which wasn’t yet taped down! – I would still have a record of the morning’s work.

Next, I wrote the framing paragraph. So and so has done this; that other person added that. We build on this by doing these things. Strategically, this paragraph defines the state of the scholarly conversation and the gap we are filling. Plus, it provides a bit of a road-map to what is about to follow. I didn’t polish this paragraph – I still have reminders like INSERT SCHOLAR K and QUOTE / RESPOND as placeholders. (The shouty caps are important. You never want to leave those reminders in a draft at the moment of submission!) But the reminders are just pointers to details, and most of that information already exists in extractable form in the continuity draft. That kind of cut-and-paste can come later. The goal for the day was simply to start creating the pathway for the reader – to onboard them to what they’re about to read.

And then it was time to turn to other things, the regular meetings and emails and urgent questions from students that are to Monday what peaceful murmurs are to hiking. True, I’d rather be hiking, but as Mondays go, I’d call it a success.

The take-away? Returning to your writing roots can be a remarkably soothing way to break through a paper-writing hurdle. As they say, writing is hard. The trick I used this morning was to avoid “writing” by reframing it as a slicing-and-sorting task. I *like* slicing and sorting. It was a pleasant way to get 777 words up and on their way. Of course, my co-author will need to sign on. But I think she’ll like it. After all, clarity counts!

And, at the end of the day (or at least the end of the morning), it turns out that scissors and tape weren’t just tools for rearranging text, but for restoring perspective. My humble kitchen tools turn out to be a tangible reminder that clarity in writing often begins with clarity in thought.