Genetic Sequencing

Rain.  Rain last night, rain this morning, rain through the day.

I woke up at 6:15, went to the bathroom, came back to bed, and finally got up at 6:45 with writing in my head.  I wrote until about 9:30, when the septic guys came to dig up the tank cover (in the rain) and pump the system.  There's a job...

Writing is a job, too, but it's less well defined.  If you want to get paid for doing it, you have to put some kind of structure around it.  Writers subscribe to writers' magazines in order to have some sense of that structure—how to find an agent, how to set a schedule, how to write a sequel-friendly plot.  All pleasant fictions to cover the fact that no good early-career writer knows what she's doing.

One of the things I've never seen anybody write about in these structural how-to articles is how to know what kind of a beast your idea is.  It seems like there ought to be a taxonomy.  You may not be able to identify the specific spider who's taken up residence in your woodpile, but it's easy enough to recognize the difference between the spider and the chipmunk and the birch tree.  It's not so easy, when you're starting to work with an idea, to know whether it's a book or an essay or an academic paper or a talk.  A book is as different from an academic paper as the spider is from the chipmunk, but when you're down in the originating DNA of its ideas, you don't know what it ought to become.

Maybe it's a blog post.

This is where external structures come in so handily.  If you're a columnist for a daily newspaper, you have a 700-word frame.  The possibilities of book and PowerPoint show and PBS script are off the table, at least for the job ahead of you; you're writing 700 words or so of un-illustrated text, which will be next to the Macy's ad.  If you're a famous author, people give you frames.  Your agent and publisher want another book; the New York Review wants an essay on political upheaval in Syria; a college in Montana wants a 20 minute commencement address.  Those are all knowable; when Campus Compact asked me to do a 45-minute talk in May, I knew how to make one of those, and I knew what size idea fit that kind of a frame.

But I have four or five different projects going on right now that are self-generated rather than requested.  And I haven't the faintest idea yet what kind of creature each one will be.  I've been asked in vague terms to write a book on higher education (by clients who liked the 45-minute talk version).  But is it really a book?  Or is it a white paper?  Or is it another series of 45-minute talks?  "Book" has always been the Grail of the writer, the sign that one has made it.  But it's hardly the only effective format.  Just in the two-plus hours of writing this morning, I've thought it should be a book, or a series of animated YouTube videos, or a theatrical monologue, or a PBS miniseries.

And I have a second "book" on advice for first-generation students considering graduate school and faculty life.  And a third "book" having to do with the emotional and spiritual dimensions of pool.  And a fourth "book" on unexpected career choices.  And I know that Nora's working on a "book" or two herself, about which she will tell me nothing yet.  And all of those are underway, in the early stages of idea formation.  Language is being shaped, arcs and sequences developed.  But until we know whether we're writing spiders or chipmunks or birch trees, it's tenuous work.

Still, I'm grateful to not have to pump septic tanks in the rain.