I weaseled my way into a writing class as I was finishing my dissertation. Others had advised against taking the course (“just finish your dissertation and worry about its readability later”). But I had been convinced that clear writing reflects clear thinking. If clear thinking emerges through writing with clarity, shouldn’t we all be required to take at least one class about the craft of writing before we inflict our thinking on others?

The professor had taught writing for years and was on the editorial board of The New York Times—a real professional! His (The Pro’s) over-enrolled class was pitched to future journalists but that seemed insignificant to me. I pleaded with The Pro for a spot:

“Anthropologists are also writers, without training or hope. Isn’t it important to make academia a better, more accessible place?”

I argued and implored and won.

The Pro’s task was enormous. We students were formidable, with our ingrained use of dull verbs that arrange and present, our anxious prose with its superfluous connective tissue, our obfuscating descriptions of abstractions. He started small, with sentences. A third of the way into the class we progressed to paragraphs and then finally, to thousand-word pieces.

I wish the whole blogosphere could luxuriate in a writing class! I’m certainly not a pro but if you’re reading this we conceivably share a set of literary aspirations. Perhaps the lessons I learned from The Pro will be useful for your anthropological compositions too?

WRITING TIPS FROM A (REAL) PRO:

Covering less ground.

Ask yourself, what will make my sentence as simple and clear as it can be? Be economical and efficient. Your sentences are most likely too long, too crowded. Revisit each sentence—are your ideas moving too quickly in the space you have given them? Look for the incomplete thought and clarify. Rephrase, reword, recast. Oftentimes this will open up a new pathway for writing and thinking.

Every single sentence should captivate. The weight of your sentence does not make it more valuable. Allow each sentence to do a tiny part of what you want it to do. Believe that a slow build over time will convey your message.

Resist the semi-colon, it will tempt you to overstuff your sentence with ideas.

On language.

How many consecutive lackluster words can the reader tolerate? Avoid any turn of phrase or cliché that is used thoughtlessly or out of habit. Someone else’s phrases will rot in your sentence. (The Pro was passionate about this. He said they were gangrenous.) Writing is a series of choices and it shouldn’t just flow or come easily. If it does we ought to be suspicious. Are we submitting to rhetorical convention, and therefore relinquishing our freedom of choice?

When you’re submerged in theoretical explications, try to make just one sentence shorter, clearer. Is the subject of your sentence capable of performing the action that you’re attributing to it? Move away from abstractions by adding a sentence about actual actors performing actual actions.

Please don’t replace real, live action with noun phrases (i.e., don’t participate in the replacement of real, live action with noun phrases).

On dull subjects.

Occasionally our writing must address tedious content. For me, writing about the policy context of coral conservation can be boring but necessary. In that case, isn’t it better to just lay down the details as quickly and succinctly as possible?

When tedium sets in I turn to John McPhee. Where a less skilled writer might depend on a personal anecdote or a vignette to seduce the reader, McPhee creates structural variety. Even when writing about policies, McPhee’s prose is energetic—it’s as if he’s trying to make his subject interesting for himself. He does this by changing the patterns of his sentences. Or he upends his prose, introducing a pulse. And each sentence is different from the previous and following sentences. McPhee changes the rhythm and sustains the reader’s attention.

Trusting your reader.

This lesson is the hardest to implement and it requires a bit more discretion than the others. Though it may seem that academic writing is different from other writing we do—letters, emails, blog posts—it isn’t. Set the cap and gown aside when you sit down to write. Writing that sounds oratorical, stiff, and formal is unclear and opaque and difficult to understand, whoever the audience is. Introduce some levity—throw in a contraction or two! Because we take our writing seriously and hope that others do too, our prose conveys anxiety. Our citations betray us here (“Look, these other people agree with me”) but alongside these attributions that academic convention requires, we fill our paragraphs with unnecessary navigational markers. We clarify, we indicate, we argue, we summarize.

You aren’t responsible for your readers’ ignorance or inattentiveness. You do have to tenderly bring their attention along. This should not include using terms like while, therefore, as, when, since—terms that illustrate that we think the reader is dull. But, nevertheless, yet, however. Convey negation through luminous prose and forego those insipid grammatical markers.

Joan Didion does this well. She is quietly assured about the information she presents. Instead of hierarchical sentences, she builds a rhythm by lengthening her sentences one fragment at a time. By the end of her paragraphs we have followed along without feeling like we’ve been led to a predetermined conclusion. She structures her paragraphs so they build cumulative power.

Final thoughts.

Clearly The Pro’s tips are impossible to implement all the time. How many of them did I eschew in this short piece? Fewer here than in the draft! The Pro constantly reminded us that clear writing emerges from careful editing. The initial work of making words appear on your screen is the most frustrating and tortuous. Spend more time revising. This is where your ideas are shaped and refined. Even incremental changes will inject clarity and liveliness into your ethnographic prose.

Anthropologists identify as fieldworkers, archivists, researchers, and teachers, but seldom as writers. Would we be more likely to do so if we explicitly studied the craft of writing, if we were more confident about our technical skills? Taking a writing class will likely sharpen your thinking and make your writing more vivid and accessible to others. I advocate sneaking into one of your own.

February is the worst month of the year. I keep repeating these lines in my head as I stare at the blank screen. I struggle to think of anything else to say. The beginning of this month is now becoming some sort of a routine.

My Dad taught me to write in the early morning hours. “When I was your age,” he used tell me, “I went to bed early so that I could wake up around 4 a.m. and do my homework when the house was quiet.” Around age 11 or 12 I began to emulate this practice, though I never quite got a handle on the waking up early part so instead, I just developed late-night writing habits. To this day I usually produce some of my best work between midnight and 5 a.m. When I think about it, my Dad helped me to craft much of my approach to writing.

Whenever I wrote papers for school assignments, he corrected them for mistakes, or as I remember more vividly, he dismantled them. He always asked questions aloud too, the kind of questions where the first time I might answer and he would quickly add that the question was rhetorical and did not require an answer but then the second time, if I remained silent, he would look at me crazy with a, “well I’m waiting for an answer” type of face. “What kind of sentence is this?” he often asked. “…And, and, really? Who is teaching you that you can begin a sentence with ‘and’?” Inside of my seventh-grade mind, I recalled that people often began sentences with ‘and’ during everyday conversation. What was different about words on paper? I smile when I think about the so-called rules of writing like this one because when I consider some of my favorite pieces, they are usually ones in which the rules are pushed, bent, broken, or re-written altogether. My Dad though, he just wanted me to succeed, to always do my best. He read my college essays and listened to each talk that I gave. He wanted me to be the best—he wanted me to shine. His energy, his cheer, his hope, they all became my muse.

He died without warning on February 1, 2012 on a crisp Wednesday afternoon, not a cloud in the sky. He was buried exactly one week later, on February 8^th, an unwieldy day soaked with invasive rain, the kind of rain that pesters, slowly creeping into every inch of your being. His birthday is February 23^rd. I tried to quit grad school after he died. I put on a pair of his old pajamas and planted myself in his chair, announcing to the world that I had no intention of ever leaving, which did not last long because my mother made me return to school later that semester.

There is a certain melancholy that lingers after a loss, a feeling in which you want to remember every single thing so that you will never forget but simultaneously never wanting to recall any memory or thought because it might torment. For me this feeling is intensified in February. The entire month is one, long spastic sequence, a reckless oscillation between laughter and agony; between motivation and stagnation. It is exhausting. During this time, writing can morph from excruciatingly painful to liberating in the span of a minute.

I think back to many sympathy cards that we received, ones that begin with lines such as, “There are no words…” or “When words fail…” and this has me thinking: why have I never seen a greeting card with an expression of words working or doing their job? How exactly are words failing? I think back to moments of dense, sharp silences during grief but there are other periods of relentless chatter, swelling with nonstop sentences and an inability to control my utterances. I am not sure if words are necessarily always failing during grief because at times it feels as if they are successfully betraying me. They fool me, they tease me and then sometimes, slap me in the face. I think that more often than not I am just uncertain of what to do with my words and I panic when they materialize in some unrecognizable form on paper.

“Why don’t you try to write through this?” I have been asked this question many times and I still cannot make much sense of it. I have never been too sure of my position or role as a writer. I do know, however, that it has been impossible to write through whatever this grief is. Whenever I have tried to write through it, the erratic emotions erupt all over again. Just when I think I am “keeping it together,” I start to fall apart. I experience long wordless lulls that give birth to gaps and pauses that I neither recognize nor comprehend. Sometimes my words make no sense at all.

Other times I write with a maniacal fury, composing pieces that make me jump up with an enormous energy for a spontaneous dance break, the kind of celebration that rivals the response to a one-handed touchdown grab. I write while laughing. I write while crying. But to whatever other side I am supposed to be writing through, I do not know where that is.

So this February I think it may be time for me to abandon this idea of writing through and instead try writing with this grief. The grief hangs with me and as long as I am trying to write through it, I think I will be disappointed when it is still there. And sometimes, the fear of failure stops me from writing anything at all, just as the fear of never finding my muse again holds my hands hostage when I try to write. I smile now though because I know that somewhere, my Dad cringed when I began that sentence with ‘and’. I smile too because I know I carry my Dad’s voice, his corrections, his thoughts, his smile each time I write.

My muse is not missing, I think it just transformed slightly. Perhaps those of you reading may also have experienced deep hurt or traumatic loss along your writing journey and if so, I share this with you today to begin a dialogue about the ways that we carry these pains along with us. Writing, like grieving, is very much a process and neither happens in a linear fashion. I think what is important for all of us to remember is that while we try to make sense of it all, we remember just that: we are all learning how to navigate. We write. We shape. We cut. We ache. We envision. We create.

I recently finished translating a book, Tsering Woeser’s Self-Immolation in Tibet (Immolation au Tibet, la honte du monde), in a project that combines the two main components of my career path thus far: translation and anthropology. Prior to my graduate work, I was a translator of Chinese and French documents in Shanghai. And now as an anthropologist, I still engage in the occasional translation of texts that I consider uniquely insightful. This brief essay is an attempt to think through the relationship between these two activities via my recent work on self-immolation in Tibet.

Prior to entering the translation industry, the distant and thus romanticized notion of translation conjured images of simultaneous interpreters at the United Nations, talking frantically into earpieces or banging away at keyboards to facilitate communication for a global community. Soon after entering the industry, however, I found that professional translators spend a considerable amount of time sitting at their desks and staring at screens as they translate one inane document after another. Now that I have finished this washing machine manual, should I get started on this blueprint for the annual city carnival’s layout, or just save that for tomorrow? I often found myself leaning towards the latter option.

I thus eventually made the transition to anthropology, a discipline which draws upon many of the same skills employed in translation, such as linguistic competence, familiarity with the sociocultural and political context, and the ability to read (or listen) between the lines… albeit in considerably more interesting settings. Despite my own admitted hesitation to draw a simple parallel between the two activities, there is indeed much that they share in common. Each takes difference and makes it comprehensible, finding commonality. The main difference is that anthropology should ideally employ these skills towards more contemplative ends than translation: an ideal that does not however always match the everyday reality of academic life.

Nowhere have I encountered greater challenges for my translation skills and analytical capabilities than in the study of self-immolation in Tibet. Since 2009, more than 135 Tibetans have chosen to set their bodies on fire in protest against the current situation in Tibet. As these events have unfolded, I have attempted to write on this topic, as well as translating some of Tibetan scholar Tsering Woeser’s thoughts on this phenomenon. Whether writing or translating, this is a topic that has brought me far away from the mundane world of washing machine manuals and blueprints, challenging me to think through and make sense of a most extreme experience.

Self-immolation would seem to be an absolute, even untranslatable form of difference: as I sit here before a computer screen on a November day in the middle of Oklahoma, there are few phenomena in life that could seem more remote than someone’s conscious decision to set their body alight and the unthinkable bodily experience that follows. This remoteness would seem to highlight the promise of both translation and anthropology, which can begin to bring us closer to other people’s worlds, whether through the translation of self-immolators’ final statements, or through the analytical attempt to answer the most pressing questions of why, and where to go from here. Yet alongside this seeming promise, I have found in the process of translating and writing that self-immolation creates fundamental challenges for the articulation of these events in words, which reliably fail in relation to the act under description.

This unique challenge of putting words to this act has however been uniquely productive for recalibrating my perspective on the relationship between writing and thinking. In contrast to the founding assumptions of both translation and anthropology, I have begun to think that sometimes what the world needs is not necessarily more words. After all, how many words have been spoken or written about Tibet over about the years? The discussion is far too often expressed through such abstract and even fundamentally alienated notions as historical sovereignty, economic development, territorial control, or even conspiratorial narratives about the “Dalai Lama clique.” Such concepts provide solace that we know what we are talking about and, one after another, are comfortingly very easy for me to translate back and forth between languages without much thought.

Parallel to the distance between my everyday life and the act of self-immolation, however, we must also note the fundamental distance between largely hollow and self-reproducing modes of communication and the concrete experience on the ground in Tibet producing the act of self-immolation. Self-immolation is an act that is impossible to translate because it requires no translation, taking us beyond words, so many of which have already been voiced on the topic of Tibet. Writings on Tibet often exist in a cycle of polarized and self-reinforcing opinions and accompanying identifications. Instead, self-immolation gives us a very visible and visceral experience of human suffering without vengeance against others, an inerasable image of fundamental humanity beyond language.

What self-immolation and other such extreme experiences require of us, then, is not necessarily more writing, but rather more thinking. Actual thinking, usually the source of initial interest in an academic career, can easily be lost in the realities of this career, with its daily deluge of emails, class preparation, job applications, revisions, and the rush to publish. Leaving the translation industry in search of more room for contemplation, I have ironically found that sometimes in academia there is even less time for thinking. The challenge of self-immolation, and the discovery that anything that one says or writes seems to never fully live up to this act, has produced a unique pause in this flurry of activity that has been strangely liberating, highlighting contemplation not only as an essential part of the writing process but also as a productive end in and of itself.

In his Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard proposes that contemplation and even the pursuit of knowledge itself originate from the human relationship to fire. This relationship between fire and thought, he argues, can be seen in the hypnotic and contemplative gaze directed towards the relatively mundane embers of a fireplace. The flames that have been ignited across Tibet have provoked and will continue to provoke observation, contemplation, and commentary from scholars and other concerned individuals around the world, to help us better understand the realities of Tibet today. But the challenge of thinking through these flames has taught me an equally important lesson: as scholars in a cut-throat academic industry wherein communication never rests, in the hurry to write or lecture or argue for our viewpoint, sometimes we lose sight of the importance of the fundamental act of contemplation. These remote and untranslatable events on the Tibetan plateau, then, have also helped me to rediscover, in and beyond the act of writing, the place of silent contemplation.

What if I told you to write what you don’t know?

I ask this because I find the oft-offered advice to “write what you know” both alarming and silencing. Isn’t ethnography at least partially about unknowability? If we acknowledge that textual recording is a form of fixing knowledge, how does one write what one doesn’t know? How can our writing play on the edge between knowing and not knowing, refusing to fix the unknown by writing it into existence? Exploring this playful and vexing tension in ethnographic writing is my current preoccupation.

A story might help illuminate my query.

A few years ago, some friends in the Somali refugee community in Maine with whom I do ethnographic work rekindled an old dispute. Tensions over leadership and representation plagued their relationship, and in the latest eruption people with knives broke through the apartment wall of my good friend Khalar. Khalar and his family fled the apartment and filed charges with the police. He and another man took out protection orders against each other. A defamation lawsuit filed by one against the other began making its way through the court system. A few days later, another friend, Ahmed, told me that this newest fighting was generated by Khalar’s first wife’s rage against his new second wife. The problems between the two women were radiating out through their respective kin groups, provoking small but violent eruptions between family members.

“Wait,” I said to Ahmed. “Khalar has a second wife?”

I was spending countless hours every week with Khalar on community projects. I understood the tensions over leadership and representation between Khalar and the other men as emanating from things that happened back in their country of origin, things that happened in the refugee camp, personality clashes, and the particular contextual politics of diasporic community building. My understanding did not extend to include marital disputes. How did I not know that Khalar had married again? A few months previously, Romana had begun attending social events with Khalar. Reading their interaction as marital, I had then asked if they were recently married but Khalar insisted they were siblings. I recalled him telling me a few weeks prior that Zeynab, a local community leader, was negotiating a payment from him to his wife, which is what usually happens when a man marries a second wife. Stunned by my conversation with Ahmed, I phoned Khalar and asked, testily, “You’re married to Romana?” I was hurt he had felt the need for obscurity with me. How had I managed to miss this?

“No!” he retorted. “She’s my cousin [cousin” and “sibling” are often used interchangeably]. She was married but never had any children. My mother [who still lived in Khalar’s natal village in Africa] arranged the marriage. She insisted on it. How could I say no? So Romana and I will have children and I will register myself with DHHS as their father.”

Despite Khalar’s attempts to define the relationship as a sort of extra-wedlock favor and filial duty, and although there was no community ceremony, and although Khalar cannot have a legal polygynous marriage to Romana in the US, it is clear that to others in the refugee community Romana is his second wife and not just a duty to Khalar’s mother. The rancor between her and Khalar’s first wife continued to animate community divides, reaching a climax when each woman took out a restraining order against the other.

I know that because polygyny is illegal in the US it is usually not announced outside the community. I know that Khalar wants to be viewed as an American-style community leader and (rightly) suspects non-Somalis are judgmental against polygyny. I know that Khalar is trying to find ways to assuage the anger of his first wife by minimizing the emotional significance of his second marriage. Is his translation of his marriage as filial duty an attempt to maintain an unknowability about his marital life not only to me, but to others in the community as well?

This incident reminded me to question what I have a right to know and what ‘knowing’ actually means. When I write about internal tensions within the refugee community, which knowledges do I include and which do I leave unrecorded? How do I claim to ‘know’ the relevance of Khalar’s marriage to intercommunity tensions if he insists otherwise? At moments like these I feel the enormity of what I don’t know, of what my interlocutors (quite reasonably) don’t want me to know, and, sometimes, of the things I don’t actually want to know. Decades ago James Clifford wrote about ethnography’s partial truths, reminding anthropologists that ethnographies, as crafted texts, are inherently incomplete efforts to impose tidy boundaries on untidy subjects. But recognizing the partiality of our accounts is something different than recognizing unknowability—those things that are never fully understood, feelings that remain untranslatable, the incommensurabilities encountered in fieldwork. How should our writing reflect respect for the things we do not know and do not have the right to know? How do we do this without domesticating the unknown?

I write to become.

Through writing, I accumulate more being since I am more than I was when I materialise the ephemeral.

I wear the traces of various Englishes, strung like so many iridescent pearls within the necklace of language adorning me. The lilting singsong of Anglo-Indian first granted me tongue, irrepressible, undaunted by the pristine elegance of Queen’s English. As I collided with the unabashed assertiveness of American idiom, I learned the discipline of anthropology. I discovered my place in the world from the antipodes, in encounter with the laconic, self-deprecating humour of New Zealand vernacular. A clamour of tongues finds expression through me to constitute the anthropologist I have become.

Writing requires an act of will or a leap of faith that I will find what I need to reach where I want to be, yet no direct route exists from thinking to writing – a spiralling path often littered with impediments. Immersed within the spinning cobwebs of my own thought, I am tempted to linger unless an externally imposed imperative channels the steady stream of words to a medium read by others. The yawning pit of terror triggered by such a prospect requires considerable effort to evade no matter how habituated I am to its presence. Despite the testimony of many accomplishments, the act of writing exposes an unvoiced vulnerability that I, like others, prefer to mask. To be judged and found wanting: to not find the right words, render intelligible or offer something original, considered valuable by academe.

My entry into the world of words is primarily as a reader. I remain enraptured by others’ writings, the magic and precision of words a lure to escape the exigencies of the present. Yet, anthropology compels confrontation with those very same exigencies! A necessary discipline to craft a self and sensibility only manifest through writing, anthropology engenders a mode of being inseparable from writing. Always already in process, entwined, anthropology as/in writing feed each other, yet are at a standoff when the immediacy of extended fieldwork drives writing underground. Until, like a dam breaching its walls, the accumulated weight of words become an urgent torrent – unstoppable – as insights reached through fieldwork compel communication whether catalysed by ‘intelligent rage’ or commitment to research participants and field site.

Conversely, what modes of writing emerge untethered from the intensities provoked by fieldwork? What felicity conditions enable instauration of anthropology as writing, without the boost of fieldwork to unleash its potential? I pose these queries to address my own current predicament in which a combination of factors curbs my ability to transport myself ‘elsewhere’ at will. When Tim Ingold distinguishes between ethnography and anthropology, he suggests crossing a threshold not necessarily reached via fieldwork. By shifting focus to encompass the spectrum of human and (more recently), non-human condition, we enter a calmer more measured space concurrent with anthropological labour. Instead of fieldwork, I engage in ‘memorywork’ nourished by imagination to the shifting sands of times past and lives lived. Such writing up occurs in the absence of documentary artifacts and hence, is fabricated entirely from ‘headnotes’ to be summoned as I do in the segment below:

“Tangled skeins of narrative possibilities plunge me into Ammam’s stories during long, hot afternoons in Calcutta spent lying beside her in the shaded cool of her bedroom. The whirring ceiling fan picks up the occasional gust of warm breeze from the shuttered windows to settle on my increasingly heavy eyelids. I listen to her reveries of a distant village in Kerala, her reminiscent voice casting a dream-like spell, sowing the seeds that have remained buried for decades to finally find fertile ground and germinate at this conjuncture in the antipodes. I recall two stories in particular, both sending a sharp thrill through me at the time, reverberating through the marrows of memories haunting me ever since.

The first is an incident from the pioneering journeys of my great-grandfather through the dense jungles of Palaghat during the last quarter of the 19^th century. A player in the futures market of that conjuncture, my great-grandfather’s mission entailed identifying and marking jungle tracts rich in spices for auction. It was a dangerous venture through a wilderness teeming with predators. On one of these trips, his path through the jungle intersected with that of a leopard, indolently stretched across a rocky outcrop of the Western Ghats. His eyes locked with the amber, unblinking gaze of the magnificent feline, camouflaged by the dappled shadows cast by the sylvan surroundings. My great-grandfather stood stock still, then bowing his head and drawing his palms together, he intoned: “Revered elder, if it pleases you, grant me permission to cross your path.” The leopard’s amber gaze burnished his face, then, in a fluid movement, the animal stretched, yawned and disappeared into the surrounding jungle. My great-grandfather went on to make a fortune trading in spices, but never forgot to give homage to the leopard that permitted him to grow old to tell his tale.

The second story emerges from the context of Ammam’s household responsibilities as a daughter, and the daily round of chores allocated to her. At the centre of the courtyard, the household well provided for the family’s day-to-day water needs. Ammam’s morning routine began with replenishing the water for the family kitchen. At daybreak, as she drew water from the well, she thought she heard a hissing sound. Ammam’s mother also noted the same susurration as she drew water for her morning ablutions. As the murmurs of apprehension among the women in the household grew louder to reach the ears of my great-grandfather, he took it upon himself to investigate the matter. Peering carefully into the crevices of the large well, he spotted a King Cobra hidden in the mossy gloom of the walls. Drawing his hands together and bowing his head low, he addressed the cobra. He said, “Revered elder, I live in this household with many children. Why have you come here to live among us? This is not a suitable home for you.” He filled a cup of milk and left it by the well then ordered everyone indoors. The cobra uncoiled itself to slither sinuously away from the well, never to be seen again; the well was emptied then left to replenish itself from the aquifer that fed it.

I tap into the ‘black milk’ of memories and return to the scene of encounters with predators in Malabar. Whether in the “wild” spaces of the jungle, or the “domestic” space of his house, my great-grandfather’s mode of address to the two creatures is striking. In those contact zones, he displays an unwavering assumption regarding the possibilities for communication. Ammam’s narratives confront the predators’ ability to take human life head-on. Yet, the mutuality of humans and animals, their entitlement to survive, thrive and co-habit the spaces where both humans and animals range is never in any doubt.”

I have fashioned a narrative to conjure alter worlds that were precursors to my own and foreground my trail of connections to contemporary anthropological discourses.

I write to enter a world where I stand tall among others of my ilk, and know I keep good company.

Writing well matters. We now have multiple volumes addressing writing in anthropology, on histories of ethnographic writing, on anthropologists coming into their own writing voices, and “how-to” writing guides—see my earlier post Anthropologists: Ready, Set, Write! for a discussion of these. But, we still need more conversation about writing and more spaces for collectively thinking through how and what we write, and why.

Our Writers’ Workshop series is designed to be just such a space. Launched last January in conjunction with the Savage Minds Writing Group, our initial Writers’ Workshop showcased essays by ten anthropologists—Robin Bernstein, Sienna Craig, Zoë Crossland, Kristin Ghodsee, Kirin Narayan, Michael Ralph, Matt Sponheimer, Gina Athena Ulysse, Bianca Williams, and myself—on aspects of the writing process. I am delighted to announce that we have an excellent group of contributors for this fall’s Writers’ Workshop series. Each Monday, I will post an essay from one of our guest authors. While we will not have a separate writing group accompanying the workshop, I invite all anthropologists to read the series and to join in the conversation as it unfolds this fall. A thank you in advance to this fall’s guest authors:

September 8—Paul Stoller, “Finding Your Way”

September 15—Noel B. Salazar, “The Writing Behind the Written”

September 22—Marnie Thomson, “In Dialogue: Ethnographic Writing and Listening”

September 29—Whitney Battle-Baptiste, “Writing to Live: On Finding Strength While Watching Ferguson”

October 6—Mary Murrell, “Writing to be Read”

October 13—Roxanne Varzi, “Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between”

October 20—Adia Benton, “Mourning, survival and time: Writing through crisis”

October 27—Ghassan Hage, “Writing Anti-Racism”

November 3—Sita Venkateswar, “Writing to become…”

November 10—Catherine Besteman, “On Ethnographic Unknowability”

November 17—Kevin Carrico, “Thinking through the untranslatable”

Here’s to another inspiring series. Let’s get writing!

Writing is such a solo activity at times, yet one that requires the support and involvement of others. Imagination is key to this, imagining the people one is writing about, imagining readers, as are face-to-face conversations with friends and mentors as you write. I hoped an online writing group of anthropologists in many different places around the world might complement these relationships, and provide a sense of community of others engaged in similar processes, similar difficulties, similar joys in the writing.

For ten weeks, we had weekly check-ins on our writing progress. Starting out strong, the numbers of individuals “checking in” publicly dwindled over time, but the number of readers remained high. I heard from many people who were following along without officially checking in, instead benefiting from the knowledge that others out there were writing too. This was one of the main goals of the writing group–to create community.

Community can help with commitment, with regularity, and with the sort of conscious attention to writing as an ongoing practice, rather than the sort of start-and-stop endeavor it sometimes is given other academic demands. Alongside the group, I created the Writers’ Workshop essay series, inviting anthropologists from across the subdisciplines to reflect on various aspects of the writing process. My hope was that these essays would provide not only inspiration, but also body and substance to our collective writing, providing help for thinking of the logistics, the craft, the details of writing. They did this and more, providing a ground for reflection each week, and for moving forward in new and productive directions. My gratitude and admiration to each of our contributors:

Robin Bernstein: Dr. Funding, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Grant Writing

Sienna Craig: On Unreliable Narrators

Zoë Crossland: Writing Archaeology

Kristen Ghodsee: My Ten Steps for Writing a Book

Kirin Narayan: Ethnographic Writing with Kirin Narayan: An Interview

Michael Ralph: Styles of Writing, Techniques of Mentorship: A Tribute to Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Matt Sponheimer: From Different Throats Intone One Language?

Gina Athena Ulysse: Writing Anthropology and Such or “Once More, With Feeling”

Bianca C. Williams: Guard Your Heart and Your Purpose: Faithfully Writing Anthropology

and my piece: Anthropologists: Ready, Set, Write!

Will there be another Savage Minds Writing Group? Some folks have asked me this. My answer is perhaps. Were we to do the writing group again, what suggestions do you have for it? What new ideas might we try, and what aspects were most beneficial to you? Personally, I enjoyed both the weekly check-ins and the sharing of writing progress (or lack of it), as well as the Writers’ Workshop series. Both helped me clear space and time for writing in ways that were productive, and in which the communal aspect was important. I am grateful for that and yet there is definitely room to grow. What thoughts do you have?

My thanks to all of you who participated, who shared your writing ups and downs, your essays, and who brought the group to life. In the words of Kirin Narayan, may you continue to be alive in the writing!

The idea of having your own writing style is an illusion. In fact, we learn to write by digesting the writers we love. We obsess over the elegant turns of phrase they appear to deliver effortlessly, and pore over our own drafts hoping to wrench beauty from passages that have been pummeled by angst and uncertainty. If we manage to enjoy success in writing (or really, in editing), it is generally because we have been well trained. At some point, someone made it her mission to instill in us a sense of conviction about the words we wield. We learned to appreciate the magic of authorship. But, it is easier to trace the blessed path to writerly righteousness in retrospect. Learning to write (which means learning to think and plan more carefully) can be a curious kind of training, in part because we don’t always know when it is happening. In reflecting upon my own training, I decided to dedicate this column to the person who initiated me into the anthropological guild, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

In what is perhaps my most acute memory from the first year of my PhD program in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, I was walking up the stairs toward the Haskell Hall Mezzanine, as Andrew Apter and Michel-Rolph Trouillot were on their way down. “Hey,” Andy exclaimed, “Michael Ralph—Michel Rolph: you guys have the same name.” Rolph was not amused. I can’t even put his expression into words, but it was something like, “There is little, if anything, similar between this young man and myself, at this juncture.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Rolph was mean, just that he had a very particular idea about mastery. He expected his students to adopt rigor as a crucial element of their intellectual formation. Faculty routinely speak about treating their students as friends. Rolph instead believed that training implied a clear hierarchy and series of protocols through which a student would ultimately become an expert—and ideally, one day, a master. As early as my prospective students’ weekend, someone destined to be part of my cohort had asked if Chicago faculty treated their students as equals. Rolph fielded the question and flatly told the student, “If there was no difference between you and I, there would be no reason for me to be here.” Thus, while I feel indebted to Rolph for endowing me with the conceptual framework that animates my work, I have to confess that the process of acquiring knowledge and securing feedback was part of the challenge that training entailed. As Malcolm X once said of his mentor, “I feared him…like you fear the power of the sun.” But then, Rolph’s “Introduction to Social and Cultural Analysis” (aka “Systems”) syllabus began with the fifteenth century political theorist Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. And my initiation involved a lot more fear than love—or so I thought at the time.

Rolph treated the students he mentored like Knights of the Round Table. He expected us to swing swords that we initially were barely strong enough to lift as a way to cultivate our intellectual fortitude. He assigned so much reading and placed such a high demand on our writing, and insisted so much that we clarify our arguments, that his training forced us to spend countless hours devoted to the task of becoming a better scholar. In the process, we were not simply forever changed as thinkers and writers—Rolph’s method of initiation changed our physical constitutions. Rolph’s approach to knowledge was, in this sense, monastic. His grueling work regime left me feeling like a friar in the darkened basement of a medieval castle, poring over texts. But for all the rigor he promoted and embodied, he was also the most imaginative thinker I have ever come across. In that sense, being trained by Rolph was like going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that so many of the allusions that come to mind when thinking about Rolph’s intellectual legacy emerge from the medieval period. For, he instilled in us an appreciation for both the breadth and the continuity that defines historical inquiry. After all anthropology was, for Rolph, a historical enterprise. For some anthropologists, ethnography is the only method that matters. Rolph’s approach, instead, combined history, anthropology, and critical social theory. These distinctions are, in fact, often more misleading than they are beneficial. For Rolph, what an ethnographer does is quite similar to what a historian does: scholars in both fields make use of cultural artifacts (whether as discrete objects, built structures, or texts), they conduct interviews when possible, they develop arguments concerned with the way that people navigate and negotiate social transformation. The crucial difference between an ethnographer and a historian thus becomes the question of periodization: the historian might explore transformations over several centuries, a half-century…a decade, while ethnographers strives to make sense of the way that people understand the world around them in the course of a year, or a few years.  For this reason, the context of an inquiry is always crucial to tease out.

In this regard it is telling that when Rolph assigned work from someone like Immanuel Kant, he veered away from the Critique of Moral Judgment, focusing instead on his 1798 publication, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. I imagine Rolph was trying to teach us that, in addition to the specific disciplinary trajectory of a field that we call, “Anthropology,” there is a social theory tradition available to us that has likewise been concerned with the norms, protocols, and ritual procedures through which people authorize trade compacts, establish control of territories, arrive at some sense of what they find sacred, and learn to adjudicate social difference. For Rolph, this debate about the stakes of social belonging had a long arc.

In recalling the conversations we had in class and office hours—and my favorite passages from his many books, articles, and essays—I am reminded that Rolph routinely looked to the fifteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century for his understanding of what it meant to be modern. His critique of colonialism was not merely about the transformation from slavery into colonialism and the formal acquisition of territories, but about the way that Renaissance-era notions of difference had structured European (or, what he preferred to call, “North Atlantic”) perspectives of people and polities in what is now Africa, Asia, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America. In fact, in his critique of prevailing scholarship on the origins of capital, industry, and governance, Rolph insisted the Atlantic world was where modernity had been worked out and that African people, products, and technologies had been central, rather than auxiliary, to these developments. Like his mentor Sidney Mintz, he saw in the conjuncture of finance capital—as well as in labor regimes and land allotments fitted to actuarial projections of future profit, and the vexed process through which any given polity secured diplomatic standing amongst its peers and rivals—the making of a political and economic system that would shape global trade and diplomacy for centuries to come.

If Rolph was a Renaissance man, it is because he viewed knowledge as as much sacred as it was purportedly secular. It is also because he sought to cultivate insights from an intellectual tradition that stretched back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing Thomas More and Machiavelli into conversation with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, Baron de Montesquieu, and others, as a matter of course. This was not simply Rolph’s method, but his pedagogy.

On the flip side, Rolph was a Renaissance man in the classic sense. Rolph was a historian, anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist, among other things. And, even in his creative projects, we see many of the key insights and historical themes that would animate his scholarship. And, as writing is as much about re-thinking as re-deploying, I like to think that creativity is ultimately the most urgent mandate Rolph persuaded me to abide by.

In this week’s Writers’ Workshop post Dr. Funding, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Grant Writing, Robin Bernstein reflects on grant writing. In the discipline, we perhaps most commonly think of grant writing as utilitarian, as a formulaic type of writing once has to do to get to the real work of anthropology. And yet, Robin offers us a gift here in terms of thinking of grant writing as generative of not just money, but also pleasure in one’s work. She writes:

 Reading and re-reading drafts of a proposal serves to reaffirm my excitement for the work, and that enthusiasm becomes incorporated into the proposal with each revision. It is possible that I am an anomaly in taking pleasure in this process. But perhaps it is just that it allows me to tap into the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement that led me to choose a career in research in the first place. I can unreservedly dream about what could be, rather than fret about what has come to pass – I can live in a future of my own making while I am writing a grant proposal. 

Taking pleasure in the process. This is a whole different approach to anticipatory anthropology, and to anthropological temporality in general—reflecting on one’s home in anthropology and where it might take you next.

So, as we move in to the last two weeks of the writing group, where are you now, and where are you going? Eight weeks down, two more to go…..

As an anthropologist with a field site on another continent and a laboratory that needs a full-time technician to operate properly, I am dependent on continuous external funding to keep things going. There was a time when I resented this, and felt utterly exhausted and desperate in the context of the endless application-rejection cycles, waiting on the edge of my seat to find out whether I could continue my projects uninterrupted, keep my employees employed, and offer any resources to my students.

I will admit that ‘scientific writing’ has never come naturally or easily to me. There is a certain structure and sequence that is expected and required, and for some reason I have always found it difficult to wedge my thoughts into the mold that is necessary for positive peer review and publication. As with anything one considers somewhat unpleasant, I generally avoid it until it can be put off no longer. But what good is scientific research if you can’t communicate it effectively to an audience of your peers? I have always found it easier to communicate with a wider audience, where I can focus on the ideas, the broader background, and the potential of any results that might otherwise be doomed to insignificance by a p-value of >0.05.

And this, I have realized, is why I rather like grant writing. I understand that many of my colleagues see this process as a necessary evil (perhaps the way I see writing papers?), one that is stymied by not knowing what a given panel on a given cycle will find worthwhile (somewhat like that notorious third reviewer of manuscripts). It is often discussed as a fishing expedition in the dark, putting significant amounts of time and energy into trying to convince people that your ideas are important enough to merit being awarded money to explore them. But, perhaps perversely, this is the very reason that it appeals to me.

When writing a manuscript, I am trying to convince reviewers that my results are worthwhile, important, and of value to the field in a broad sense (no easy task, even with p-values <0.05). When writing a grant proposal, I aim to convince reviewers that my ideas are worthwhile, important, and relevant. This is liberating – it keeps me in a frame of mind where I am constantly looking forward. While in many cases I do include results from previous research as pilot data (p-values and all), or justification for what I’m proposing, these don’t take center stage. Instead, I become deeply involved with the challenge of convincing that anonymous panel (or perhaps just a person or two) that my project is one worth investing in, within a page limit and specific format. I take delight in condensing a page of text that would put me over length into a creative and informative figure to take its place. Reading and re-reading drafts of a proposal serves to reaffirm my excitement for the work, and that enthusiasm becomes incorporated into the proposal with each revision. It is possible that I am an anomaly in taking pleasure in this process. But perhaps it is just that it allows me to tap into the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement that led me to choose a career in research in the first place. I can unreservedly dream about what could be, rather than fret about what has come to pass – I can live in a future of my own making while I am writing a grant proposal. When the submission gong sounds and the proposal is out of my hands – then the stress begins.

With that, then, I offer a few thoughts on the grant-writing process. This is not a how-to; those sorts of guides abound on the intertubes, can be very specific or broad, and more or less effective. Instead, these are some lessons I have learned in the time since I submitted my very first proposal, and may be of some use to someone out there.

Know thy funding agency

This may seem obvious, but if the aims of your proposal do not clearly speak to the overarching goals and priorities of the organization with the money, it will be hard to get that organization to see how funding you makes sense. Familiarize yourself with the organization’s mission statement, with their target areas and goals (these can change frequently). Think of ways that what you are proposing to do can speak to these, and be sure to clearly articulate it.

Background

When contextualizing a research question, one frequently runs into the problem of how to tame the ‘introduction’ or ‘literature review’ section. This is the place to show reviewers that you have a thorough and current understanding of research in the area where you are proposing to do your work. Write too much, and your original thoughts and ideas are outweighed by the work that’s been done before you. Write too little, and you run the risk of being seen as too selective. I’ve often found it helpful to, in initial drafts, skip the ‘introduction’ section altogether and instead challenge myself to incorporate specific and succinct literature reviews as part of my ‘research question’ section. This ensures that the background that I present is directly relevant to, and highlights, my own original thoughts and proposal ideas. Then, it’s easy enough to copy and paste into another section.

Nice to know vs. Need to know

This piggybacks on the prior section on background, but also holds relevance for your proposal at large. In today’s funding climate, it is often not enough to propose to do something because there is a gap in the literature, or because a re-analysis of a previously proposed idea is now possible with new samples or technology. Why do we need to know the results of your research? This ‘need to know’ is sometimes required in a clearly articulated section of a proposal (such as ‘Broader Impacts’ for a NSF proposal). Keeping the question “why do we need to know this” instead of “why would it be nice to know this” in the forefront of your mind while writing will help you craft a compelling narrative.

Clarity, clarity, clarity

Sometimes you will luck out and get a true expert in your domain to review your proposal. Most often, you will have one or two reviewers who are familiar your area of research, with the remainder competent non-experts. These non-expert reviewers do not delight in sorting through your writing to decipher your meaning from nuanced and flowery prose. They want to know what you want to do, how you plan to do it, why it’s important, and how much money you need. Don’t make your reviewers go on a treasure hunt: put all these nuggets up front, make them clear, and ensure continuity throughout. Bold, italicize, underline – don’t be afraid to use these actions to draw the reader’s eye to key points. Use white space to delineate mental pauses between sections. Handholding and being overly simplistic is not necessary, but writing as a clear, succinct, and thorough tour guide is helpful.

Never give up…ever

I think one common theme tying grant writing together with manuscript writing is that the work is never ‘done’ done. There is always room to improve, to expand, to reorganize, and to match your product to that inaccessible archetype of perfection that we all carry in our heads. In both cases – grant and manuscript writing – there is the ‘x-factor’ of the outsider’s perspective. Even if you obsess over every last detail in a proposal and feel supremely confident that it is the best thing you’ve ever written, it is no guarantee of funding. In fact, you can probably count on not being funded on your first submission. If you can keep this in mind, it may make it easier to let go of the idea of perfection and view the first submission as an opportunity to make room for the reviewer’s perspective in what you’ve written. Cinching your proposal so tightly that there is no flexibility in organization or content will make revisions painful at best. I’ve lost track of the number of grant, fellowship, and program proposals that I have submitted over the past 10 years in order to arrive at the handful that have been awarded. What I have held onto is the thrill of the pursuit. Viewed through this lens, grant writing becomes less about reaching for that gold ring, and more about reconnecting with the passion that drives us. Renewing that on a regular basis is worthwhile, even if the end result doesn’t come with a dollar sign in front of it.

This week’s gorgeous guest essay on “Writing Archaeology” by Zoë Crossland brought a new conversation to our Writers’ Workshop series: how does one teach writing? How does one learn to write? As she reflects:

It’s clear that the practice of archaeology is as much about writing as it is about fieldwork. The texts we compose are fundamental to translating artifacts and sediments into stories about the past, and yet we pay relatively little attention to the craft of writing, preferring to train students in techniques of excavation and field survey. 

The craft of writing, indeed. Here is to continuing to think about writing collectively, and to thinking about writing pedagogy.

Most of our writing instruction in the discipline takes place in either direct feedback on one’s writing from peers or professors, or simply from reading good writing. Less common, but growing over time are ethnographic writing workshops–we’ve had three at the University of Colorado over the last five-six years or so, led by Ann Armbrecht, Kirin Narayan, and myself; and there are always such workshops at the AAAs every year, including Renato Rosaldo’s fantastic ethnographic poetry workshop. Even rarer it seems–but much needed–are courses devoted to writing such as Zoë Crossland’s Writing Archaeology course or Ruth Behar’s longstanding Ethnographic Writing course at the University of Michigan. Who else is teaching writing in anthropology? 

Tune in Monday for our next Writers’ Workshop post from Robin Bernstein on grant writing, and some tips we can all use. For now, check-in on your week and your writing, and here’s to the homestretch–two weeks to go!

Like fiction, archaeology allows us to visit other worlds and to come back home again. So, it can be a useful exercise to juxtapose archaeological texts with historical novels, poems and other forms of writing. Just as a novelist does, a writer of archaeology has to attend carefully to the conventions that shape the stories we tell. The written past demands some kind of narrative coherence, a consistency in our compositional form, and in the internal logic of the world we bring into being. Like poets, we have to choose our words carefully. In this comparison we can identify the shared techniques used to evoke other worlds and to draw in the reader. We can also consider the narrative possibilities that are excluded from our archaeological writing, and ask what opportunities might be opened up by allowing different forms of voice and language.

Going further than comparison, how might experimenting with different forms help us find new ways to conjure stories from the material traces of the past? There is an intimacy to archaeological excavation that is rarely captured in our narratives. The rasp of a trowel over granular soil; the vegetative odor of damp roots stripped green and white by a spade thrust; or the cold, polished feel of porcelain, smooth beneath the fingers. Much is gained in the translation from earth to text, but what is lost? How might we find narrative space to include some acknowledgement of affect and emotion, as well as the texture and grain of encounters with the stuff of the past?

We’ve been working through these questions in my Writing Archaeology class this semester, exploring how archaeological evidence evokes a particular response, and how novels and poems work to do the same thing. What enlivening techniques might we learn from fictional accounts, and how might they encourage us to think more critically about the role of the reader in bringing a text to life? It’s clear that the practice of archaeology is as much about writing as it is about fieldwork. The texts we compose are fundamental to translating artifacts and sediments into stories about the past, and yet we pay relatively little attention to the craft of writing, preferring to train students in techniques of excavation and field survey. This is not to say that archaeologists have not thought critically about writing. We began the class by reading some of the many experimental texts in archaeology. These include Rosemary Joyce and colleagues’ dynamic Languages of Archaeology, Janet Spector’s pioneering What this Awl Means and Carmel Schrire’s unflinching and evocative Digging Through Darkness. There are a surprising number of archaeological texts that play with form, positioning and language. Many of those who experiment with fiction also take an autobiographical approach, working to situate their experiments within the context of their own frustrations with the limits of conventional archaeological texts. Poetry is rare however. A beautiful new contribution, Stonework, has recently been published by Mark Edmonds working with the artist Rose Ferraby. Given the doubt that lies at the heart of archaeological endeavor – that moment when one must leap from the material signs that lie within our experience to the projected past that we read from and in them – how is archaeological writing approached? Do we attempt to hide or minimize this doubt, to embrace it, or to elaborate upon it? What is noticeable in many texts is the need for a framing device. Archaeologists rarely let a fictionalized or poetic piece stand on its own terms. In order to think about this more closely we’re also reading novelists who write about the past or material traces, such as Raymond Williams and Orhan Pamuk. We’re reading poets too. Seamus Heaney, of course, but also Peter Riley’s Excavations, and Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets.* Riley and Schwerner both play with the boundaries of fact and fiction in ways that are normally forbidden to us archaeologists.

The Writing Archaeology class is designed for students who are working on substantial writing projects – whether a senior thesis or a doctoral dissertation. It’s a small seminar, with ten participants this year. As part of the class the students undertake weekly writing assignments that work to better understand an author’s aims, his or her successes and failures. So, for example, in reading and discussing Janet Spector’s classic text What this Awl Means, I asked the students to write a similar narrative about their own research. Spector’s text has at its heart an imagined relationship between a bone awl and the adolescent girl who made and owned it. This was one of the first attempts to write an archaeological history as a story, as a biographical account centered on a named and historically documented person. I asked the students to write about their own projects in semi-fictionalized form, using a voice that was as close as possible to the one that Spector deployed.

This is an exercise designed to prompt students to think about language with precision. I asked them to consider the language choices that Spector made. For example, what verb tenses does she use, and how do they shift at different moments in the story? I also asked them to think about how Spector’s word choices affected their response to her story as readers. What kind of narrative mood is evoked by the text, and how is this accomplished? What kind of adjectives and verbs are used? Do they give the effect of a story quickly told, words piled up higgledy-piggledy, or does the narrative seem stretched out, slow and languorous? Or perhaps something else is achieved? Finally, what do they each bring to the text as readers – does the account resonate with other stories they’ve heard, and if so, how?

We workshop everyone’s writing in the second half of each class. I ask students to identify one thing they like or are proud of in the piece they’ve submitted, and one thing that didn’t quite work, or that they struggled with. We discuss our responses, make suggestions and note other points that we enjoyed, or that we think perhaps might need a bit more thought. What has been revelatory for me in this exercise, is the very different tone and topics of discussion that this approach elicits. By starting to take sentences apart, word by word, we’ve been finding out more about our own reading and writing practices. The writing exercise also gives students some insight into the terrain that the author was negotiating. Why did she make particular choices, and how might different styles of writing change how they read the text? To write a short piece that attempts to inhabit someone else’s authorial voice encourages close reading, attention to the exact words chosen and to the difficulties of experimental writing. What comes out of this class on writing is a more generous reading experience.

Let me offer some of the responses that the students gave me when I asked them about their thoughts on the class as I was writing this blog.

Michael suggests that the exercise works as “an excavatory tool” into the texts we read. In emulating a writer’s style, he points out that one has to figure out the boundaries between homage, pastiche and parody. As Courtney puts it, in writing such a response to the text you “have to sit with the author” and face the difficulties and challenges that the author faced. Valerie notes that it is an awkward process to force yourself “out of your narrative comfort zone” and into other voices. When imitating an author’s voice the students must make similar decisions about how to characterize the past people that they inhabit in the text. Courtney and the others noted how uncomfortably transgressive this can feel, enhancing their awareness of the ethical issues around representation and the control over narrative. This was felt especially strongly by those students working on the recent past, or who are telling a story about another nation or people’s histories and cultures. To acknowledge this is to recognize that these writing exercises are steps along a pathway. Not an end in themselves, they are meant to make visible the assumptions that we bring to our writing, as well as to open up new ways of thinking about our archaeological evidence, and to hopefully prompt insights that we might not otherwise have had. What’s important here is to create a safe workshop space to engage with each other’s work, and to acknowledge that failure is always possible, but that it is allowable and productive. To channel Seamus Heaney (with apologies):

Beneath my fingers and my thumbs

The keyboard waits.

I’ll dig with it.

Contributions by

Lindsey Bishop

Valerie Bondura

Charles Garceau

Emma Gilheany

Michael Merriam

Maud Reavill

Maura Schlagel

Dianne Scullin

Courtney Singleton

*With thanks to Severin Fowles for bringing Armand Schwerner’s poetry to my attention.

I am happy to share the syllabus with anyone who would like a copy. My email is: zc2149 [at] columbia [dot] edu

Four more weeks to go, so this might also be a good time to not only check-in on last week, but also assess your goals for the remainder of the writing group, and also tune in on Monday for our next Writers’ Workshop post, this time from Zoe Crossland, professor of archaeology at Columbia University.

Finally, if you missed it, there is still time to add strength to your writing support network—create an Anthropology Zombie Apocalypse Team! I made mine yesterday and got Sam Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Franz Boas. This week I’m going to see if I can’t channel some Kurt Vonnegut in my writing. This could be interesting….

When Carole McGranahan asked me to blog for the Savage Minds writing group, I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about.  I’d recently finished my fifth book, and was in the early stages of a sixth manuscript, so it seemed like I should have something to say about how to get a big project done. 

But I never realized I had a process until this morning.  To get the creative juices flowing, I sketched out a flow chart of how I tackle a project from start to finish.  The chart surprised me.  My quirks and old habits turned out to be a defined system, one that I have implemented for each of my books without even knowing it.

1. Produce an imaginary TOC

When I have an idea for a book, I type out an imaginary table of contents (TOC).  I think about the overall argument, and how to best organize the material that I will need to substantiate that argument.  At this stage I make a preliminary plan about the number and the style of the chapters.  For more traditional academic books, I go with fewer, but longer chapters that are organized thematically.  For projects aimed at undergraduate students or general readers, I have a greater number of short chapters and prefer a more intuitive chronological organization of the manuscript.  Although this outline changes, the intellectual work that goes into its initial production helps me think through the big questions of audience, tone, and length before I start writing.

1.  Create electronic files

After I have the TOC, I create a separate document file for each of the chapters, as well as for the front matter, the acknowledgements, and any appendices.  Then I cut and paste in any preexisting writing that I’ve done.  I call this “found text,” and I include everything that might be relevant to the chapter: journal articles, essays, book reviews, fieldnote excerpts, emails, outtakes from previous books, etc.

3.  Write crappy first drafts

Whether I’m building around “found text” or starting from scratch, I write a crappy first draft (CFD) of each chapter.  I don’t always do them in order, but I don’t edit any individual chapter until I have CFDs of all chapters.  These first drafts are appalling, but writing a chapter draft from start to finish without worrying about the grammar or coherence allows me to concentrate on the ideas and emotions that I want to convey.  No one ever sees these drafts; I delete them all once I start revising

1. Print out and line edit each of the chapters

I edit by hand (with a fountain pen) on paper.  Editing on screen is more efficient and environmentally friendly, but it makes for lazy writing.  Line editing in print forces me to read through the entire chapter before making changes to the electronic file.  This allows me to keep the larger structure of the chapter in my head, and to see how the pieces might work better in a different order.  This round of line edits is tedious because it is my initial crack at correcting the serious deficiencies of the crappy first draft.

1. Print out and line edit again

I repeat the process above.  The chapters are still rough, but after this round of line edits, they start to become readable.  At this stage, I focus on grammar, syntax, and narrative flow.  I start watching for typos and think about topic sentences and paragraph length.  I also consider how my arguments develop over the course of the chapter, and what additional material I might need to substantiate my claims.  Only after I have everything down on paper do I input the changes into the computer.

1. Combine the chapters into a manuscript

After the second round of line edits, I go back to my table of contents and think about the overall structure of the book.  Some chapters have outgrown themselves, and must be divided in two.  Orphaned chapters find new homes or get cut altogether.  All of the text that gets slashed is dumped into an electronic “outtakes” file.  This serves as a reservoir of “found text” for future projects. All of the chapters are now combined into one big electronic document.

7.  Print out and line edit

Call me a murderer of trees.  I print out the entire manuscript and do a full round of line edits by hand once more.  I concentrate on overall coherence and clarity, and look for more material to cut.  The manuscript begins to feel like something that I can share with the world without dying of shame.

1. Find friendly readers

My mom, my partner, my friends, and nonjudgmental colleagues are my first line of readers.  At this point, I’ve usually been working too intensely and for too long on the project.  I need some critical distance.  Giving the whole manuscript to a few trusted interlocutors allows me to take a break and get some much-needed external input.  Are my arguments clear?  Is there still surplus prose?  How many typos have I missed?

1. Listen to Stephen Hawking read my words

Once I have incorporated all of the friendly suggestions, I use the “speech” function in Microsoft Word to have my computer read me the entire manuscript. Unwieldy syntax, overused words, and even simple typos are more easily heard than seen.

1. Complete references and send it off

The final task is to organize all of the references and the bibliography.  Careful attention to the references allows me to review the overall structure of the book and think about the literature to which I will be contributing.  Only once the references are in order will I begin to contact editors.  At this point, the manuscript is ready for blind review.  I say a little prayer, send it off, and start work on my next project.

Five weeks, that is. We are half-way through our ten weeks of writing together. Phew! Are you still here with me? Our numbers are dwindling, and if you’re anything like me, these check-ins seem to be coming much too frequently! If you are someone who hasn’t checked in every week, do not despair or feel you can’t jump back in. Check in when you like, and if not, then at least keep writing.

What in your writing is worth telling? What stories need to be known by others? What commitments have you made to others, and have others made in sharing their stories with you? This week’s guest essay by Bianca Williams–Guard Your Heart and Your Purpose: Faithfully Writing Anthropology reflected on finding courage and faith in the writing. Acknowledge vulnerability. Discern purpose. Have faith. There are stakes involved in our writing as she so clearly reminded us…and herself. 

Words are powerful. The words we hear, transcribe, and create do things in the world and act on our hearts.

Indeed they do.

Here’s to a fantastic Week 6, to collectively getting over the “hump,” to this coming Monday’s fantastic guest essay by Kristen Ghodsee, and to community in the writing. Looking forward to hearing where the writing took you this past week.