It's easy as ABC!
/I’ve been reading A Place for Everything: the curious history of alphabetical order, by Judith Flanders, and yes, I am a librarian nerd. Fight me.
ANYWAY, the whole idea of alphabetical order came along very slowly, such that even in the 18th and 19th centuries there were those who resisted it, claiming that using the system in an encyclopedia — for example —broke up areas of knowledge into pointless pointillistic blurbs. Stochastic data, if you will.
You may — as I did — think that’s totally odd, since alphabetical order is so firmly ingrained in our culture, but I realized with a shock that our libraries are not organized alphabetically, are they? They are divided into subject areas, and only when there are books with the same call number, either Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress, then we alphabetize by authors’ last names.
That’s not my actual topic today, though.
Back in the day, people would copy information they wanted to remember into little notebooks called commonplace books. You may recall Hamlet’s snarky cry of “My tables — meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” in which he mockingly suggests that he write down this insight in his “tables,” i.e., a notebook.
The problem was that as your life went on, you were apt to lose track of those bits of stochastic data. One solution was to reorganize all those bits into other volumes — still not alphabetical, but at least sorted. (Our own Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ended up with twelve such notebooks at the time of his death: the WASTE BOOKS.)
The way to do this was to copy your bits onto slips of paper and sort them into categories. You might then re-copy them into actual notebooks, or perhaps keep them pinned together or run a thread through holes you punched (a strategy known as filing, from the Latin filum, “string”). You could also glue them into a notebook; many people used flour paste or “Moth Glew” (a pest control substance that remained sticky) so they could reconfigure the slips as needed.
And that brings me, finally, to my topic.
…the mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), a pupil of Copernicus, also kept his notes for his books and lectures on slips. When he was ready to write he shuffled them around until he was satisfied they were in the correct order, then pinned each one in place, producing his final text before “restoring the slips to their place for reuse.” [p. 144]
That’s right, class, we already knew 450 years ago not to “start at the beginning, go until you read the end, then stop,” aka the King of Hearts Paradox. Rheticus and others like him simply got all their ideas out of their heads and onto paper in no particular order. The order came after, not before.
As I’ve said before, this is exactly how I wrote Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy (pp.23–24). I scribbled ideas randomly into WASTE BOOKS dedicated to the project, writing the topic or Precept at the top of the page. Once I had enough to start, I copied all those ideas into Scrivener and began to connect them and flesh them out.
Did I have all the ideas I needed when I went from WASTE BOOKS to Scrivener? Of course not, and that’s the point. Scribbling random ideas down and then reorganizing them showed me what I might be missing and where I had gaps I needed to fill.
For example, at one point I realized that one of the chapters had a perfect format, something like
intro
explanation
my personal use of the Precept
group work
historical example
links & overlaps
summary
possible guest Lichtenbergian commentary
Then in Scrivener I created blank mini-documents for each of those sections in every chapter, which allowed me present each Precept in the same, fully fleshed out way.
Fun Fact: I originally ordered the three central Precepts as ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS > SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION > GESTALT. (I have a coffee mug with that incorrect graphic on it; it’s a collector’s item.) It was only after I began working in Scrivener that I realized that was wrong: as a stage in the creative process, GESTALT belonged between ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS and SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.
I used the same process when working on the concepts of my burn theme camp, 3 Old Men, and I’m using it now as I work on the staging of William Blake’s Inn. Finally, I have spent this entire blog post rearranging paragraphs and thoughts to improve the flow and sharpen its message.
tl;dr: Stop thinking you have to create your THING THAT IS NOT straight through, from the beginning to the end.
Get all the bits and pieces out of your head: ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS.
Rearrange them: GESTALT.
Connect/complete them: SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.
Repeat as needed until finished: ABANDONMENT.
