The key to writing a new book may not be to open new territory, but to go deeper into that territory I already know. I may not have deeply explicated a few things--not as deeply as I would have liked.
I do feel that I understand my style now, which has nothing to do with academic precision. Indeed, academically I am a sloppy writer, taking years if not decades to refine my terms. (I do persist with it, much to my credit, even to the point that right now I am satisfied, after beginning the project of intellectual shamanism in 2005.)
The most difficult aspect of writing for me is to open up the channel to my feelings, as most of the time this stays closed. When it opens, I suddenly see more, much more than I had been taking in before. I used to think, believe it or not, entirely in abstractions. It used to take me the longest time to come to terms with anything anybody said to me, because I would have to determine whether it was -- in the abstract -- right or wrong.
Now everything has changed, in fact I do not even feel like the same person. I can accept much more readily that when I screw up in my attempts to be academically precise that this is precisely what I am supposed to do, if I am going to be me. My words are more literary than precise, unless they happen to be those words that I have been working on for around a decade.
To understand one's natural voice is so important. To know where one is likely to go wrong means that one has more opportunity to offset the strange things against a different kind of voice. Nothing whatsoever is wrong in a literary text unless it fails to be counterbalanced. That is key.
Consequently, to work with the slightly jaunty, misshapen ideas is necessary and can produce a lot of fun. In any case one must go with one's character and not adopt a feeling of fighting against it.
I think an element of chaos always finds its way into my work. I let it take root there. If it grows up wild and sturdy, well and good. That is part of what is in me, that needs to find expression. I let certain elements of chaos that I have noticed find their way to be at home in my writing. There have been malapropisms, errors relating to hidden coding in the layout, and other elements of chaos that come from working with material that initially appears as alien, for whatever reason. (It may be I am working with parts of my mind that are not used to appearing.)
Writiing is a process of shaping and counterbalancing the mysterious elements that appear. I don't want to tame them totally -- I want to let them have their expression. To lose the sense of the wild in what I do would be like to annihilate myself.
I do feel that I understand my style now, which has nothing to do with academic precision. Indeed, academically I am a sloppy writer, taking years if not decades to refine my terms. (I do persist with it, much to my credit, even to the point that right now I am satisfied, after beginning the project of intellectual shamanism in 2005.)
The most difficult aspect of writing for me is to open up the channel to my feelings, as most of the time this stays closed. When it opens, I suddenly see more, much more than I had been taking in before. I used to think, believe it or not, entirely in abstractions. It used to take me the longest time to come to terms with anything anybody said to me, because I would have to determine whether it was -- in the abstract -- right or wrong.
Now everything has changed, in fact I do not even feel like the same person. I can accept much more readily that when I screw up in my attempts to be academically precise that this is precisely what I am supposed to do, if I am going to be me. My words are more literary than precise, unless they happen to be those words that I have been working on for around a decade.
To understand one's natural voice is so important. To know where one is likely to go wrong means that one has more opportunity to offset the strange things against a different kind of voice. Nothing whatsoever is wrong in a literary text unless it fails to be counterbalanced. That is key.
Consequently, to work with the slightly jaunty, misshapen ideas is necessary and can produce a lot of fun. In any case one must go with one's character and not adopt a feeling of fighting against it.
I think an element of chaos always finds its way into my work. I let it take root there. If it grows up wild and sturdy, well and good. That is part of what is in me, that needs to find expression. I let certain elements of chaos that I have noticed find their way to be at home in my writing. There have been malapropisms, errors relating to hidden coding in the layout, and other elements of chaos that come from working with material that initially appears as alien, for whatever reason. (It may be I am working with parts of my mind that are not used to appearing.)
Writiing is a process of shaping and counterbalancing the mysterious elements that appear. I don't want to tame them totally -- I want to let them have their expression. To lose the sense of the wild in what I do would be like to annihilate myself.
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