It is an indicator of how dramatically the time available for my leisure has contracted – though not the topic of this post – that I still haven't finished reading the New Yorker I bought when the year was less than a fortnight old. It had a lady in a green fur on the cover and in it the usual mix of miscellany and eclectica, nothing that would immediately catch my attention but which would, with rare certainty in an unstable world, entertain me.
Browsing through it in the newsagent before making my way to Kensington High St. for the workweek-ending coffee, I noticed an article with illustrations of a rather unusual kind. Besides the characteristic cartoons that are scattered throughout each issue, photos or topical drawings often anchor an article in the reader's perception. The one I had in front of me was different. It contained seven diagrams of maps in various states of abstraction, labeled Fig. 1 through 7 in the style of scientific communications.
The essay was called Structure and had to do with writing. I was intrigued because I'm suffering from an inability to resolve a paradox: On the one hand, I'm a very structured person. I love and need structure. My work revolves around determining (protein) structures. To make sense of the world around me, I try to put it into a structure I can understand. This comes naturally to me.
On the other hand, when I write, the anticipated structure of the final product is no guidance. For this blog, most of the time I sit down with only a vague idea of what I want to write about. Random thoughts cross my mind. If I'm lucky, they transmogrify into sentences. Over time, fragments of paragraphs fill the screen, an expanse of incoherence. In a laborious process that always takes much longer than it should, I expand and rearrange the bits until they finally coalesce into something I can accept onto my blog. While I'm frequently happy with the results, especially later when rereading triggers memories whose existence I had forgotten, I'm not at all happy with the process, which seems haphazard and wasteful.
Longer pieces, like those that end up on my website, are created differently and sometimes benefit from a more structured approach. I might, especially for the write-up of a trip, start with a list of encounters to relate and places to describe. I might know what I want to write about. That's in the nature of the subject. But the process of writing still occurs by trial and error, and I have no idea of how to streamline.
The article, by John McPhee, a veteran staff writer (a.k.a. freelancer) of the magazine, doesn't exactly dispense magic. It takes a structured approach for granted and then to the next level. The seven accompanying sketches outline seven increasingly non-linear ways of telling a story, illustrating a quest to get as far away from chronology as possible in something as inherently chronological as a journey. I grew more fascinated by the page.
It's very easy to describe a journey linearly. The result is oftentimes very boring to read and rather unnecessary. The order of events in a journey doesn't have much to do with the understanding of a place that the final written piece should reflect. There's two ways of achieving a coherent narrative: Bruce Chatwin was a great master of modifying reality to match his artistic vision, single-handedly creating the genre of fictionalized travel writing. John McPhee has a different approach. He struggles hard to creatively structure the material he has collected to achieve the perfect fit with what he wants to express. Where to start is the crucial question, followed by where to go next, and the simplified maps that accompanied the article were examples of his answers. They showed merging strands, a spiral and a chaotic back and forth.
How would that look in practice? As it happened, only two months ago did I finish Best American Travel Writing 2005, which contained Tight-Assed River, a window into life and work on a river barge on the Illinois. I struggled reading this. There seemed to be no forward and no back, no today and no tomorrow. The barge would travel up the river one moment and down the next. I was confused and couldn't make sense of what was going on.
Turns out that the materialization of Tight-Assed River is described in great detail in the New Yorker article I've now finished, though I made the connection only very late. Figure 7 shows the barges as little arrows, red going upriver, green going down. John McPhee is mighty proud of his concoction – and it got him into a prestigious anthology – recalling the realization that there would be "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end", the journey an "endless yo-yo" where "a chronological structure would be misleading".
For me, it doesn't work. The non-linearity feels deliberately obfuscating. But that doesn't mean that structured writing isn't for me. I can see little drawings and outlines as being rather helpful, as long as they structure they represent isn't madly unorthodox. Prerequisite for this to work is obviously that the material is already there, in neat little topical piles, ready to be organized along the structure. I won't have the chance to put this into practice anytime soon. There's simply not enough spare time in my life in the moment.
For those interested in a less-mangled but still far-from-linear narrative by John McPhee, A Fleet of One, a ride-share on a hazmat tanker across the US, is available for free at the New Yorker.
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