TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "use your hands"
This semester, The Near-Sighted Monkey is spending a lot of time at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery hanging around scientists and thinking about how they use their hands and how we use our hands when we are trying to figure something out or explain something.
Does being able to write out a problem by hand have some advantage over typing it onto a screen? What is it? How does it differ?
Says the Near-Sighted Monkey about her first day at WID:
“There are white boards and markers every which way you look on the upper floors of the WID building and they are often covered with what look like long dense sentences — I don’t even know what to call them. Are they formulas? These sloping rows of hand-written shapes. They are beautiful. Straightforward un-self conscious calligraphy—- numbers over letters with tinier numbers next to them and then sudden epsilons and deltas and symbols I’ve never seen before like an equal sign drawn wiggly which I think means “pretty much equals”.
I could watch the people at WID draw their formulas out on white boards all day.
When I told one of the mathematicians I met how surprised I was to find people doing so much writing by hand, he told me he needs a pencil in his hand when he’s thinking. He said most of the mathematicians he knows are the same way. “
How can our hands help us think something out?
Filed under: use your hands
(Source: handdrawnbyhand)
Writer’s Blocks
This weekend my friend Austin and I were talking about writing, and I remembered an interview with Lawrence Weschler in The New New Journalism in which he talks about building with wooden blocks while he’s thinking about the structure of his articles or books. Here’s the passage, after he’s talked about his idea-gathering and information collecting:
Are there any activities that help at this point?
Two things. One is that I read a lot of novels. Writers like Larry McMurtry and Walter Mosley are especially good. I’m sort of like a bicyclist riding behind a truck: I want to get into the slipstream of that other narrator’s narrative. To get the feel of narrative, to be on the road, to remember what it feels like to tell a story.
The second thing I do is play with blocks. I have a very large collection of wooden blocks. Some of them are my own invention, and some of them are just rectangular.
These blocks belong to your daughter?
No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.
And what do you do with these blocks?
Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I’ve built on the kitchen table. And they’ll say, “We see you’ve been busy today.” And I have! Because although I’m not thinking about the material at all, I am thinking about structure and rhythm….
And how do these block structures get translated into writing?
I’ll be playing with my blocks and find myself thinking, “Hmm, I suppose if I put this part of the story in front of that rather than after it … That might be interesting.” And gradually I start to find formal issues of sequencing. Then I start to notice rhymes that I hadn’t noticed before.
For instance, when I was writing about Breytenbach there was a key moment in his story when he is being arrested at the airport and passes by a window in which he sees himself. I thought about what it might have been like to see himself at that moment. And then I remembered that in one of his poems he had a line about “South Africa is like the mirror at midnight when you looked in it and a train whistle blew in the distance, and your face was frozen there for all eternity, a horrible face but one’s own.” And I thought, hmm, if I put that quote next to that scene …
Now this gets really interesting. This is fun. And at a certain point everything flips around: I’m suddenly magnetized north rather than south, and everything else in the universe except the blank paper before me is north. I’m at my desk, and wouldn’t even notice if the house was burning down around me. And yet, I’m not interested in the material, I’m interested in the form. And the thing that is totally mind-blowing is that elements I put side by side for purely formal reasons turn out to be true about the real world. And this is because beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. It is the same kind of satisfaction that a mathematician gets out of an elegant proof.Although the process sounds somewhat mysterious, and I’m not sure I would find it helpful in my writing, the important idea—that structuring writing is easier when you turn it into a physical activity—is undoubtedly true for me. I usually use index cards and shuffle them around, but using building blocks or Lego or even drawing a picture would probably work, too. The key is to get things out of your head and into your hands.
(All the interviews in that book are good, by the way, very focused on craft and would be of interest to any writer, not just journalists new new or old.)
I’ve never read any of David McCullough’s books (something I’ll change soon) but I’ve read this interview twice now, and it’s just great, especially because McCullough mentions that it was a Paris Review interview with Thornton Wilder that changed his own writing life:
I can’t tell you what a difference it made for me. When asked why he wrote books and plays, he said, “I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading or to see a new play that would engross me.” If it didn’t exist, he wrote it so he could read it or see it.
So many good bits. On the importance of looking and seeing:
[S]eeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.” […] The chances of finding [something new] are fairly remote… it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough. […] The training I had in drawing and painting has been of great benefit. Drawing is learning to see and so is writing.
On slowing down and writing with a typewriter:
I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.
About quitting writing his Picasso biography, and the importance of picking a good subject:
I didn’t like him… He was an awful man. I don’t think you have to love your subject—initially you shouldn’t—but it’s like picking a roommate. After all you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?
