“Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones” is now 5000 words long, after working on it for about three hours, maybe a bit less.
I'm not as good at doing outlines as Graham, though I think that's a fine way to proceed. What I do instead is write something like a seed of the essay, maybe three or four pages. That's how The Ecological Thought started. It hangs together because at one point it was just three pages long. Then I just kept on putting more sentences in between the existing sentences.
In this case, and in the last two cases, it's been a little different still. I've had something like a cloudy idea of the essay. Then I've waited until it seemed like it could start to rain down on to the page. Then as the rainstorm proceeded, some slight flashes of insight occurred and the essay took shape around them. That's how I wrote Ecology without Nature. I waited for years, literally, to put it together, until I was confident enough. Then I zoomed through it in about five weeks.
3 comments:
Funny. I just had a conversation with myself, wondering how ooo fits with anarchism and now you have given me an answer, they are TAZ and perhaps even PAZ and would Hakim Beys ideas work in with them... given he is the author of the temporary autonomous zone?
"What I do instead is write something like a seed of the essay, maybe three or four pages. ... Then I just kept on putting more sentences in between the existing sentences."
Makes sense. But, strikes me as something that would've been more difficult pre-wordprocessing.
Hi Karen, Yes indeed, I'm doing a somewhat detailed reading of Bey in that essay. Bill, that's right. I just can't imagine actually. I did type the first few things I did at school on a typewriter. But they were only a few pages long each. How on earth...?
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