Here we are then, the data analysis chapter. It’s as much as a magical mystery tour as the rest of them are but I’m increasingly conscious that is simply the way that writing is. Some days you figure things out the moment that you begin to work and some days you don’t. There are moments in my books that haven’t got changed from first draft to publication and I know that they’re right because of how they feel. Is that helpful? To talk of writing as a textured, three-dimensional thing? I am not sure that it is and yet I want to for that is the only way that I understand it.
Perhaps it’s better to talk about craft then, that well-used phrase within the world of writing. The craft of writing. Crafting sentences. Crafting this and crafting that, but always kind of keeping that separation between the act and the thing. Writing is crafted. Crafting makes writing. Writing is an act of craft. But perhaps something happens when you ignore all of that and kind of just push the words together; writing is craft, craft is writing, writing is craft. There’s something interesting in that for me, something that kind of moves back to the ink and the quill and the marking of the page with the ink, the sort of something that makes me think here is a tangible thing that didn’t exist before and I have made it and it has made me and together, line to page, black on white, something had happened in the world and it is good.
Making, making, always trying to see what comes of it, and you know when it’s right and you know when it’s wrong, but here’s the thing: you can’t build when there’s nothing there. Making needs stuff, it needs you to be full and the world to be charged and ready and some days, that doesn’t happen, but when you’re writing something long and something big then it has to. You can’t wait for circumstance to allow it, you need to force the context and make it happen. You need to craft, you need to make, you need to will these lines into shape and form and meaning.
I talk a lot about muscle memory with my students, the training of the body as much as the mind, for writing is a muscle and you must work it. I am not sure where the muscle is based, I loathe, somehow, at locating writing solely in my head when walking in sunlight can tease the words out of my heart as much as a cold night in December; perhaps the muscle is simply us and writing is all about learning how to find that part of you that wants to craft, wants to make, needs it to happen.
Data analysis then, to data and the search for form and shape and meaning; an arcane act, a mysterious act, but it’s just writing at the end of it and you can’t have something good unless you have the bad, and so you write the bad and the poor and the wordy and the sentences that you know need to make better sense at some point but that point isn’t now, and you have to have faith in that and allow it to happen. The making, that first moment, it’s messy and it’s loose and sometimes it’s perfect and all you have to do is let that happen and trust in the process. (rewriting, rewriting, remaking, remaking, rewording, editing, deleting, questioning).
We all have a process, even writers who do not think they are writers, even people who doubt their every scratch upon the page, process is within all of us and what’s important is trying to figure out what that is, what works, what doesn’t, what is just fear made flesh upon the line, what is doubt, and letting yourself delete, letting yourself stop. Letting yourself be unafraid and deleting because the words will come back, they’ll come back and they’ll be better. Sometimes I worry about losing drafts, backing up, backing up, backing up, and sometimes I sort of long for it to happen because I know what I write next, how I replace it, that will be the good, great stuff.
Data analysis then, the chapter that needs to tell you why you came to the party and what’s in the party bag, the chapter that’s halfway through the thesis and kind of feels like it should be at the front, the chapter that’s built initially on sand and shale and water, all of it so soft and so friable and so dangerously brittle that you don’t even want to look at it for fear that it might fall and fade, the chapter that suddenly starts to find form the more you work it, the chapter that suddenly starts to feel right, the chapter that suddenly starts to sit in the world and work in the way that you knew it had to all along.
The denial of doubt, the assertion of order, the patterns making themselves seen, the knowledge that they were there all along; the form, the fit, all of it known, all of it flesh.
Big boots and adventures 