Tao lin writer12/28/2023 ![]() Then my phone broke and I moved my notes to a file on my computer in TextEdit called notes.rtf that is always open on my screen. From then until May 1, 2015, I typed notes only on my phone in the Notes app. I’ve been taking notes every day since October 28, 2013. Do you take notes every day? What types of things do you try to focus on or what types of details have you found useful when you look back on them later? How do you organize such an extensive archive? When you revisit your notes, do you usually know what you’re looking for or do you just browse them until something sticks out at you? I’m interested in the style of note taking that you’ve been doing on your own life. ![]() I’ve tried to avoid reusing names I’ve already used so that it’s less confusing and so I can pair a name with a character better in my head. In your fiction, how do you decide names for characters? Then, maybe 70% into my work on the book, the style stopped changing as much, and I created a guide to organize my thoughts on Taipei’s style from then on, I referenced that guide, in which I also kept lists of themes and motifs. I kept the efficient, I felt, newspaper technique of conveying someone’s age by writing “Paul, 26,” and abandoned the word “perhaps” for “maybe.” Sometimes I changed back and forth and reminded myself to stay calm, that I was just still undecided. ![]() As I edited the notes into a draft of the novel, a style developed and I began to consciously choose aspects of the emerging style that I wanted to keep or abandon. With Taipei, I started out with hundreds of thousands of words of diary-like notes that I typed quickly with many stream-of-consciousness-seeming sentences like this sentence that I knew wouldn’t be published but were just notes. Maybe 90-95% of the time I spend on writing is spent on editing, on refining and clarifying and embellishing and rearranging and pruning and shaving and buffering and experimenting and exploring and tweaking. How do you develop the style you choose for a specific work?įor me, style develops out of editing. Your work has always had a distinguished aesthetic approach with dramatic stylistic differences between books. I’ve increasingly learned that learning seems to never end-I can keep going deeper into topics, reading one paper or article with one perspective, then multiple papers/articles with different perspectives, then an entire book, then multiple books, and so on, and keep increasing my understanding in ways that make my previous understandings seem vague or inaccurate or wrong. I also enjoyed research because it feels satisfying and meaningful to me to publish nonfictional information that is accurate, or that is more accurate than what is already out there, and because I like learning. I liked it because it gave my writing process another aspect that I could switch to working on each day. I read ~150 papers from scientific journals and ~130 nonfiction books and I researched a file in which I’ve typed 400,000+ words of notes on my life and other things since 2013. With my next book, my first nonfiction book, I researched both my own life and other things more than I’ve ever researched anything. I researched my Gmail account, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and history. With my poetry and fiction, I did little to no research on facts about the world, but I researched my own life. How does research fit into your writing process? Is this a new approach for you or has research always been a part of how you’ve worked? With the latest book it’s been clear (partially from your Twitter reading list) that a lot of research was required. Your fiction has always been personal, and driven by autobiographical experiences. I keep becoming interested in one of the other things and my motivation keeps changing or disappearing and it usually takes something major from outside, like a book contract, for me to finally focus on one thing. ![]() I haven’t had that problem, but I’ve had something where I have too many things I want to write about and I feel unable to focus on one for sustained periods, and it feels like writer’s block in that I feel stuck. I imagine people with writer’s block feeling unable to think of something to write about. Is writer’s block something you’ve experienced? Or, if not that, is there a comparable thing that you’ve run into that makes it harder to write and produce? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |