Well, I've been immersed for a few months in all the stories and interviews, off-hand remarks and seriously-meant discourse I gathered together in notes, electronic sound files, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of photos, and wisps of memory in my noggin. I wrote and re-wrote and re-organized and re-typed a lot -- most of which probably wont really make it into the final draft, or even the first draft of what will eventually become MY DISSERTATION. But, now that I have gone through all my data, and been thinking in circles about it, spinning my wheels for a couple months, my supervisor has granted me permission to go back to reading things I
haven't already written. So, I'm going back to the history of certain things, pouring over articles and dusty books, and hopefully will soon be writing the ''boring'' parts of what will eventually become (dramatic pause) MY DISSERTATION.
So, what was the point then, of all that ''hanging out'' with my notes? Why spend all that time writing pages and pages that wont be read by anyone but my supervisor and myself? The point of all this dwelling has been to ground what eventually becomes my dissertation in all this good, thick (nicely narrative) description and avoid producing a bad, thin (too theoretical and flighty) ethnographic account. To not come at it from theory and just plug in the data, so to speak, but to make the data speak for itself. Kind of important, I suppose, when you spend a year of your life engaging in research, which on top of paying attention to everything, asking a lot of 'dumb' questions, trying out my Dutch, doing (and eating) everything people invited me to try, etc. is really a whole lot of talking with people who want to help you out, share their time, opinions and experiences with you.
So, I think this brings me to the topic of this post: writing. Well, writing
ethnography well. Because in the end, my big, scary, capital-letters DISSERTATION -- the culmination of 5 years of work, maybe 6 by the end of it (yikes, I know!) -- is also supposed to be a work of
ethnographic brilliance disguised as a dissertation. But the question of how to get started writing at all, let alone how to get started on writing something worthy of the time and effort, of the people whose lives inform my project, and in the end, something worth reading... that's kind of a different question all together.
In October, while I was doing all this dwelling in my notes business, I ran into my old Theory prof in the hall of the department. After welcoming me back from the field, Ken asked me: "So, is it all written yet?" I laughed off the ridiculous question (I'd only been back a couple of months) by saying, "Of course! Well, almost... Ha ha." But then a kind of great thing happened, Ken gave me a couple of interesting bits of writing advice, places to start
writing.
"Just start
writing!" he said. "Automatic writing. Just start in the middle of a sentence. Don't even bother with the beginning of the sentence. You can come back to that later. Just start in the middle of the sentence and keep going."
"Hmmm," I pondered. "That's pretty interesting... I'm kind of in the middle of transcribing right now."
"Forget that! Don't transcribe! Just write!"
"Well," I apologized, "I'm not really transcribing, just sort of listening and taking notes on things and only transcribing the bits I think I might quote..."
"Don't even do that! You don't even need to look at your notes. All the important stuff is up here," he says, pointing wisely to his head. "You know what
Geertz used to do when his students came back from the field? He asked them to give him all of their notes. Everything. And then he locked them up and told them to go write their first draft."
As Ken is telling me this, I am picturing the great mahogany desk covered in stacks of files and books, with one of those green-glass shaded secretary lamps, and potted plants sitting across a wide windowsill that I somehow imagine every great and well-respected anthropologist must have in their office. I know of course that this can't be the case. University budgets and all. But nonetheless, there is a shadowy figure of Geertz taking the precious stack of his student's papers, notebooks, tape-recordings, scribblings, maps, clippings, etc. I can picture the cautious pride and humility in their eyes as they trustingly turn these sacred things over to their supervisor change to horror, as he surreptitiously swivels in his great chair, and locks them in an equally imposing and dark-wooded cabinet behind him.
"What? He just takes all their notes? But what if they need to quote someone?"
"It doesn't matter. All the important stuff is already in your head. You'll be surprised at how much you actually remember. He used to say just make it up. Just make a note in your draft that this quote is made up, and when you get your notes back you can check it. And you know what? When the students got their notes back, those made up quotes were almost written verbatim."
"What? Wow."
"Exactly. All the important stuff is already up here."
Hmmm, good advice. But where does one start, really? Well, luckily,
Marshall Sahlins gave Ken some more advice that actually became a starting point for him in writing the non-ethnographic novel version of his own dissertation. He said, just take a moment, a moment or an image that keeps coming back to you, haunting you, over and over again. Take that moment or image and just start writing from there. You'll know what that thing is. Whatever it is. Because it stays with you. And you'll be surprised at how much just pours out of starting with describing that
thing.
Running into Ken in the hall again the following week, he was shocked that I still wasn't finished my dissertation, given all the great advice he had imparted to me the week before. Never worry. He had yet another strategy for churning out a brilliantly ethnographic dissertation. And this one works, because he had done it himself.
When he was still a grad student struggling with writing THE DISSERTATION, he was talking with yet another mentor. Well, complaining. And his mentor said, rather bluntly, "Ken, you talk a lot. Why don't you just come to my office some day, and we'll sit down with a tape recorder. I'll ask you questions and you can talk. And then just transcribe everything. And then that's your thesis."
"So," said Ken, "you just need to find someone who knows enough about your work in order to ask some really insightful questions. Then you can just talk it out. Record it, transcribe it, and that's your thesis."
Sounds simple enough. Besides, if everything is all in your head anyway, it seems like a good way to get it all out in the open.
The next week, I had parked myself in our graduate student lounge. As I sat on the burgundy sofa reading something or other not related to my own thesis, Ken stopped at the door.
"What have you got for me this week?" I asked. I kind of like that each week I am getting a new gem of writing advice from someone so unconnected to my official committee.
"Oh, nothing... Well,
actually,
emulation. Just pick an author, any author whose style you love, and emulate their style. Or write out parts of their books. Isn't that what Hunter S. Thompson did?"
"Oh, I don't know."
"Yeah, he did. Hunter S. Thompson wrote out whole passages, books even, of Ernst Hemingway. That's how he got a feel for his style, for the shortness of the words and sentences... You need to think of an author whose style appeals to you."
"Uh huh. That's interesting. I never thought of doing that."
"What is your favourite ethnography? Or it doesn't have to be anthropology. It's maybe better if it isn't. Whose your favourite author?"
By this time I had slotted the bookmark back into my Dutch translation of
Pride and Prejudice. I had picked it up at an odd little second-hand shop one day in Amsterdam. Now that I was supposed to be dwelling in my fieldnotes, and explicitly not reading anything academic related to my research, I thought it was a good time to get back into fiction. I had sort of given up on reading new fiction two years ago. Under the weight all the reading I was required to do for my comprehensive exams, even reading for fun seemed like work. When I was in the field, I hardly read anything for fun at all, with the exception of the books I devoured during two glorious vacations: one curled up in a family room at Christmas and the other on a beach in France for two weeks. But now, faced with the question of who was my favourite writer, in anthropology or otherwise...? I hadn't read in so long, I wasn't even sure anymore...
"Um, Jane Austen?" I replied, somewhat weakly.
"Hmm, that's probably not the best writing style to adopt. Who else?"
"Well, I used to really like Tom Robbins," I say, thinking back to a highschool book report. It was one of the most enjoyable things I remember writing, because I allowed my style to be infected with the excessively, drippingly descriptive and playful style of the author. Fun, but maybe not appropriate now. "But, I kind of don't think that he'd really be a good author to emulate either."
"Ha, no. You're right. But there's got to be someone else."
"I'm not sure..."
"Yes, you know who you like. There's someone."
"Erm, I am kind of reading some books by a Dutch author, in English.
Geert Mak?" Several people had suggested his work to me because it was so popular. I had read
Amsterdam and am still working through the brick of detailed human history called
In Europe. Every chapter opened by describing the author's travels through Europe, each city's landscape, smells, atmosphere... And then weaves the lives of historical figures, important events, and the experiences of normal people into that richness. Yeah, Geert Mak could work. "He's a popular historian. But I like his style. He writes really accessibly. Lots of description, but it's nice."
"See, there you go. Hey, we should be writing these things down. We should write an article about it or something."
"I am." I laugh. "They're all in my little black notebook," I say as I fish it out of the depths of my bag.
"Well, good..." He said smiling as he disappeared from the doorway.
The last bit of writing advice came a bit out of the blue. It came out of Ken telling me the following week when I saw him in the department, "I don't have any writing tips for you this week."
I quipped, "Oh, that's okay. I'm not writing this week." It was a Thursday. It was the last week before Christmas holidays and I had been spending some time with a good friend of mine who was visiting from out of town for a couple days. I was on campus because I needed to invigilate an exam and then take my stack of 50 or so exams home to grade before catching an early flight to my parents' on Monday morning. Three days to mark fifty exams wasn't going to be fun, but also wasn't impossible. But, obviously I didn't have time to write!
Apparently, that's not an answer an academic should ever give.
"What?!" Ken's eyes widened, and he launched into an unexpected last piece of writing advice for the year. "You have to write every day! Even if it's nonsense. Made up words. even if it's just meditating in front of the computer screen. But you have to write every day. You have to write for at least five minutes every day."
"Even on the weekends?" I ask, hopefully. Surely, even the most dedicated writers get a weekend.
"
Even on the weekends!" he laughed. And he told me about how his father-in-law came home everyday and would retire to his study (again, I am picturing the rich mahogany - what is it with my imaginary academics and dark wood furniture?), pour himself a drink and write for an hour, or fifteen minutes, or something --
every day. "That's how you write 19 books."
Well, if writing a little bit every day will get you 19 books over the course of your career, I'm sure it's sound advice for finishing one dissertation. Even if, like imagining the obligatory mahogany furniture of academics, it keeps showing up in my thoughts in those terrible capital letters. Breaking it down a little bit every day and writing -- whether pure gold or pure rubbish -- has got to help.
But for now, I'm going back to the advice of my supervisor and am going to read for a while. And then, when my wheels stop spinning the avalanche of brilliant, rich, grounded, insightful ethnographic prose will come pouring out... Right?
