Last week, I got a comment asking if I could share a bit about my writing process and how I connect so many different ideas together. I have to be honest that a lot of it is just intuitive, so I don’t really know how I do this — it’s a feeling.
I can’t hold everything in my head though, so I do have some basic methods and tools for external storage and retrieval that I can share. I wouldn’t call it organization, but it is a mess that works for me. Writers often talk about sorting into two groups, ‘plotters’ that plan and outline, and ‘pantsers’ that mostly wing it — I am definitely a pantser.
Recently I was listening to an interview with the historian Susan Stryker, where she said that ‘figuring it out on the fly in an experimental way’ is a ‘monstrous aesthetic’. I like that! Stryker has been interested in the monstrous since her famous essay on Frankenstein basically kickstarted trans studies in 1994. Monsters represent porous boundaries and disturbing-yet-exciting combinations.
Wait, I know I’ve read something else about monsters recently…let me search it in Obsidian. Yes, there’s a chapter in These Wilds Beyond Our Fences called ‘Hugging Monsters’, but it looks like I forgot to make any notes about it. I have to go get the book off my shelf.
I keep these little colorful tabs all over the place so I can mark things I’ve underlined and want to go back to while I’m reading, but I tend to forget the boring step of adding it to my database. This means I often end up re-discovering things I’ve already read, which is not efficient, but is very fun!
This chapter is about how Akomolafe met Karen Barad, whose theory about agential realism has been big for new feminist materialism — basically the idea that objects and subjects are both acting on each other all the time in a big web of connections. He actually quotes Stryker’s Frankenstein paper in the last part of the chapter when he talks about how, rather than fearing monsters, we must seek them out.
He writes:
“…even more scandalous than the fact that we are vectors for the monstrous is the observation that monsters are not occasional anomalies that appear when the moon is blood-red, or when a crazy scientist retreats into his fusty enclave to debauch the holy order of nature. Something deep and troubling is happening at the very ‘heart’ of the world. Something that is not merely occasional or frequent. Monsters keep the world fresh; to the one who supposes that things are settled, that forms are given, that the road is clear, monsters spring a surprise — opening the new in the belly of the old.”
I didn’t plan to transition into a tangent about monstrosity here, but my mind leapt sideways to that Stryker quote when I called myself a pantser. Association is partly just how my thinking works, and writing is how I think out loud, so I end up weaving a lot of seemingly disparate things together.
If pantsing is a ‘monstrous aesthetic’, and associative thinking is a common trait for ADHDers, then what is an ADHD aesthetic? And is it, by nature, a bit monstrous? Putting this on the list of posts-to-be-written!
If I had to explain my writing process step-by-step, it would be something like this
An idea appears
I like Elizabeth Gilbert’s framing of ideation, that ideas are things that visit us, not things we ‘have’. It’s a bit mystical, sure, but that is my experience. Some situations are better for being able to hear these ideas.
For me, it usually happens when I’m doing something repetitive and physical — walking, folding laundry, taking a shower, washing dishes. I get a lot of ideas while I’m cooking dinner at night, so I’m often running to my computer to write them down while boiling something on the stove.
Sometimes the idea arrives in thesis form, with several bullet points of readings or things I want to connect; sometimes it’s just a title. I make a new note in the Newsletter folder that I keep in my Notes app, and dump whatever initial thoughts I have there. Then I walk away.
Rabbit holing
Research is a treasure hunt. I try to find a few different books on a subject, I sift through as many pages of Google Scholar as I can, I peruse Reddit threads and hashtags on social media. Anything really interesting, I drop into the note I started in step 1.
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