In the Weeds...
Why it's been more than a month since my last post (fellow writers will, I'm sure, find this familiar)
So, I’m at the part of this project where I am really “in the weeds.” I have 16 essays in various stages of dis/repair tucked into an elaborate system of nested folders. Each essay has its own folder, each of those folders have four subfolders (research links, photographs, working draft, discarded writing), and often those subfolders have subfolders (photographs I have rights to, photographs I don’t have rights to, photographs of unknown origin, for instance…).
What I’m saying is that I’m thick in the work of it in a way that makes stepping back to look at one part of the process trickier than it was at earlier stages.
I’m also at the part where I’ve assembled pretty much all I know, or will know, in the book’s moment. Now I have to figure out what I think/feel/believe about what I know, and that’s always tougher. I’d be interested to hear from other writers about how they work through this part of the process, the sifting and parsing of the research they’ve done in order to give the reader access to what they’ve learned without dictating what the reader should think/feel/believe about the material.
Because, as most of you know, I can get pretty didactic. (I’ll pause for a second so a goodly portion of you can mutter “that’s an understatement” before I go on.) I have more than a handful of passionately held beliefs: we should always be working toward justice, everyone deserves access to the basic requirements of a decent life, education should always be treated as a social good equally available to all, all dogs go to heaven, Tudor’s biscuits are only so-so, Star Trek is demonstrably better than Star Wars, etc. etc. etc. But I also absolutely believe the best literary nonfiction collects knowledge for the reader, but leaves the reader to build out of that knowledge what they will.
How do you, writer friends, contend with the problem of having strong beliefs about what the material you’ve discovered signifies that you don’t want to impose on the reader? I’m asking a lot of questions—who is an Appalachian? who is a Jew? can you be from a place and not of it?—that even I don’t have the hubris to try to answer for anyone but myself, even if I feel very strongly about the answers I’ve come up with for myself.
I know from past experience that the most productive work actually happens at this stage in the writing, when it feels like things fall apart almost every day and I’m not 100% sure where I’m going when I sit down to write. But more than any other project I’ve worked on, I keep having to steer myself away from polemic and back toward investigation. I’d love any tips you have for noticing signs that you’ve wandered too far into certainty in your own works, friends, and how to adjust when you find those signs!
Two things: First, when I was writing a novel where I had done years of research and every time I tried to write I'd think I had to run off and look at one more microfiche at the UF Library, I read a piece by Jamaica Kincaid describing her process writing, I think, A Small Place. (Which is, as you know, a similar mix of memoir, cultural history, and politics as your work.) Anyway, she said she had to take all her boxes of research and shove them under the bed and then write without looking at any of it. This helped me so much in proceeding and getting back to the essentials of what I was writing. I guess these days there is some computer equivalent for shoving files into some hard to get to space. And second: I've also also tried to write where I leave the writer to make their own realizations. BUT . . . these days I don't as much anymore. I think I went too far in that direction. So these days I include more reflection or internal dialogue in an essay. It can make me uncomfortable in a "who am I to be telling you this" way. But at this point in my life, I do know some things. I do get to say what they are.
I give myself time by walking away and being OK with being unfinished. That might not be realistic in your case, but I am sending you so much hope that you will find your way. In my own writing about Judaism, I also lean toward struggle (and against certainty) as the main components of my spirituality and identity. Watching "The X-Files" helps a lot too.