Unending Headache
Bazerman, Charles

>>SPEAKER: Well go right ahead.

>>CHARLES: Well I want to talk about the longest lasting composition I've been engaged in and it's still not successful. It is a book or maybe two books that I've been working on for about twenty years. I guess the preface to the twenty years ago, this was way back and I hope I can keep this short, early on when I started to do very concrete projects I saw that when I learned a lot from very specific detailed research and I also saw that people understood me a lot better when I was telling very detailed, evidence heavy stories. So the ideas that I was getting at, it seemed pretty obscure to other people, I really invested very heavily in data heavy research. When I would do some of the theory as learned by some of the research that it grew out of that over time as the theory got more elaborate I started to synthesize more and more elements in what I'd been reading and also what my research had been leading up to in the kind of view of the world that I was devising. I kept trying to do small pieces that would capture some of that but could never capture it enough and then the ideas kept going. So about twenty years ago I decided I needed to really write a big theory and I didn't know what it would look like and I started taking notes and made several attempts that went nowhere. Then I had a couple of book outlines and early chapters and sketches and then about a dozen years ago I came up with an outline of an idea and it was going to be two books actually. One of them was going to be a lone preface which was to explain why everything fits together. [Inaudible] The big vision after that was a first attempt and then I was like I've really got to do the book which has the footnotes to it which had the theory. So I came out with two volumes and the first one might be a two hundred page theory as - I'm getting a headache trying to think of this - the theory as a very direct statement and in a form of a practical way of how we think about writing and what are the things we need to understand as a writer in order to write particularly well. The second volume was going to be much, much longer and it was going to be everything that I'd ever read that I thought would contribute to that. I've been slogging my way through that for that last dozen years and adding a couple chapters at a time, sometimes in the first volume, sometimes in the second volume and I keep getting distracted in other things. It's in my head at some level almost always and of course I knew I was stuck because there are parts that I had not worked what it is that I wanted to say about a certain level of the writing but I think I've got the pieces in place now and I'm slogging away as time goes on and in recent years I've been getting a couple chapters done a year and in big projects I constantly back step and revise a previous part and get some motion. I try to tell the story in public so I get committed and so I can be embarrassed when it doesn't come out. [Laughing] So that's the story and I know it doesn't have any great insights but it's more of a confession of my inability to finish this enormous monster. I was pitching it to some publishers today but I'd pitched it to publishers over the years too and when they say they're interested and then I don't deliver. So that's the story.

>>SPEAKER: Well thank you.

>>CHARLES: You're welcome.