Provoking: The blog of Filip Dousek

I have been writing a novel for so long that my friends think it’s just a chat-up line. My first notes are about 8 years old, so when the book gets mentioned, laughter often follows.

I am comfortable as long as people just laugh, but once in a while I am asked what it is about. Then comes trouble – I can dodge the answer and look pretentious, or attempt to answer and look like an idiot. Why? Because I don’t remember what my own book is about.

So what is the book about? This happened again during one breakfast chat with Tom Papirnik in Brighton, in a cafe that seemed to stand on a vortex of paradoxes. Even the cafe itself could not be described consistently (we couldn’t agree if it was that good or that bad), and then I hit on the idea that the book’s content is an incommunicable idea. We laughed, but the thought stuck. It’s actually true for the time being, because the book has not been written yet, so it cannot be communicated. But it also captures fairly well how I struggle every time I try to summarize. I have a feel for what I am writing, but it does not summarize well. The book is quite long now (before edit!) – 400 pages + 1000 unsorted notes. I get a feeling that the text is like a hard drive, and I seek here or there, load some chunks into my work area, work on them, save, and move to another cluster. The book is a network of individual nodes (chapters, paragraphs), and I work on individual nodes without needing to remember the rest.

There is the moralizing point of view: If you cannot summarize your book into a few sentences, you don’t know what you are writing about, and it will be crap. I heard of this as one of the standard publishers’ tests. The traditional story contains a meaning, a point, a three sentence bonsai. Why? On the last page of a book, the reader’s brain, having already forgotten most of the text, asks – okay, so what do you want me to remember? What was this about? He would like to remember the experience, possibly draw a lesson for the future, but he can only do it through a line that fits within the limits of consciousness (point, lesson, theme). And if this final need is not catered for, the reader might finish the book unsatisfied, which is not good for the business. But the story already is a bonsai, so its point is a bonsai of a bonsai. I am skeptical towards book summaries, points and messages. What can be simplified should be said in its simpler form. I like ambiguity, paradoxes, double meanings, diversions, networks of interconnected ideas, thought fertilization. I enjoy novels, but am bored by most summaries. Raison d’être, IMO.

Getting to the point: It is not possible to ‘know’ the whole book for the writer just as for the reader. Now returning to writing after several months on other projects, I forgot even more. And I found myself with over a 1000 notes that need to be merged into main text. Which notes are important? Which themes are important? Which notes are related? Could I get an eagle-eye view of the chaos within too many ideas to remember? Visualization.

I spent two weeks tagging each note with multiple tags, assigning priorities (weights) and also scenes, where possible. Then I loaded the Excel files into TouchGraph Navigator to get a picture of my novel, the bonsai of a bonsai:

I didn’t know beforehand if the result would be worth the time. And I am really surprised how much more I can see in the network images. The TouchGraph UI is simple, but the output is great. I can display all individual notes or just the network of tags, with links weighted by co-ocurrence. I can output a list of tag co-occurrences, with relative importance (much more telling than absolute importance). This tells me which tags are related, and I can now go through the lists and draw out significant clusters of tags: Uncertainty – Romantic – Photos – Prague – Revolution. Madness – Meaning of Words. Story – Point – Death – Life. Humour – Fear. Woohoo! Several topics (identity, the perception of time), which I considered to be on the sidelines of my thoughts (and I thought about saving them for some other book), are actually among the most integrated tags. I can also select only certain topics and see the notes that relate to them, and notes under related tags…

This is TouchGraph (by the way, they also have visualization apps for Facebook, Amazon and Google). I am planning to upload the data to Tinderbox next to include theme development and scenes.

So, what’s my book about? You tell me! Click on the images to see full versions and leave a bonsai in the comments :)