Designing a System to Organize your Revision

Designing a System to Organize your Revision

This is an exercise for designing a visual or schematic organizational system for planning, tracking, and proceeding through the complex flow of revision. It’s especially targeted toward approaching a later-stage draft of a very large and possibly unwieldy project, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t also scale down to something smaller. I am thinking of a system that allows you to digest what you’ve already written or imagined, to think in sections or other approachable units, to select and gather what you want to transfer forward into the draft, all while being less determining of outcome than an outline—to preserve a space for not knowing. The goal is to create a system that gathers and focuses the existing material in a way that supports the actual daily process of revising, leaving open space for invention, improvisation and surprise as part of that process. 

This exercise draws on design thinking, for its open angles of approach, its user orientation, and its emphasis on continual iteration and testing — as any useful system is likely to morph and evolve according to what you need it for and according to how clearly you understand your own needs. So we’ll take a brief detour into the principles of design thinking (some design thinking sources in the bibliography). After the introduction of design thinking, there’s a scaffold of questions to help initiate the process, followed by collected visual examples and some thoughts on material systems.

DESIGN THINKING

Design thinking moves through five stages (though it can move simultaneously and non-linearly through these stages so don’t root them too firmly to this order): empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. 

Empathize

This is the stage that researches the user’s needs, trying to understand the problem at hand from the standpoint of a user’s behavior and experience. In this context, you, the writer, are the user. You are trying to design a system for your needs (both ongoing and with special respect to the project at hand) and consider them in relation to how you actually behave and experience writing — not your idea of how one should behave as a writer. If you are not someone who sits down to write for precisely two hours every day, then designing a revision process premised on that kind of daily practice is probably going to set you up to fail. In the empathizing stage, therefore, you need to think about how the reality of your life and your habits intersect with the volume of writing you need to achieve and the kind of experience you want from the process of writing. 

Define

Closely linked to the empathizing process, definition is where you take what you learned about the user and state your user’s needs. In this process, you analyze what you learned and turn it into a problem statement—a statement of the problem that needs to be solved that is user-centered (not outcome-centered), and that is neither too unworkably large nor too narrow. The define stage makes no statements about methodology or materials. One way to open up this definition is to frame it as a “how might we” question followed by a “why” question. (How might I make the revision process more X? Why do I want the process to be X? So Y happens.)

Ideate

This is a brainstorming stage, where you try to find new angles for approaching the defined problem with a material solution. This is a place to consider materials and methods that already exist while still being playfully open to other materials and methods. In the ideate stage, the value is on proliferation of possible paths.

Prototype

In the prototyping stage, you embrace material, either building a model or building an actual version of your system. You might try several prototypes if there’s a variable in play, for example: a version of your system that is pegged to a wall and another one that’s portable, held in a binder or a document. 

Test

Use the system. How does it work? Reflect back on the problem — does the system address it? Does it miss a few corners? What parts are easy to use and what parts don’t survive the transition from idea to practice? What additional needs become clear as the system is put to use? What needs rethinking? 

Repeat

Then, you move back through the stages as needed, to keep edging the system toward a better and better version. In design, the holy word is iteration: the whole thing stays flexible, keeps diving back into this cycle in order to respond to the evidence of use, to the new problems and new understandings that arise. This exercise is not aimed at bringing a product to market, it’s aimed at organizing and supporting your own writing process, and so you might iterate variations of your organizational system as you proceed.

USER RESEARCH QUESTIONS TO TOWARD EMPATHIZING

1: writing habits

  • Where do you write? How many spaces do you like to occupy during the writing process? 
  • What technologies of storage do you use? Notebooks (what kind?), computers/devices (what apps or programs?).
  • How do you mentally grasp abstract or higher-order thinking? (Do you like diagrams? Do you like freewritten reflections? Listing or geometry? Do you think in images? 
  • What kinds of durations do your writing sessions actually take? Do you accumulate through small returns or write for several hours at a time? What are different writing durations that have worked for you in the past — both in giving you access to your writing mind in a satisfying way, and fitting into the other exigencies of your daily life?
  • What is your day or week like? What else besides writing holds a place in your calendar.
  • What rooms or contexts are most amenable to mental focus? What are the qualities of those rooms or contexts?
  • How have your writing habits changed over time?

2: emotional considerations—still in the realm of habit

  • What are familiar frustrations for you in the writing process? 
  • What are the things that you know interfere with your writing or otherwise impede it?
  • How would you describe good experiences of writing in the past—thinking through both exploratory and later stages of a process. What are the satisfactions of writing, for you?
  • If you have a running “I-should-but-I’m-not” going in your head, what is it that the should-be would actually accomplish (that is, not how would you behave if you were behaving as you believe you should, but what would that behavior get you)? 
  • What do you want out of writing (considered in the longer term)? What about writing feeds your life, and how?

3: obstacles and needs—specific to the revision at hand

  • What fears do you have about the revision at hand? 
  • What excites you or beckons you about the revision at hand?
  • How much prior writing (earlier drafts or notes) do you need to revisit or make accessible in order to write forward?
  • What was the initial seed or spark of this project and is it an the animating force? (Does it need to be recuperated? Expanded? Does it need to be let go of?)
  • Are there other animating impulses or forces you want to keep in mind?
  • How strong is your current relationship to that sense of animation?
  • How do you feel about the work ahead? Do you view it with excitement, trepidation, fatigue in advance? 
  • Is your mind in this project or do you need to find your way back to it? 
  • Are you bored with it? Do you need to re-activate your interest? 
  • What has drawn you back to this project now? 
  • How does the writer-you of the present relate to the writer-you who wrote the earlier draft or drafts? Are you still the same writer? What persists and what’s changed?
  • Do you need to create a revision process in which you can dismantle and reassemble what you wrote? 
  • Or does your revision process one of combing and working the existing material? 
  • Do you want to transfer significant amounts of the earlier drafts forward or write fresh?
  • Does your revision need to take you into very new territory? 
  • What is the admixture of reassembly and new territory?
  • Do you need to carve out an experimental space for new explorations aside from the primary document?

TOWARD DEFINING

Using the answers to the user research questions above, define the system that is needed. Try to be concise. Notice any throughlines or themes to your responses that recur: try to understand the patterns or dominant feelings that showed themselves in the process of answering those questions. 

TOWARD IDEATING AND DESIGNING A SYSTEM: INPUT AND PROCESS QUESTIONS

The biggest question to ask now is how to design a system that will creatively address the needs you identified in your user research. This is a question about rethinking how to arrive somewhere. For example, if you need uninterrupted time to dream all day, but don’t have uninterrupted time to dream all day, what are the fruits of daydreaming that you can access by other means? Perhaps carrying around a little card deck of symbols, images, and quotes, and shuffling through them in the interstices of your busy day can produce the same constancy of mental space? Or perhaps your system manifests as a recorded voice guiding you through a long visualization in the world of the story as a prelude to writing.

INPUT QUESTIONS

  • What does it need to compass? (What’s the span of existing material (such as earlier drafts, a body of notes) that you want to be able to filter through this system?)
  • How will it blend the old (transferred forward) with new input?
  • What categories are the right ways to break down the material you need to filter? (Events, images, references, characters, appearances of objects, patterns to play or replay…)
  • At what degree of abstraction will you represent material in your system? (Shorthand reference or printed-out passages? Would a symbolic alphabet help distill? What about color coding?)

PROCESS QUESTIONS 

  • How can the system help to support the revision not only from the standpoint of content, but also the step-by-step tasks of a writing session?
  • What is the scale or unit at which your system needs to show you the material? (Do you want to your system to present material organized by scene, by chapter, by passage, by throughline, by movement, by sub-theme, or some other unit?)
  • What is the relationship of your system to the start-to-ending timeline of the writing? (Does your system need to map onto a timeline or is it something more like a pantry or bank that serves the whole duration of the writing? Or perhaps your system needs to be able to map in both ways?)
  • What materials will you use and into what container will you put them? (i.e. Post-its on a wall, index cards in a recipe box or on a poster board, notes placed into a trading card binder, printed out text pasted onto a big sheet of paper, photos arranged in a slideshow…)
  • How will you orchestrate a writing session in conjunction with your system? What’s the writing process that dovetails most simply and workably with this system?
  • How does your system allow you to train your focus on a task or question?  In what order do you want its sub-areas of focus to present themselves to you?

PROTOTYPING AND TESTING

Make the system. Use it. Notice what works and what doesn’t. Keep asking yourself if it’s giving you all the support you need to scaffold your work on the revision. Return to your user research notes. Is there anything you missed that you need to incorporate? Reconsider the way you interact with the system within or around a writing session. Perhaps you really need your eyes on it as you write. Perhaps you need to sit with it contemplatively and then go into another room and write only with what lingers in your memory.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?