Writing is thinking: an example from my work in progress

In the face of the constant pressure to welcome generative AI into every aspect of our lives, we writers often protest that "writing is thinking." Thinking is not a skill or process that we, as a species, should be eager to farm out! But it's sometimes difficult to think of examples that illustrate what we mean, in the heat of those arguments.

This week, as I was noodling with the first draft of the first chapter of a new book, I came across a little example I thought I'd share. It's very unusual (and a bit uncomfortable) for me to share anything about a book that is in the very early stages, but here we go! This one is set in the 16th century, which is all I’ll say about it for now…

Whenever I'm drafting a new book, I play around with point of view and tense, trying on different options. It might seem rote to change the tense of all the verbs – in fact, on the surface, it seems like precisely the sort of tedious job that software could do for us. But I have found, over and over, that it isn't rote at all. When you tell a story in past tense rather than present, you tell it differently.

For example:

On the table beside her, a board with indistinct bread crumbs. A frothy pile of abandoned needlework. A triangular web stretches from the underside of the table to the top of its leg, with a fat spider inside it. All in all, an obvious moral lesson: the breadcrumbs have not been swept; the spider web has not been disturbed; the sewing has not been finished. The girl, we must understand, is lazy.

I drafted that final line without thinking too much about it, as I'm still feeling my way into this story. But when I tried the paragraph in past tense, it forced me to step back and think.

On the table beside her, a board with indistinct bread crumbs. A frothy pile of abandoned needlework. A triangular web stretched from the underside of the table to the top of its leg, with a fat spider inside it. All in all, an obvious moral lesson: the breadcrumbs were not swept; the spider web was not disturbed; the sewing was not finished. The girl, we must have understood, was lazy.

Obviously, that final line no longer works. The connotation of "must have understood" is wrong for my purpose: it suggests "surely, we understood" rather than "it was the artist's goal to make us understand", and it loses the archness it had in present tense. The whole voice changes if I change the tense of that line. 

This also raises questions about point of view. The scene is from the point of view of an art dealer, Susanna, who finds the painting dull and mediocre, and the obviousness of the moral lesson is part of her mental critique. That "we must understand" is not quite internal dialogue, which would be italicized, but it's borrowing her perspective and possibly even her language, as the "we" might be something she'd think. It's a shared voice, partly the author's and partly the POV character's, blurring the edges between them. (This is called "free indirect style", a feature of most modern fiction.)

I considered other possibilities for that line. "The moral was clear: the girl was lazy." That works, but is redundant, given that I have "moral lesson" earlier in the paragraph. Maybe: "There was no missing the point: the girl was lazy." Ah ha! I like that even better than my original. 

But it loses the "we", which made me stop and think about why I'd used it in the first place. One touchstone for this book is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and its sequels, which use "we" throughout in a very concrete way to refer to (I would argue) the people of Henry's court, or possibly the people of England. It's a fascinating technique, and raises questions about who is narrating, and who the narrator understands the reader to be … don't get me started; I'll talk your ear off about this. 

My use of "we" in this very rough draft of a new book's first chapter was not quite deliberate. When I played with tense and ran into the oddities of "must", it forced me to interrogate that choice. Did I intend the "we" here as a circle joining the character and the reader? Or was I trying to do something similar to what Mantel did, with a sort of 16th century chorus chiming in from time to time? At this point, I don't think I have any reason to do that with this book, and in fact, thematically, I may have good reasons not to.

Which then led me to thinking more deeply about what I am trying to say with this book, and role of proto-nation-states within it.

All that thinking because "must" is a verb that behaves strangely in English.

In a couple of years when this book comes out, you can see what I changed that line to – unless I go back to present tense. The whole process I describe here was about, oh, three minutes at most. It's just one tiny example of the ways that language triggers thought, just as much as the other way around. If I told ChatGPT "describe a painting" or something, I would lose some of the benefits of playing with words, in all stages of draft and in revision, to help me say something that matters to me – to help me understand what it is I want to say.

This is one of the many things I love about writing, even when it’s difficult. The art is in the process, not the result.

But sometimes the results are pretty…

This brings me to this week’s bits and bobs:

• When The Embroidered Book came out in 2022, I received two Goldsboro special editions as author copies. They’re really gorgeous: sprayed edges, foil decoration on the hardback, signed and numbered frontispiece (except these are not numbered, as they were destined for the author.) I’ve put one of those copies up in a great auction to raise money for trans rights organizations in the UK and South Africa. I’ll ship anywhere in the world, and include a typewritten (on my typewriter) signed personal note.

• I’ve also got a reward up for grabs in the Locus magazine fundraiser. Locus is such a vital instiution and it is worth supporting. My donation is a half-hour Zoom chat in which you can ask me anything you like about writing, publishing, your own work and career, reader questions about my work, whatever you like.

• I’m teaching a four-hour online course for the Loft Literary Center called The Power of Retelling in Fiction, on June 28. You can sign up here. This is one of my favourite subjects, and I’ve run this workshop once before and really enjoyed it.