Entries by Molly Gage

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Accessibility Issues

Parthenon temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Attica, Greece.

No matter how dense the subject, complicated the field, or convoluted the material, every interested reader should be able to access and understand the argument in any nonfiction book.

For some authors, this can be a difficult imperative to accept. When we’ve spent years–decades, likely–gaining expertise and building arguments, we often bury the assumptions, connections, and relationships that make up the foundation of our work. When we then condense our work into a book, we often assume our readers will do the work of excavation.

Although very (very) few readers will do this, authors often resist directives to make their arguments more accessible because it feels like a directive to dumb things down or pander to casual passersby.

To get past the resistance, we can think of accessibility not as a tool for making an argument artificially simple but as a tool for for making it functional and usable. In this case, functional and usable mean readable. Making thinking accessible means making a book readable, and it’s an authorial responsibility.

Books are, in part, a medium for delivering an author’s thoughts to a reader’s understanding. Ensuring successful (that is, readable) delivery depends on the access granted when authors adopt the conventions by which their thinking can be shared. 

These conventions usually guide authors toward locating their argument’s foundation and exposing the scaffolding from which their claims have been built.

Although this seems like it should be easy for an authorial expert, it’s very often not. The foundations of our most complicated arguments tend to be buried so deeply that even their authors can’t always easily find them. Consequently, many authors meet a moment of despair during the drafting stage–deciding that if their reader can’t follow their thinking, it’s simply because their thinking is too complex.

It’s possible. But far more likely, this is just the story we tell ourselves to avoid the difficult but necessary work of making our thinking usable, functional…readable.

While it’s true that not every reader will be interested in evolutionary biology and the future of genetics, or in the philosophical foundations and future of AI, those who are interested and motivated are capable of following the author’s most complicated argument, as long as it’s accessible.

We write for these readers–interested, motivated readers–readers who have sought out our work and want to know more. Making our argument functional and usable for them simply means making it readable.

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The Feedback Behind the Feedback

Feedback is an integral part of any big project. Ideally, we solicit feedback from functional experts, neutrally review their notes, and integrate their applicable suggestions. In practice, however, we often solicit feedback from our friends, review their notes somewhat defensively, and search in vain for usable insights.

Feedback is always helpful, but it’s not always helpful in the ways we expect. Though we typically use feedback as a tool for finding solutions to our project’s problems, it’s a lot more effective (and more reliable) to use feedback as a tool for verifying our project’s problems (and determining which require our attention). 

We do this by looking for the feedback behind the feedback. Readers’ suggestions are often motivated by the emotional friction they experienced when encountering our project. When we look in the background, to the feedback behind their feedback, we can identify this friction and deduce the problems that generated it.

Let’s take a comparative look. Here, a list of solutions from a reader of a working draft:

  • Take out chapter 3–it doesn’t really seem to fit.
  • Chapters 8 and 9 are long and repetitive–join them together in a shorter chapter.
  • Some of the chapters start with stories and others don’t–start them all the same.
  • There are so many citations that I’m not sure what’s yours and what’s not.
  • The story in the conclusion is really interesting–move it to earlier in the book.
  • The same examples are used too much–mix it up more. 

These might be helpful, but they might be arbitrary. Is deleting chapter 3 a good solution? It’s hard to say when we haven’t identified the problem beyond “fit.”

If we look behind the feedback, though, we find more generative feelings:

  • I’m confused, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe chapter 3 is confusing me, or maybe it’s another chapter.
  • I’m confused. Maybe it’s because some chapters have different forms than others.
  • I’m confused. Maybe it’s because there are a lot of interruptions in the sentences. 
  • I’m having a hard time following this argument. I’m confused
  • I’m not interested in this argument until it’s too late.
  • If I’m totally honest, I find this a little boring.

What’s the friction motivating our reader? Confusion: They can’t find the argument’s throughline. They don’t find the argument interesting. They may not find the argument relevant.

The feedback behind the feedback can feel harsh (which is one reason readers don’t offer it, and one reason writers don’t seek it out), but it very often points the way to the underlying issues keeping our project from completion. Sometimes, the most useful solutions are in there, but in the background. We need to look behind the feedback behind to find them.

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The Gap Between Ambition & Work

https://clevelandart.org/art/2021.204

When beginning a new project, especially one that requires skills not yet acquired and experience not yet gained, we often encounter a gap between what we envisioned for our project and what it seems poised to achieve.

This chasm is an unavoidable feature of the creative landscape. It’s there, and we know it’s there, and if we’ve created something before, we know that, sooner or later, and typically when we’re just about ready to release our new project into the world, we’ll arrive at its edge. 

The crevice is the beginner’s gap, and Ira Glass of This American Life candidly defines it as the space separating our work from our ambitions for it. Encountering this gap is demoralizing–and arriving at its brink over and over again makes it feel totally unnavigable.

Plus, there’s the irritating truth that one of the trickier aspects of the beginner’s gap, aside from its dark infinitude, is that it remains open for a surprising amount of time. “Beginner” is somewhat of misnomer here because the gap is actually always present, it just goes by other names.

Luckily, it gets easier to navigate. The work of creating a lot of material over an indeterminate but necessarily long period builds the bridge required to reach the other side of our efforts and feel real satisfaction.

But most of us don’t get there. We encounter the gap once or twice or more and never want to encounter it again. We experience the disappointment of the gap’s darkness as a message to turn back. 

We should instead experience it as a message to keep going. The beginner’s gap is just one element in a larger scene: It’s true that there’s no way to really close it (in part because some disappointed ambitions are a frequent companion to creation). However, we can prepare for it and build a bridge across it by expecting our projects to fall short of our ambitions, and by keeping going anyway.

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Creative Friction

Semiotic Triangle

When it comes to writing, AI can generate poems, songs, stories, and fiction and nonfiction books. It can produce interviews and summaries and evaluations and copy of all kinds. As it gains more, better, and potentially multisensorial training, it will be able to do much, much more.

For some, the sudden surge in applications uncovers previously unexploited conveniences. If, for example, you spend too much time writing articles to  refresh SEO relevance, AI offers a convenient solution.

For others, however, the purpose of writing is not always—or not only—to get the work done. It’s also to do the work, even though, as a proxy for thinking and reflection, and/or as a means for information exchange, writing is an inconvenient medium.

It’s also often annoying, irritating, unpleasant, and very, very hard. Even writers consider writing torturous—a point made in Hemingway’s oft-quoted description of writing as “easy”—you just have to “sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

But the inconvenience—the annoyance, the irritation (probably not the bleeding)—are important parts of the process. They’re cause and effect of the friction created when we attempt to match what we want to express with our expression. 

AI can make the match easy by smoothing away this friction, but the convenience cuts both ways. In fact, convenience, writes Tim Wu in the still-relevant “Tyranny of Convenience,” helpfully and necessarily sands down some of life’s rough corners. However, if we sand away too much, we lose our edge. When we make easy our primary goal, we radically limit our choices, as well as the individuality we express in choosing.

AI makes the work of writing easy—makes the work nonexistent, in fact—by smoothing away the friction that requires our individuated expression. This can be very convenient, but it comes at a significant cost.

Though we can and will turn to AI for a wide variety of tasks, when we instead do the very hard work of overcoming the annoying, irritating, unpleasant, and terribly inconvenient friction of writing, we make ourselves meaningful.

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AI: Stimulus and Response to Creative Anxiety

Reaping machine, 1880-1925, New Zealand, by Crombie and Permin. Identifier: B.079705.

By now, we’ve all seen the hype cycle welcoming and lamenting AI’s advancements. It’s true: Its astonishing innovations are a source of wonder. And, at the same time, ill-conceived incentives and unintended consequences will probably lead us, led by AI, in a meandering race to the bottom, in some areas at least. 

We’re in the grey space of before, awaiting potential regulations and experiments in implementation that will determine ethical and practical usage. In the meantime, we can draw from AI many useful lessons. For writers and others, AI offers a lens for understanding and responding to creative anxiety, maybe even the creative anxiety provoked by AI.

Creative anxiety is the stress that follows from the pressure to think expansively and improvisationally. When we feel it, we freeze before our task, work superficially through a tough problem, or avoid whatever is causing our discomfort. 

As an existential threat to creativity, AI is a legitimate cause of this (and other) anxiety. But AI is not yet so much an existential threat as it is a reinforcing mechanism of two critical biases. To wit, it supports our tendency to confuse excess with meaning and our assumption that creativity is limited.

Our online lives encourage the conflation of excess with meaning in many, many ways. Such conflation is an efficient mechanism of/for the attention economy, in part because it eliminates the firsthand, active, participatory, and also time- and body-consuming experiences that typically inform significance. Our online experiences are gained second- or third-hand, passively and asynchronously. Their value depends not on impact but on endless accrual. 

Yet, the pervasiveness of digital ennui suggests that the accrual can’t really lead to the kinds of significance on which meaning depends. That’s one reason why the online scroll feels so endless and futile: We seek, infinitely, some meaning.

AI promises a new tool for making excess meaningful. In fact, its ability to accumulate the furthest pixels of the digital world suggests its output is particularly authoritative. This has implications for creativity, too: Those of us who experience creative anxiety often implicitly assume that creativity is a limited resource. It’s out there and acquirable mostly through discovery. AI’s capacity to access everything out there suggests a claim on locatable creativity.

But this isn’t quite right. Excess can inform significance and meaning, but it must do so by way of an interested interpreter. And creativity isn’t contingent on everything: It actually depends on nothing. By some measures, creativity is the improvisation that follows restriction—it’s an internal potential. In fact, it’s the possible basis of our evolutionary capacity and is therefore inherent, as possibility, in every living thing. 

Ultimately, while AI provokes anxiety, it also suggests strategies of response. We can, for instance, create significance and meaning by seeking out firsthand experiences (perhaps using AI as a tool to inform these experiences). We can also structure our work in restrictive ways that require improvisation (perhaps using AI as a tool to help set restrictions). 

AI can be a meaningful and creative, if fundamentally derivative, producer. But for now it requires interpreters to cull from its excess and respond to its nothings with flexible improvisation. It can help us to channel the very anxiety it provokes, even—or especially—when we consider it a stone against which to sharpen our response.

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Audience Aspirations

people

Books fails for many reasons, but nonfiction books fail when they fail to find an audience. Although this is a common consequence after publication, it can be hedged against in the early stages of book development. 

When nonfiction books fail to find an audience, it’s typically because they were developed, accidentally or purposely, for everyone. A book read by everyone sounds like a worthy aim, but it’s a reflexive and counterproductive goal.

Why? After all, everyone sounds like a lot of readers, and most people associated with books (rightly) believe that the more readers the better. Also, the concept of “audience” is inclusive: When we describe our book as a book for everyone, we mean it’s a book for anyone. No one should not read it. 

This results in the everyone reflex: the natural and potentially even logical assumption that when we write, we write for everyone. The reflex is powerful, and when it guides development, it leads to books that fail to find real readers.

The everyone reflex is partly a manifestation of our confirmation and egocentric biases: We assume that others are as interested in our subject matter as we are, even if they don’t know it yet. 

In this way, the reflex lets us sidestep the responsibility of explaining our book’s relevance. Though this seems unnecessary—surely interested readers will find our book?—it’s a critical part of argumentation and one of our most powerful tools in positioning our book for success.

To circumvent the everyone reflex during the development stage, we must ask and answer the question of our book’s relevance. We must explain, on the page, our book’s “significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand.” This explanation serves as our book’s reason-for-being, giving shape to our argument and pointing toward its most appropriate audience.

By identifying our book’s significance to the matter at hand, as well as the interested readers who already do and should care about it, we write not for the nameless, featureless everybody, but for the very particular readers who need and want our book.

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Critique as an Invitation to Collaboration

The most viscerally painful critique I received was from my PhD advisor in a high-stakes, high-reward meeting before my defense. She’d reviewed my 320-page, 466-footnote project. She had much to say.

I, of course, wanted to be showered with praise. I also wanted appreciation for the work I had put in. I wanted approval that would not only validate my efforts, but would also free me from this project, which felt more like a boulder than a millstone around my neck.

Given these hopes, it won’t be surprising to hear that I didn’t receive anything like the praise I sought. Instead, my advisor was outraged that I hadn’t adequately cited her influence. Then, she picked apart my argument, piece by piece, pointing out its every weakness, and theoretically dismantling its overarching structure.

I was annoyed. Then incensed. Then devastated. I was also embarrassed—embarrassed that my work hadn’t garnered her approval and embarrassed that I wanted that approval so badly.

Today, more than ten years on, a major part of my work includes participating in similarly high-stakes, high-rewards conversations about high-commitment projects. I’m frequently the critic, but my work is also often the object of judgment. I still wonder: Why is it so hard to hear critique?

I’ve come to feel that critique hurts for a variety of reasons: It hurts because it mimics our inner doubts and insecurities. It hurts because it indicates rejection from a group we seek to join. Critique also communicates a strong signal that we must return to something that we long to release. It’s a painful indication that despite our efforts we haven’t achieved our aims.

I haven’t learned to lessen the sting of critique, but I have learned to view it not as evidence of universal disappointment but as an invitation to collaboration. It may not be gentle, thoughtful, or even particularly well-meant, but a critique frequently offers ideas that can make my ideas better.

Luckily, learning to view critique as collaboration isn’t a perspective shift that requires ten years to make. I believe I learned it back then, after the hurt of my advisor’s words subsided. When I felt capable of opening up my document yet again, I applied many of her suggestions. I ripped apart the garment I had spent years weaving, then pieced it into something new. It actually didn’t take nearly as long as I had feared, and once I was finished, I experienced the relief of utter rightness. The project was not only in better shape, but it had finally, finally achieved the form I’d been aiming at all along. 

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to feel the pain of critique many, many times. It still hurts, but now I consider it an invitation to collaboration. When I accept, my projects benefit.

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Love is a Battlefield

Valentine’s Day is for lovers, for family, for friends, for children, and for pets. It’s also for artists, for creators, and for writers, too. We can think of our relationship to creativity as a labor of love, but a passion project requires more than care; it requires a commitment.

These projects are marked by the love-is-a-battlefield kind of love (thanks, Pat). We may actively avoid committing because so many complicated feelings are involved: We’ll need to negotiate some give and take, some push and pull, and our intense, sometimes furious devotion. 

A passion project also stirs up resentments that can mimic our most fraught intimacies (echoing Terry Real’s “normal marital hatred” here). We can spend infinite time thinking about our project, or thinking about making time to work on it, or thinking about working on it. But then, when we’re actually working on it, we’re dissatisfied. Infinitude is too vast. We want something more, something better, something different.

Valentine’s Day is a good day to remember that when it comes to the objects of our passions, it can be ok to hate—just a little bit—what we love. Maybe your project seems to require too much sacrifice. Maybe it doesn’t live up to your standards or your ideals. Maybe your standards are so high that you can’t begin the work.

Psychotherapists and philosophers have long suggested that, in our intimate relationships, big resentments and small hatreds might possibly enhance our love. Perhaps, like the naughty child seeking secure parental devotion, our project thwarts our every effort at discipline to test our dedication.

Maybe. Maybe not. But if you find yourself returning to a project—whether an idea, a book, a venture—again and again, even after false starts and disappointments, it may be because your love is true. Celebrate your passion: It’s probably time to commit. 

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New Year, Old Tensions, & the Potential for Generative Balance

Writers are intimately familiar with the tension between the fresh-start promise of a potential story and the perpetual pain of a blank page. But when the new year turns over, most of us feel the discomfort between productivity and paralysis, too.

The calendar may be a construct, but we’ve tacitly agreed it’s a construct that renews itself on January 1. The implication of renewal suggests a new opportunity to rewrite our beginnings and endings, making plain the latent tension between doing and dormancy.

While we frequently discharge this tension through resolutions—declaration helps to provoke the momentum we need to act—resolutions don’t really work. This may be because resolutions borne out of a desire to discharge discomfort miss the mark.

It’s uncomfortable to feel caught between possible action and perpetual paralysis. But we shouldn’t seek to relax this feeling. We should think instead about trying to heighten it. 

The push-pull tautness of desire—I want to act; I don’t want to act; I want to act—is elemental. We rely on it, especially the uncomfortable friction it generates, to negotiate a generative balance between activity and rest. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s popular line suggests something similar: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Reframing irresolution as generative orients it to the future, aligning it with action. Withstanding such tension mistakes the locus of power. When we foster such tension instead, we open wide the world of possibility: “One should,” Fitzgerald writes, “be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” 

This year, it might be worth resolving to work toward the generative balance that tension makes possible. In doing so, we sustain the conditions of imaginative possibility, which gives all action meaning.

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It Takes a Team

Writing a book feels like—because it very often is—solitary work. But a published book is the result of coordinated teamwork. A roster of readers, reviewers, editors, copyeditors, production managers and production assistants, marketing managers and marketing assistants—and sometimes an agent or two—are responsible for binding a sheaf of pages into a brand new book. 

Some or all of the following people often have a hand in shaping a rough-draft manuscript into a clean-copy book:

    • First, the writer
    • Then, usually, a reader
    • And another reader
    • And another reader
    • Then, frequently, a more critical reader-reviewer
    • Next, often, a developmental editor
    • Then, after revision, another, second- or third-round reader-reviewer
    • Often, next, a copyeditor
    • And another, third- or fourth-round reviewer
    • At this point, possibly a query reader-reviewer
    • Or, a query editor
    • Upon submission, an editorial assistant
    • Then, an acquisitions editor
    • Next, an editorial board
    • Then, the acquisitions editor, again
    • Then, a developmental editor
    • Next, a copyeditor
    • Then, a production manager
    • Then, production assistants
    • Also, a marketing manager
    • Then, marketing assistants
    • Along the way, an agent might also read and shape words, sometimes serving as a reviewer, a developmental or other editor, and maybe as a copyeditor, too.

The point is this: We often feel alone, and this feeling of alone-ness can be amplified in the process of writing a book. Perhaps we assume we must go it alone. Perhaps we feel as though we really are on our own. But, in truth, no one writes a really excellent book alone. It takes a team of interested, thoughtful people to bring forth a book that matters.

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