What was your method for writing the book?

To the degree I have a method, here were the steps:

1. I started with a bunch of ideas that I had pondered for decades. (For example, I first wrote the passage about muga and Zen in 1982.) These ideas were scattered throughout papers I had written for school, notes I’d jotted down while reading, and journals I’ve kept since I was 18 years old. I reread all of this material and took notes.

2. I weeded out things that I no longer believed. For example, it is often said that great rewards require great risks. I now believe this simply isn’t true. Warren Buffet, one of the richest people in the world, said he doesn’t look for a six-foot wall to jump over. He looks for six one-foot walls that he can step over. Another: I used to think that you cannot simultaneously be the master of your own fate and also be guided by a force greater than yourself. However, students are masters of their own fate, but guided by more-knowing teachers. As a manager I guide the people who report to me, but they are masters of their respective fates.

3. I looked at how what remained fit together. If time is money and money is power, then time must be power. If you should be strong as steel and flexible as a willow, then be a spring, which is made of steel and is flexible.

4. I assessed whether what resulted from the previous step made sense. In a sense, time does power all things, but the notion of a spring really isn’t that helpful.

5. See how what remains fits together, whether the implications make sense, and continue to condense—again and again and again. The result was about 100 highly compressed statements, often in Chinese or in symbols, such as 理來自氣, / à É.

6. Turn these compressed thoughts into paragraphs. 理來自氣 became the section on Expertise and on Emergent Properties. / à É became the passage below (which was subsequently cannibalized for parts in the final manuscript):

É is, I think, the shape of the relationship between the quality of an explanation (y-axis) and the complexity of an explanation (x-axis). Start at the lower left corner. A low-quality, low-complexity answer to “Why does the sun shine?” is, “Because the gods are happy.”

            I am fully with Laudan on the issue of what constitutes a good theory. It must explain the facts and not cause conceptual problems. A better theory explains the facts and solves conceptual problems. “The gods are happy” explains the sun’s shining, but then you are stuck trying to explain the moods of the gods.

            A higher-quality explanation of the sun’s shining would entail a long-winded history of cosmology and optics. But this is also high-complexity (the elbow of the É).

            A yet higher-quality and simpler answer is simply E = mc². You can see the slice of Occam’s razor in this.

            I would pay dearly to get business people to understand this. Their attitude is, “Why fix it when you can architect a solution?” I’ve seen them reject beautiful, elegant, thought-through solutions to problems on the grounds that the solution was too simple. “More complex must be better” seems to be their heuristic. What’s more, they can back up their heuristic with data. “First I had a simple but lousy explanation. Then I made it better by making it more complex. So there is a positive correlation between quality and complexity.” So far so good, but it is said that Galileo would not accept “Yes” for an answer. I suppose that since business people are trained from the beginning not to accept” No” for an answer that not accepting “Yes” strikes them as insane. Nevertheless, if you keep at it, your explanations will turn the corner and become better and simpler.

            So? It is hard to think clearly about anything. Also, our minds leak. If you walk around trying to juggle a bunch of complex theories about everything, each with dozens of interlocking parts, it becomes too easy to make a mistake. Then you spend your time mopping up mistakes and thinking that theories in general just don’t work. A handful of simpler theories can be applied better, faster, and cheaper. This is why Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

7.     That gave me the content. I then worked on the form by reading dozens of books on grammar, rhetoric, and writing. I gleaned a breadth of ideas from these resources and created my own style guide akin to this:

From Robert McKee’s Story:

• Don’t write from the outside in: I love these paragraphs and will pretzel the text so that it hits all of them.

• Write from the inside out: Tell your story and cut anything that doesn’t fit. Kill your darlings.

• There must be text/subtext interplay. “The text cannot be about what the text is about.”

• Make the ending inevitable and a surprise.

• Write like a detective novel. The first time they encounter something, it means one thing, but as they read on, it’s meaning morphs.

From John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist:

• “Do not let a sentence stand if its meaning is not as unambiguously clear as a grizzly bear in a brightly lit kitchen.”

• In honor of Gardner, I included a sentence in the book that salutes him. By way of a hint as to which sentence it is, here are two of his: “…to whom not even a common farm duck would give his ear” and “An intelligent cow would be suspicious.”

• Never use an important detail only once.

From Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing:

·       Every page must have something that the reader can picture.

From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything I learned to end each chapter with a lead into the next.

From James Gleick’s science writing, I learned to go abstract, concrete, abstract, concrete….

From Martha Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar:

• The writer judges by the quality of the writing, the reader by the emotions it arouses.

• If it is meaningful for you, it will be emotional for them.

I’ve either lost the citations to these or they come from combining other general  principles:

• Use with great caution any words, phrases, or devices that draw attention to themselves, such as nonstandard grammar (That is a story amazing). Why use them at all? Because they offer the reader variety. Why with caution? Because they are distracting. So too with alliteration (Peter Piper), assonance (rumbling thunder), and many other such writing tricks.

• More generally, vary everything: length, complexity, size of paragraphs, perspectives—so that you don’t have the same me-voice droning on and on throughout the book. In fact, since you really aren’t that interesting, remove yourself wherever possible.

• How do you “vary everything?” I created a spreadsheet with every permutation of:

• Tense: past, present, future

• Point of view: third omniscient, third limited, first singular, first plural, second

• Sentence length: long, short, medium

• Voice: Active, passive

Then I practiced. Here is a point of view paragraph that hits all the possibilities:

They used the Frankl-Gadamer conjecture to crack the code of meaning so that you can make sense of anything, any tragedy, any death. We used it immediately, because that was the same weekend McGuire died. I used it to emplot his daughter. She thinks, “Oh, I see,” nods and walks away, gone to lighten the burden of her friends. You can use it the next time you are suffering and if you do it right, it will help, for you can bear any amount of suffering, if there is meaning.

• Hunt and Kill:

• Adverbs.

• Double adjectives.

• Almost anything ending in –tion. (Note that if your theme is contribution, then you are going to fail badly on this one.)

• More than a few instances of cute: turbo hooey, hogwash on afterburners, troublematic.

• Any cliché. 

• Weigh the tradeoffs of:

• Using quotes to break up the text so as to vary and make it more interesting, versus how quotes can dilute your own voice.

• The way words like “the former, first, furthermore, in addition, still, nevertheless, and so on” give structure to the text and yet are distracting.

• The reader must be able to trust you. Like a roller coaster. Take them for a ride, but keep them safe.

• The style must work in the service of the material, not in the advertisement of the writer. Do not draw attention to yourself or to your writing.

• Good is what works.

• The rule is to be engaging.

• Moment by moment authenticating detail, because vivid detail is the life blood of good writing.

• Don’t write it if you wouldn’t say it. If you don’t use a word in speech, then don’t use it in writing.

• Don’t hesitate to make quick cuts, radical juxtapositions, emotional jumps.

• Consider using classic Greek ring construction, where you begin and end at the same place, as in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings.

• Your style must reach authority. Maybe you don’t need to establish what gives you the right to speak; the quality of what’s on the page should do that for you.

• Readers stay with a book as long as it promises to answer still unresolved questions. Show the reader that there is always more depth below. Don’t make them ever think that you’ve gone as deep as you can go.

• Spend a lot of time working on your voice.

• Write and rewrite until the content matches the form. One mechanical trick that helped a lot was to simply rewrite and retype everything. It forced me to pay attention to every word. How many times? I threw out 40,000 pages of drafts.

• Filter the text a different way by having the computer read out loud, in its dead monotone, what I’d written. I can’t expect the reader to put the emphasis in the right place or to figure out what I mean. The words alone must carry the load. How many times? I threw out 100 CDs that I’d burnt and listened to on my commute to work. I kept a digital recorder with me: “The first paragraph of chapter three seems to have an extra word.” “The second paragraph after Harrison still doesn’t work.”

• Accept that there are no finished works, only abandoned ones, and let it go, which really wasn’t that difficult, because after so many drafts, I was completely sick of it.

When you talked about what you took into consideration when writing the book, you said, “The text cannot be about what the text is about.” I know that this advice is for fiction, and can’t see how it applies to nonfiction. Can you give an example from your book?

I interpreted (which is to say applied) McKee’s advice to mean that there should always be more than one thing going on in any passage. Take the following as an example:

Consider the case of a woman who bought a pair of Oprah Winfrey’s shoes, even though the shoes didn’t fit her. When she felt depressed and needed confidence, she stood in Oprah’s shoes. She became confident enough to tell her story on national television, without the help of Oprah’s shoes. Oprah as a role model was the final cause of her increased confidence. Given that there was no sole-to-soul magic that Oprah cast through her shoes to the woman, how did the final cause work?

Recall that information is a relation between sender and receiver. The shoes didn’t vary, but her interpretation of the meaning of the shoes did. Because of the hermeneutic circle, you can’t step into the same shoes twice; every time she revisited the shoes, she had experienced new things since the last time, and was bringing a new perspective and a new interpretation of her life to the shoes. Her varying interpretation of the shoes created the variation in the sender. The channel wasn’t the shoes, but her thoughts. The variation in her confidence was the variation in the receiver. The relationship between sender and receiver created information, a decrease in system variability (her chaotic feelings), and an increase in her confidence. Although it seems that she got something from nothing, that she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, it was actually the hard work of her own thinking that accomplished the feat, as it were.

We can unpack this passage to see that it has:

1.      Words on the page that the reader has to decode.

2.     Puns, such as sole-to-soul and feat/feet.

3.     Something visual: A woman standing in Oprah’s shoes.

4.     A jest about pulling herself up by her boot/shoe straps

5.     A nod to Heraclitus’s “You could not step twice into the same river.”

6.     Linkages to previous ideas in the book: information, interpretation, and the hermeneutic circle.

7.     A payoff for the reader: You, too, can defeat doubt, if you persist.

8.     A step forward in the argument that puts into position elements needed to define meaning and contribution.

9.     Implications for what this says about the reified notion of the power of faith: It has functional, but not ontological existence.

10.  Resonance with Kenneth Clark and Lynne Cox regarding extending one’s powers of mind and spirit to the utmost.

Q: What books do you recommend for would-be non-fiction authors?

In addition to a good dictionary, start with Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Joseph Williams' Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, and Bruce Ross-Larson's Effective Writing. When you've mastered those, move onto Sol Stein's Stein on Writing and Robert Harris' Writing with Clarity and Style. Robert McKee's Story is for screenwriting, but is still helpful, even for non-fiction. George Orwell's Why I Write is also good. If you want to get fancy, then read Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech.

Q: What is the best writing advice you ever received?

Bertrand Russell once said that nothing you write is ever as good or as bad as you think. This helps prevent you from getting too sure of yourself and from complete desperation. The former is good, because writing is rewriting and if you think your writing is great, then you don't rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Desperation is part of writing, but too much sucks.