In the Thicket
I am fascinated by small birds that can fly through bushes without smacking into the maze of branches inside. In a bush or a thicket, the chaos of limbs and twigs may seem to “bar the way” for orderly movement. But somehow, birds and other creatures have learned to maneuver the dense space.
In these shrubs, branches don’t proceed in neat columns, but zig and zag and bend and cross and bump and twist. To me, they offer an image of the amazing connection between all things. The thicket has become a new metaphor for my writing process.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 289
When I have an idea for a story, I usually think of the plot first, or the gimmick. Once I have a basic structure in mind, I think of the themes. What are the details and ideas that weave in and out of this story, accruing meaning as the story progresses? And then I consider what research I could do to increase my own knowledge of those themes / details.
For example, in my sci-fi novel-in-progress The Lesser Light, the title is a reference to the moon, as described in Genesis 1:16. What could I learn about the moon—both from science and from literature / mythology—that could enrich my storytelling? From there, I go down various rabbit holes, tangents, sidetracks, dead ends, etc. Werewolves don’t feature in this story, but is there something from werewolf—or regular wolf—lore that could intersect with my story? Tides are affected by the moon—what can I learn about tides, and from there, oceans, currents, etc.? And the more I learn about these various topics, the more intersections I notice.
Though I don’t want to be overwhelmed by all the possible side-research, it is good for me to spend time in “thicket-mode.”
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 361
I think the thicket-mind allows me to do some work very well. The creative life, especially writing, is well-suited to me. I can gather information as I please, let it all jumble up inside my head until I forget who said what and whether an idea is mine or someone else’s, and then write my brains out, see what happens on the page.
For writing, I need the labor of “digestion,” of “composting,” of “playing around with stuff.” Instead of feeling the pressure to produce, I slow down and tinker so that what I end up producing is better than if I had rushed through it in the name of “timeliness.” I am in a diffuse flow state. To a certain extent, I am wasting time. I am not being very productive. But if I am engaged in thinking through ideas, in reading, writing, playing around—this is not wasted time. Even dead-ends are fruitful.
Ministry was this way for me, too. Many of our meetings would have been deemed “unproductive” by some standards. It was slow-going work, but we invited every person to weigh in on various decisions. We did emotional-spiritual check-ins at most staff meetings. We spent time each year discussing “who are we? What is the ministry we do? Why do we do it?” Even though I often helped facilitate those meetings, I would try to listen, doodling and jotting notes as each person spoke. Often, a discussion would not resolve during the meeting. I would go to my office (or home office, after 2020) and think. Maybe I would read. I often read scripture, looking for a word that could be like a bird flitting into the thicket of my thoughts.
During some meetings, I would pose a question to the team of interns and staff. I would write answers on the dry erase board. As the conversation progressed, I would make lists, draw arrows, circle things, connect ideas with dashed lines, even draw pictures. At the end of the meeting, I would offer my interpretation based on all the input received. During these meetings, my mind was energized, and I was in a state of “flow.”
Logistical work is another beast altogether. I don’t know if I like logistical work, but I’m good at it, and I like the sense of accomplishment it affords. It took me a few years to realize that my thicket-mind also applies in this context. But it looks different. And it is harder to get people on board at first.
Only recently have I discovered my philosophy of work (at least logistical work): “My goal is to do as little work as possible.” This may seem like laziness. It is not. It is a different way of working. My goal is to work more efficiently. In order to become more efficient, however, I have to waste time with playing around. Through trial and error, I can create a process that is more efficient. There are tasks that initially took me an hour to complete. After tinkering for several hours, I created a tracking chart that sped up my process. Now I can complete the same task in 15 minutes.
Sometimes, it may appear that I am procrastinating on work that should be done. (And maybe I am procrastinating; my sister once declared that I put the “Nate” in “procrastinate.”) But taking time to reflect can look like procrastination. Rest can be mistaken for laziness. Am I in thicket-mode or work-mode?
In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde explores the distinction he makes between work and labor. This distinction may seem arbitrary, but it allows Hyde the terminology needed to make his argument. “Work is what we do by the hour,” he says. “It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money” (50).
Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify (50).
When I speak of labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work (51).
Some examples of work that Hyde presents:
Working on a factory assembly line
Household chores, such as dishes or taxes
Making rounds in a psychiatric ward
Harvesting crops
Some examples of labor that Hyde presents:
Mourning the loss of a loved one
Progressing through an addiction recovery program like AA
Writing a poem
Raising a child
Developing a new calculus
“Invention in all forms”
Both work and labor involve the expending of energy, but they are done at different paces, with different trajectories, different schedules. “And labor, because it sets its own pace, is usually accompanied by idleness, leisure, even sleep” (Hyde 50).
I’ve read in various sources (can’t remember which—thicket-brain!) that boredom is actually vital for creativity. The mind needs time to “zone out,” to disconnect from the drive for productivity or entertainment. Only then can new ideas start to whisper forth, like a breeze sneaking through the leaves of a shrub.
This is what writing is like for me. I consume ideas from every which way, but I need time to let them percolate, to intersect, to dance with each other. And then I can write. I’m a collector. I like to collect quotes, make my notes, and then reflect on what I wrote. And then I can share what I discover with others.
In fact, the artist’s design seemed thus: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 13
Though I may write clearly—at times—I am not sure that clarity is what I aim for in my work. I prefer density. Not density in terms of opaque jargon (though that may happen if I feel the jargon is helpful), but density in terms of association, connection, juxtaposition, relationship. Density like the mazy mess of branches inside a hedge. Thickness like a thicket.
Of all the yardwork chores one could do, I think my favorite is trimming hedges. I like seeing the progress made, I like angling toward straight edges or smooth curves, I like the slow rhythm of it, I like choosing which cut to make next.
Perhaps the writing I share with others is like a trimmed hedge. Underneath it is the mess and maze of intertwining ideas, what you can’t see. But what you do see is the appearance of order, the illusion of knowledgable choices. In reality, I’m trying things, seeing what works, how it works, if it works, what resonances and intertextuality present themselves with this construction and not that. If it looks polished, know that it was not always that way, that my thicket-mind lurks beneath any surface I’ve written.
“It was all change until the very last second,” says Verlyn Klinkenborg about published writing. “Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions. … It’s the living tissue of a writer’s choices” (33). What you read of mine may look like stone, but to me, it’s barely cooled lava.
I’ve begun to add an “Appendix of Related Quotes” to some of my earlier posts. Turns out that every piece of writing I finish becomes a branch in the larger thicket of my thought. When I come across a related passage in another text, it stirs my imagination. I juxtapose my writing with these newly encountered texts to see what new thoughts emerge. The appended quotes may be interesting to you, and may help you think further about whatever topic is at hand. I hope that is the case. But they are mostly for me, so that I can continue reflecting on the themes I’ve written about earlier. Every piece is a work-in-progress. Every thought is a branch in the thicket.
This blog is called Writing Under the Writing for a reason. While I try to polish my posts somewhat, they are also the branches that undergird other writing projects I am working on (mostly fiction and poetry). So in a sense, you are getting invited to the inside of my hedge of ideas. It’s not always tidy or easy to navigate, but I hope it’s at least interesting.
I tell you all this to let you know why posts have slowed down a little this month. In thickest thickset thickets I sit and consider new connections. I’m working on some posts for December, but I’m still mostly in thicket-mode, slowly laboring in research, ideas, and the actual writing.
A few weeks ago, I had a dream involving several different kinds of wind turbines. I saw them from a distance. Most were the standard three-arm giants you might see in eastern Washington. The others were … different. One was like a hoop made up of small, irregular segments. As the wind came in, segments rotated at different times and rates. If you watched one segment, you could watch it twist in its own time. If you watched the wind turbine as a whole, it was chaotic. It looked like it would fall apart. (It had the same vibe as one of those windsock figures outside car dealerships.)
My question upon waking was: “Can the chaotic / random be more efficient than the systematic?” I don’t know the answer for wind turbines, or most areas of life, work, labor, etc. But in my creative life, it seems like the answer might be yes.
What about you? Do you have labors in your life which move at their own pace, which intersect every which way with each other?
Appendix of Related Quotes
For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 456
Besides being wise, the Teacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs. The Teacher sought to find pleasing words, and he wrote words of truth plainly. The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings that are given by one shepherd. Of anything beyond these, my child, beware. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
- Ecclesiastes 12:9–12 (NRSV)
Consider your interior life—what you feel and think and the ways you remember. How much of it is chronological in order? Brief segments may be imbued with the orderliness of time. But in their relation to each other the elements of our internal lives are more likely to be associative, even dissociative, linked in ways that have nothing to do with the clock or the day by day of life itself. Writing is often an appeal not to the order of our chronological lives but to the order of our internal lives, which is nonchronological and, in fact, unorderly.
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing, 120–121
Your job isn’t to arrange chunks of evidence, chunks of the world in the order you gather them. Your job is to atomize everything you touch, to dissect your evidence into its details and particulars and resist the inherent jargon of your subject, breaking apart every clod of words you come across. Your job is to undo the adhesiveness of the evidence you’ve gathered, its tendency to clump into indissoluble units. Dissolve them. Pay attention only to what interests you in it. Break the complexity of what you’ve learned into the very small pieces of a mosaic shaped not by the clumping of evidence but by your conscious decisions as a writer. … Writing is a way of ordering perception, but it’s just as often a reordering of perception in a form peculiar to the writer’s discovery.
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing, 122–123
It adds up to quite a collection, from which the author has taken, bit by bit, only the elements he wants. The evidence has been atomized. Each minute detail has been removed from the immediate neighborhood of its original context—where it was first found or noticed or transcribed—and given a new neighborhood in the web of the prose itself, where newly autonomous facts surround it, each of them relocated too.
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing, 125
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 203
It’s not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression.
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
The few who refuse to live for the plot’s sake,
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue. …
- from “Not the Idle,” by Carl Dennis
God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 145