I try holding not too tightly onto specific sentences in early drafts. That’s because I know things will get chopped and changed over time. But there’s one sentence in this essay I’m writing that I love so much. Too much, in fact. It’s gonna get me into trouble, have me saying something nasty to any editor who suggests I change even one word in it. This kind of love will have me giving up the whole essay just to save this little sentence of my heart.
You all would not believe how many sentences in my articles are first dictated into a voice memo while working out. I swear: sweating + exhaustion induce clarity of thought.
Closing up shop for the day working on this piece. Per habit, I left myself some breadcrumbs in the comments for when I pick it back up tomorrow. The comment tagged to one paragraph says: “WHERE DOES THIS GO? WHY IS THIS HERE? FIGURE IT OUT, BUDDY.”
Just wrote “more-than-human” as an adjective in a draft. Now I’m asking how did I become this person?
I’m 2.5 weeks in working on an essay about theories of change in activist education research. I’m shooing for my First Shitty Draft by the end of June, and I’m at the point now where I’m not quite sure if I have something novel to say anymore, because the piece so far might simply be me narrating to myself why I’m convinced by all of the Indigenous and decolonizing work I have been reading but had hoped to be in conversation with. It’s an interesting swing of the writing process: going from ideas, to conversation and interaction with others’ ideas, and back to your own ideas but wondering if the whole process was to convince yourself that, “Yeah, what they said is basically what I think now. So we’re done here.“ I’m pretty sure I’ll write my way out of it — because I’ve felt this swing before — but either way, I’m learning a lot. And that’s good.
Black Thought on writing:
I think a writer should always be aware of his or her surroundings. The material is there. It’s already in the world. You have to be in tune with it to hear it and see it. The best essays, the best books, all wrote themselves. Same with paintings and dances—all of the best art, all of that shit just comes from the universe. You have to master the art of being in tune enough when it’s time to create.
From The Paris Review
Here’s my favoirate thing I wrote this year. It’s a short piece about sound, young folks, teaching, and a rapper. Much of what’s here is material that got squeezed out of an academic article I wrote in the same year. But I’m happy it did because what I mostly wanted to do was share the little exchanges among youth that thread through the article: how they tuned into what they were hearing, how they took matters into their own hands, and even how they hurt my feelings sometimes. I wanted to share these things without having to step too far away for some kind of academic analysis.
What I like most about the piece is the ending. Here’s why.
Pieces like this that reveal tensions in education spaces often end with neat recommendations. They try to clean up the mess they made. Cleaning up can be good. I tried to for a long time. But it didn’t feel right, mostly because I still don’t have those kinds of answers to what is in and around the text. So instead, the ending turns back on me and how “the strikes and blows of these reverberations hit me too because of the relational ties I hold with these artists.” With that approach, I think I stuck the landing, especially with the final sentence that keeps things unsettled.
Sada Baby stays in motion even now, echoing through my writing as I toggle over to his Soundcloud page, press play on his songs, and wonder if I will hear something that makes me tune in differently to the young people around me.
But here’s something else: I wrote that final sentence four years ago in Memphis on a writing retreat. I wasn’t writing this piece yet — far from it. I was working my way through sound studies readings in anticipation for writing the larger academic article this piece would be cut from. The sentence is a description of what I found myself doing in Memphis. It’s in a blue notebook with pink and orange sticky notes flying out of the pages. In fact, the sentence probably started on a sticky note.
This is one of the ways “writing is a form of time travel.” That sentence traveled with me for a period of four years. Or rather, it’s likely more accurate to say I traveled four years back to it in order to finish this piece. Or maybe, in Memphis I traveled four years ahead to write it, and the end of this piece is when I finally caught up with myself.