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Shred Your Writing to Shred at Writing
Getting a handle on the problem of too much material
Sometimes I can’t quite make it to the blank page because I feel that I don’t have enough to say. Other times, though, I have the opposite problem: I have too much to talk about, and I don’t know where to begin.
This is particularly true when I’m doing research-based writing. I read and read, taking notes and making notes to myself about how it might all fit together—and it might all fit together if I could ever perfectly hit that delicate tipping point between needing just one more piece of information and being overwhelmed by too much knowledge about too many things. I tend to err on the side of overwhelmed.
That is my problem for my current chapter, on the emergence of the idea of “civilization” in European discourse over the century or so following the voyage of Columbus. (Yes, the idea of civilization is that new.). the chronological sweep of the time period I’m covering in this chapter, plus the wide range of sources upon which I draw—writings in Spanish, French, English, Italian, and (heaven help me) Latin—together make for an unmanageable mess of possibilities. I need a path through this plenitude.
At times like this, I turn to a trick I learned from my sophomore English teacher, that gruff grizzled…
