By Kate Daloz
A few weeks ago, I had the good luck of leaving a meeting with my editor and coming straight to Baruch, to a cross-consultation with Xander. I was excited about the ideas that had come out of the meeting—the editor had helped me identify some structural problems in the draft that I had sensed but hadn’t been able to fully articulate on my own—but my head was spinning.
At first I was afraid my thoughts would be too jumbled to make for a useful consultation, but as I talked, Xander started drawing a diagram, mapping out both the old, flawed structure and then the new, sleeker structure I was beginning to think about. At the end of fifty minutes, we had a sheet of paper that looked like the work of an insane chemist—cryptically-labeled circles connected to one another by lines. I also had the first, clear steps towards a new draft of my book.
I often use diagrams in my own drafting process, but working with Xander reminded me how helpful it can be to collaborate on one with someone else, especially when the writer is trying to wrangle an overwhelming, non-linear jumble of ideas and information into the simplified, linear form required by the reader. Watching Xander draw my project helped me consider possible distinctions and categories that would allow me to invite the reader into my ideas while still retaining complexity.
It reminded me how useful I have found diagrams in my consulting and teaching work as well. Working with writers thinking about a project’s structure, I sometimes sketch out the shape of a possible essay by drawing a series of rectangular boxes to represent paragraphs. I’ve found this to be especially helpful for writers overwhelmed by assignment length—reducing a 5-page paper to a set of cartoon boxes that just need to be filled in (“Look! You’ve already got four of them!”) can help reduce word-count stress. We can also use the boxes to talk about relationships between paragraphs (“Is the idea in this one in contrast to the idea in the previous one or expanding on it?”), mark them with symbols (= + ≈ ≠ ->), and then decide what kind of written transition will represent that relationship to the reader. Best, though, is when the diagram helps a writer suddenly realize that, though the reader will experience her work linearly, she herself is under no obligation to develop the draft from top to bottom. For many developing writers, this is a real revelation that leads directly to deeper, more confident revision and comfort with more complex arguments.
Drawing with Xander also reminded me, for the millionth time, how writing stress often stems from trying to impose readerly linearity on thinking that’s not yet ready to be linear. In their very messiness, scribbled diagrams reject final-draft perfection—looking insane is partly what makes them work.
Published May 14, 2015
