How hard can it be?

You may remember that one of my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts for the past two years was to read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of those Great Books that almost no one has read. I am loving it.

Yes, it’s mid-18th-c. satire. Yes, it’s like nothing else. Yes, it’s dense 18th-c. prose, being funny in that overloaded 18th-c. style.

But what a romp! Here’s one guide to reading it. Here’s mine: Imagine a juggler who tells you that he’s going to start with one ball and work his way up to five. He starts to juggle. The number of balls increases, but never reaches five. Suddenly he’s juggling cubes and you didn’t see that happen. Oh wait, the balls are back. One of them is glowing. He does a quick whiparound, and now the balls are glowing orbs of gas. There are ten of them.

That’s The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It starts the night he is born but over the next 600 pages he never quite gets to actually being born. (It actually starts the night he was conceived, but enough about that.)

If you can find it hysterical that every time he approaches the actual plot of the book, he immediately changes the subject and we’re off on some other side quest, you’ll laugh as much as I’m laughing at it.

Anyway, in one of his digressions, his father is rambling on about some philosophical hobbyhorse of his, and Shandy, the narrator of his own life, tells us about one Bishop John de la Casse, who wrote important treatises on the topic, but was unable to write more than a line and a half a day, because:

[T]his disability in his Grace arose from an opinion he was afflicted with, —which opinion was this, — viz. that whenever a Christian was writing a book […] where his intent and purpose was bona fide, to print and publish it to the world, his first thoughts were always the temptations of the evil one. —

This was the state of ordinary writers: but when a personage of venerable character and high station, either in church or state, once turned author,— he maintained, that from the very moment he took pen in hand—all the devils in hell broke out of their holes to cajole him.-'Twas Term-time with them, —every thought, first and last, was captious;—how specious and good soever, — 'twas all one;—in whatever form or colour it presented itself to the imagination, — 'twas still a stroke of one or other of 'em levelled at him, and was to be fenced off.—

So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth, — both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT— as his RESISTANCE.

(emphasis mine)

And a man who wrote 600 pages in nine volumes should know.

For another take on the whole ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS > GESTALT > SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION cycle, see this post from cartoonist Ruben Bolling, aka Tom the Dancing Bug. His video shows his process from scribbled ideas to finished product. Very much worth watching.