François Matarasso

A Selfless Art, Update #1

Yesterday, I began work on A Selfless Art – six hours work and 1,600 words. That’s about as much as I can achieve in a day, if I start writing by 6am. At the moment, I’m going for quantity. Write, and keep writing. Write some more. Don’t stop to think, let the act of writing be the thinking. Above all, don’t edit. I can waste an hour on three sentences. There’ll be time for that, when the first draft is complete. For now, it’s just about getting ideas into a readable form. 

Can I maintain this pace? Probably not. Some days I write in treacle with a quill, and am grateful for 300 words. But this book is different, in style and purpose. I’ve enjoyed working on sketches and that’s unusual, promising. In any case, I’ve set myself the goal of having a draft by the end of the year. Four months. A Restless Art took four years, but that book involved a lot of research. More importantly, I didn’t know what I was trying to do, so I wrote tens of thousands of useless words. 

This time, I do know what I want to say. For the first time in my life, I’ve written a synopsis, setting out the argument chapter by chapter. When the idea came to me, at the end of March, I really didn’t understand what the book was for. All I knew was that I needed to confront doubts and questions that had been crowding round me with aggressive insistence for months, years. I was lost, professionally and personally, and I launched the book like a desperate lifeboat, with no confidence it would keep me afloat. When I don’t know what to do, I write. 

Because A Restless Art was a public project, supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, I used this website to help me ‘think in public’, sharing research materials, project reports and evolving ideas as I went. There’s probably as much material on that site as in the book.

But A Selfless Art is personal. I don’t want help or permission. I might abandon the book, if it leads to a dead end or, better, if it gets me where I need to be. If it is finished I might put it aside for several reasons. It’s good to write without a deadline or an obligation to publish. 

So I’ll wait before sharing any of the new book’s ideas. Instead, I’ll try sharing the writing process, like this. I don’t know how interesting that will be, to me or anyone else, so there might not be many of these updates. For now, though, I’m just happy to have begun the journey.