I’m gonna keep going with this little tirade about trying to write my book, until the switch has been tripped enough for me to actually get back to writing for it tonight. Okay, so the main thing that I’ve learned up till this point is that the way that I learned things, and that I came to understand things does not necessarily translate into anything useful for anybody else. Maybe, but it just felt more stilted the further I got into it. The way I was trying to write it was sort of like archaeology. I was trying to dig up all these different pieces that I had come across in my research, and from them construct an accurate picture of some far off culture. This was useful for it’s time, and I guess was a step in the whole development of the concept. That’s the next thing that I’ve learned about really big writing projects. Is that they go in stages, and maybe when you’re more experienced, you can predict and ride out those stages, I don’t know. But what you need to realize is that what you’re writing now may not at all be what it is in the end. If you sit there and try to force something to fit into the original shape you had, it’s very likely to get horribly mangled. But possibly having it horribly mangled is what allows you then to mold it into a new shape. Hopefully sooner or later, this process ends, and you can actually just run with it, and someday (gasp!) even finish it. I’ll have to let you know.
Anyway, my original system of delivering this idea was basically just to communicate point for point this whole model I’ve constructed for myself which is encapsulated in the word “story-systems.” It’s a model I’ve been developing for a while which I always say lets me compare cultural artifacts blah blah blah. But very few people want to hear about that kind of shit, I think. After a certain point, I also discovered that I hated writing about it. The words, I didn’t want to have to be saying those things in those ways, over and over again. It got too didactic. So now it’s all been switched up, shaken loose and moved around. Instead, I’m going with this whole idea of “religion as search engine” which I like a lot more. I’ve already posted about that a bit, so I won’t go into it right now. I’ll no doubt be posting about it more too, especially once I realize that too as an idea needs to be scrapped, and replaced with something better. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed that won’t need to happen. Anyway, I’m typing pretty fast now, so maybe I ought to try and have another swing at it. Back soon, no doubt!
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