I’ve spent an awful lot of time marking student papers this week. At a guess, around 90% of my feedback has been on a similar theme—something along the lines of, please be more specific.

Probably the most common issue I see in student work across the board has to do with floating in the conceptual ether. Speaking in theory is a surface-level hack for sounding knowledgable, but I tend to develop a feeling of suspicion when the writer fails to ground the conceptual stuff once in a while.

This doesn’t just apply to obviously philosophical things like -isms and -ologies (e.g. positivism, phenomenology). What do you mean by marketing, or science, or music? Without context, these words offer a gist at best, and that makes it really easy for someone to miss the point

Most words have stories in them, if we’re willing to get specific.

Increasingly, I’m finding that my creative process hinges on reacting to existing works. This seems to apply in most areas of creative work that I’m involved with. It is almost always easier to start by engaging with a source and responding to it than it is to start with nothing. In fact, it is actually quite difficult not to have a thought if you follow a bit of reading with some absent minded gazing into space.

Today’s post is a brief prompt: next time you sit down to write something at a computer (an email, an essay, a resignation—anything), try getting through the entirety of the first draft without pressing the backspace key.

This can be a lot harder than it sounds. If your experience is anything like mine, you might get the sense that your fingers seem to have an editorial mind of their own.

Working without the backspace key has become fundamental to my drafting process. Paired with a timer and a word goal (say, 500 words in 60 minutes) it can yield a crappy first draft remarkably quickly. For me that is useful, because the first draft is almost always crappy anyway.

I really enjoy comparisons between music and food. Making music is a bit like cooking—you have to balance the flavour profile, but that’s not something you can do at the end; you have to taste along the way.

Because I am a word-oriented person, I am finding that starting with words can send things out of whack: the flavours of the words tend to dominate the dish (the song), and like too much salt, they can be tricky to pull back.

It seems useful to think in terms of the ways in which our compositional context (including the materials to hand) exert a kind of contextual gravity. What elements are exerting the strongest gravitational pull in an unfolding creative process? The words? The sounds? Something else?

Once the mise en place has been set up (the context), an implicit set of rules are in play. If you’re cooking a steak dinner and decide halfway through that you’d rather make a dessert, you’re unlikely to beat the context (unless you can find a way to turn the work in progress into a convincing dessert). Better to see the steak through and then loop back to make dessert. You could throw the steak out halfway through, but that would be a waste, of resources and of a practical learning opportunity.

I wrote an article for The Artifice recently, about meaning-making in art (you can read it here). In the comments section, several readers have been discussing entry points into literary theory.

Barthes’ Death of the Author often comes up in conversations like this, and several of my readers have recommended it to other readers. I recommend it too, though not uncritically.

My general impression of Barthes’ argument is that the author’s intended meaning should not be taken as the thing that the text is about, by definition. My main beef with this idea (if taken too far) is that the author is clearly part of the story (it wouldn’t make sense to take this literally, of course).

I do agree with the idea that text can’t really have an objective meaning—clearly it always operates as an intermediary between some artefact of the world and some form of an interpretant (often a human, but perhaps also a computer).

The point is that the physical boundaries of a story (or song, painting, etc.) are not the same as its semiotic boundaries. What a work means is clearly not confined to that paper and ink it is made from.

Phenomena such as cancel culture show us, though, that the identity of an author clearly remains relevant to the meaning of a work.

On the theme of this post, check out this well-known (and, well written) piece by Nick Cave.