Will Buckingham: Unforeseeable

Unforeseeable

Sunday August 8, 2010

As I’m without internet for a day or two, I’m writing this in my trusty notepad, and I’ll upload it later. I’m currently with my friends in Jinan, eating watermelon and waiting for the train onwards to Xi’an. Shandong has been an absolute pleasure from start to finish. Historically, it is a fascinating province. And I’m leaving with the sense that there is much more here that I would like, at some time, to explore.

Anyway, once I’ve arrived in Xi’an, I’ll be pretty much in the last phase of my trip. There’s still a bit of work to do in terms of more formal research for the trip, although hanging out with dog-meat sellers, eating watermelon with friends, and stumbling through Chinese conversations in shops whilst buying an MP3 player to replace the one that I managed to crack in Qufu can all equally be considered to be research when it comes to the curious business of writing stories. So far, of the sixty four stories that I have set myself the task of writing, I have written about forty two. This is a pleasing figure, and I’m hoping that by the end of the trip I’ll be well into the fifties. Ideally, I’d like to have no more than ten to complete by the time I get home. Although, of course, this is only the beginning. There is the business of writing the remaining stories. There is the business of editing. And there is the curious framework into which I am fitting all of this work, which needs to be revised again and again until it is exactly right. All of this, I think, could take a long time.

It is always interesting seeing a book take shape. This one has been on the boil for years on end. In fact, many of the things I work on tend to have been on the boil for a long time. There are some writers who write in series. They write a book. They finish it. They have another idea. They write another book. And so on. I tend to write in parallel, which is a much messier process. I always have a number of possibilities on the go at once. Some of them fade away, some of them turn into other projects (so for example, I was reminded only today as I looked over some old work lurking around on my hard drive, that my PhD thesis and Sea-Legs, the book that came out of it, had their origins in a curious novel that I was once trying to write), and some of them eventually emerge, but never in the shape that I had anticipated. One of the reasons I like writing, in fact, is that it is a process of engaging with the unforeseeability of things. One of the reasons that I feel suspicious about some of the mechanisms of academic research is that they are designed for minimum unforeseeability: we have to know in advance what we are going to find, and the unforeseeable is considered as a threat.

This is perhaps why I tend to write well on the move as well. The not-knowing-what-comes-next of a life on the move is similar, in a way, to the not-knowing-what-comes-next of the process of writing.

Uploaded in Xi’an, after a great overnight rail journey…. More anon!