A Selfless Art

The structure of a text is critical to my writing. I need to see the map of the journey before I can set out, just in outline though—I like discovering the landscape as I go. Many years ago, a friend explained how to use headings in Word. It was a revelation. I’ve been using it to plan my work ever since.

Nevertheless, and however helpful the software, writing is much harder than it was. I hope that shows a deeper understanding of my subject not just my age but, whatever the case, the result is that I now work slowly and hesitantly, especially when it comes to structuring my ideas into comprehensible form.

For example, with A Restless Art it seemed natural to begin with the history of community art but I decided the reader had to know the theory first if the history was to make sense, or even matter. But you could argue it the other way around and, for a while, I did.

With this book, I thought I knew the story: I even wrote a five-page synopsis of the book, something I’ve never done before. But I lost confidence in that version (lost confidence is where this book begins) so I’m now working on unconnected fragments, setting down ideas while I have them. It’s disconcerting, walking without any sense of where I am, and only an instinct about where I’m going. Like someone lost in the desert, I might just be going round in circles.

I hope the book will eventually find its structure. I prefer to read a narrative, an argument, and it’s hard to achieve that in a fragmentary form. One exception is Sven Lindqvist’s brilliant, terrible A History of Bombing, unhappily never out of date, but it is chronological and he offers the reader several paths through the labyrinth of futility, rage and horror.

For now, as the bombers destroy, like most people on the planet, I work quietly to build, even if it is only fragments of text. But I believe words matter, just as those who misuse them do. There is a struggle for truth and decency, and it is won or lost in language. I trust that these fragments will one day combine into the materials of a bridge but, for now, rather than following a trail of breadcrumbs, I’m laying one.