End of Vacation

If everything will have gone as planned, today should be the last day of my vacation. I'm hoping the vacation went well, though I don't know yet, because I'm writing this a month early to provide with uninterrupted content.

Work-ation

The vacation kind of broke down. Here I am working on my computer again, doing an unexpected tenure case. I still learned some valuable things from the vacation, and painted a few rooms of my house.

Run

During a jog a few weeks before my vacation, I realized what the connection was between two chapters, "Lorca's Duende" and "Musical Lorca." I wasn't even intending on working on this problem during my run. The solution just came to me: I can locate performances / musical settings of Lorca in the concentric circles of particularity / universality that I discuss in the previous chapter. Of course, it seems obvious when I say it like this, but the idea had not occurred to me before. All of a sudden I realize why the 'Musical Lorca" chapter *works* in the context of the book--rather than being simply a descriptive survey.

How Do I Do It?

I really don't know how "I," the human being Jonathan Mayhew, is able to turn into "I," the scholarly writer of the same name. I really don't know how I do it. I've often gotten into trouble assuming someone else can do what I can. I can easily imagine myself not being able to do it, or losing the ability to do it at some point. When I'm sitting here not writing, the ability to write a book seems almost as improbable as being able to mount a flying trapeze.

A New Technique

Here's a technique I've been using a bit: take the least well developed chapter of your book and work on it until it is the third least well developed chapter. The way I do this is to take a sheet of paper and write out everything I know about what is going to be in the chapter, then sit down at the computer and write.

Now take the new least developed chapter, the one that has been left in the dust, and do the same thing again with that one, and with a third chapter.

This also works with completing chapters. Take the chapter that is closest to being done and bring it to completion.

Since beginning and ending are separate skills, it is refreshing to switch between chapters sometimes. The other main skill is just "going on," working in the middle of a chapter that is neither incipient nor near completion. That is the hardest stage, the one least abundant in satisfaction. What I recommend here is to wage a stealth attack, taking the chapter quickly from its initial stages to its final ones.

Titles

Here are some chapter titles for my book:

What Lorca Knew: The Embodiment of Knowledge in Spanish Poetry


Preface
SUITE ONE: Fragments of a Late Modernity

1. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente
2. Poetry and Philosophy: From Zambrano to Valente
3. Antonio Gamoneda and The Persistence of Memory
4. Strange Islands: Late Modernism in Spanish American Poetry

SUITE TWO: What Lorca Knew

5. Lorca’s Duende: Nation and Performance
6. Musical Lorca
7. What Claudio Knew
8. The Verse Paragraph (from Juan Ramón Jiménez to Olvido García Valdés)

I want to make each chapter title distinctive and memorable, which means not too long. A chapter title can be shorter than an article title, because it doesn't have to be quite as self-contained and self-explanatory. Chapters 2 and 8 still need better titles. Those are just stand-in titles.

Modified Stealth

One thing you might want to do is work on all the chapters of your book in one day and try to get a significant portion done on several of them. Just write like crazy and when you get stuck, move on to the next chapter.