Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.

This evidence supports the view of some narrative theorists that there is a universal story structure. These scholars claim every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new and surprising, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the characters must look deep inside themselves to overcome the looming crisis, and once this transformation occurs, the story resolves itself. 

I had always hoped writing could be like a Halloween costume, as fraudulent as possible.

We care about doing what we want to do creatively. We want to be interested in it. We want it to challenge us. We want it to be difficult. We want to reinvent the stupid thing every time.

In extreme cases, an entire project would stall because I couldn't carve out enough contiguous time to get through the next part of it.

riting to read strategies

There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inveming. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self -evident modesty of the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-serio usness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking-and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you arc adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending irs growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly-well, just hang it up. It is nor that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong-nothing impor­ tant ever is. Rather, it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you arc busy critiquing you arc less busy augmenting. You are that much less fo stering. There are times when debunking is necessary. But, if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is coun­ terproductive. Foster or debunk. It's a strategic question.

ntracategorical complexity inau- gurated the study of intersectionality, I discuss it as the second approach because it falls conceptually in the middle of the continuum between the first approach, which rejects categories, and the third approach, which uses them strategically. Like the first approach, it interrogates the bound- ary-making and boundary-defining process itself

Like the third approach, it acknowledges the stable and even durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance toward categories. This approach is called intracategorical complexity because authors working in this vein tend to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection—“people whose identity crosses the boundaries of tradition- ally constructed groups” (Dill 2002, 5)—in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups.

Finally, these critiques dovetailed with two separate but highly influential developments: first, the postmodernist and poststruc- turalist critiques of modern Western philosophy, history, and language (see, e.g., Foucault 1972; Derrida 1974), and second, critiques by fem- inists of color of white feminists’ use of women and gender as unitary and homogeneous categories reflecting the common essence of all women.

intercategorical complexity , requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configura- tions of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions

In total, I describe three approaches.

The three approaches, in brief, are defined principally in terms of their stance toward categories, that is, how they understand and use analytical categories to explore the complexity of intersectionality in social life.

The first approach is called anticategorical complexity because it is based on a methodology that deconstructs analytical categories. Social life is consid- ered too irreducibly complex—overflowing with multiple and fluid de- terminations of both subjects and structures—to make fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences.

bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984): “Feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexual oppression because the very foundation of women’s liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.”

Feminists have written widely on methodology but have either tended to focus on a particular methodology (e.g., ethnography, deconstruction, genealogy, ethnomethodology) or have failed to pinpoint the particular issue of complexity.

In a nutshell, research practice mirrors the complexity of social life, calling up unique methodological demands.

I suggest, however, that intersectionality has introduced new methodological problems and, partly as an unintended consequence, has limited the range of methodological approaches used to study intersectionality.

As for the origins of the term itself, it was probably first highlighted by Kimberle ́ Crenshaw (1989, 1991). Many other key texts introduced the conceptual framework and offered similar terms: see Davis 1981; Moraga 1983; Smith 1983; hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldu ́ a 1984; Glenn 1985; Anzaldu ́ a 1987, 1990; King 1988; Mohanty 1988; Spelman 1988; Sandoval 1991.

writing is about contrived naturalness: rigging the system of meaning to turn out the way you want, and making it look normal and inevitable in the process.

Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink.

scientific practice is more like politics - an effort to marshal support for one's position.

xpert keep gaining in expertise while the less expert make little progress.

Conventional wisdom has it that practice makes perfect and that expertise is the natural outcome of years of practice. But few people become good writers, no matter how much they write.

AlphaPlus, Perfect Writer, Text Wizard, Spellbinder, WordStar, or Isaac Asimov’s favorite SCRIPSIT 2.0, made by Radio Shack.

how a transcript of a talk given extemporaneously does not read well on the printed page

INTERVIEWER On the subject of being a woman writer in a man’s world, you’ve mentioned A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone. LE GUIN My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of One’s Own was kind of tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.

Hupomnemata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace). Thus, when Fundamus requests advice for struggling against the agitations of the soul, Plutarch at that moment does not really have the time to compose a treatise in the proper form, so he will send him, in their present state, the

Hence, a first analogy can be put forward: what others are to the ascetic in a community, the notebook is to the recluse. But, at the same time, a second analogy is posed, one that refers to the practice of ascesis as work not just on actions but, more precise]y, on thought: the constraint that the presence of others exerts in the domain of conduct, writing will exert in the domain of the inner impulses of the soul.

Legal Writing for the Courts: An Annotated Bibliography

that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as if they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally.

And I know not whether both exercises, when we perform them with care and assiduity, are not reciprocally beneficial, as it appears that by writing we speak with greater accuracy, and by speaking we write with greater ease

But we cannot arrive at such power of thought suddenly or even soon. 3. In the first place, a certain form of thinking must be acquired by great practice in writing, a form which may be continually attendant on our meditations. A habit of thinking must then be gradually gained by embracing in our minds a few particulars at first, in such a way that they may be faithfully repeated.

But to enable us to write more, and more readily, not practice alone will assist (and in practice there is doubtless great effect), but also method.

The sum of the whole matter, indeed, is this: that by writing quickly, we are not brought to write well, but that by writing well we are brought to write quickly

In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence. By writing, resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, from where they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies or as circumstances require.

We must write, therefore, as carefully and as much as we can, for as the ground, by being dug to a great depth, becomes more fitted for fructifying and nourishing seeds, so improvement of the mind, acquired from more than mere superficial cultivation, pours forth the fruits of study in richer abundance and retains them with greater fidelity.

I know it is an ordinary subject of inquiry whether more is contributed by writing, reading, or speaking. This question we should have to examine with careful attention, if we could confine ourselves to any one of those exercises. 2. But they are all so connected, so inseparably linked with one another that if any one of them is neglected, we labor in vain in the other two, for our speech will never become forcible and energetic unless it acquires strength from great practice in writing.

We can now see that a writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially.

It is the ability to collect an army which is adequate to the war in hand, and to organize and to employ it to good advantage.

First of all is the ability to know against whom and with whose help to make war; for this is the first requisite of good strategy, and if one makes any mistake about this, the result is inevitably a war which is disadvantageous, difficult, and to no purpose.

I shall never be found to have had anything to do with speeches for the courts.33 You can judge this from my habits of life, from which, indeed, you can get at the truth much better than from the lips of my accusers