The Un-Format for Un-Writing
I'm preparing materials for leading a seminar on book formatting in the months to come, and I've been reviewing my own learning journey for raw material. I hope, like in most things, to guide others not so much by my good choices, but at least to steer them away from the bad ones.
The biggest feat I had to overcome, and the one that opens the lecture, is the almost Zen activity of not-formatting, in preparation for final formatting. I'm not unfamiliar with the idea of "semantic tagging" as this has been something that's come up in my software engineering career, even back to the dark days of the web (it's better to use <em>...</em> than <i>...</i> for example.) Word processing software has ruined us, and the web hasn't helped. We're a people that are accustomed to what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG.) But formatting, especially for different targets, requires that we don't get what we see. Writing a manuscript, an eBook, and a print title should ideally all come from the same source, so rather than say My Title is Times Bold Face Large Type (as this is) it's better to use whatever a
Title Style
looks like and move along. It's a delayed interpretation, where we state the intent up front (this is a title, this is emphasis, this is a paragraph) and something later, in the future, is responsible for interpreting that.
I like this, both for its return to those core old-nerd semantic principles, but also as a lesson for writers in general. Focus on meaning, on the structure, on the words. Concern yourself less with the look and the styling and the presentation. The purpose should persist, across mediums and across presentations. Obsession with the specifics of look takes energy away from focusing on what you're saying.
I'm teaching the un-formatting as an opening process in the many steps of learning how to deconstruct the piece into its key parts and purpose: the line, the graf, the scene, the chapter. To pull apart the thing and identify the purpose and not the presentation. Unlearning the process that we have gotten used to, the full control of the word on the screen and the conflation of "how it looks" versus "what it means."
🧩 🦏