The weight of paper

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on December 12, 2015.

Take a look at the map above, which was the work of the American geologist Henry Darwin Rogers. As the legend on the right indicates, its various colors represent different rock formations. It’s obvious that some areas are larger than others, but how would you measure the difference? When Charles Darwin—no relation—was writing The Origin of Species, he was faced with exactly this problem, and his answer was an elegant one: “I have estimated the areas by cutting out and weighing the paper.” And while his solution reminds us, in the words of Stanley Edgar Hyman, that “there is something formidable and relentless about [Darwin’s] active involvement” in personally investigating everything that affected his argument, it also testifies to the weight of paper. We often treat paper as a two-dimensional surface with zero thickness, but it isn’t, of course. In the old days, anyone who sent a letter by airmail became acutely aware of its physical properties, and publishers still have to think about it today. Above a certain size, a book becomes harder and more expensive to produce, which has subtly influenced the length of the books we’re used to reading. (A few titles, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker or Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, seem determined to push the limits of how many words can be packed between two covers.) But while I’ve spoken frequently here about the importance of using pen and paper to work out ideas, I’ve generally thought of it in terms of the act of writing with ink, and I haven’t given nearly enough emphasis to the properties of the paper itself.

I got to thinking about this while reading a blog post a while back by the tabletop game designer Max Temkin—most famous for Cards Against Humanity—on the testing process behind a game called Secret Hitler. It’s full of useful advice, like this: “Jon Sharp taught me a great rule for iterating based on observed player feedback: ‘double or half.’ If something isn’t working, double it or cut it in half to quickly diagnose the problem. I like to think of this as the ‘Dr. House’ approach to game design.” But what I liked about it the most, aside from its fantastic pictures of game prototypes, is how the physical feedback provided by the paper itself informed the design process. Temkin started testing the game with blank playing cards and generic card sleeves, and if you want to get even cheaper, he recommends pasting slips of paper over cards from the free sample packs you get at Magic: The Gathering events. (Temkin writes: “Nobody wants them except for game designers, who usually jump at the opportunity to fill their backpacks with cheap cardboard rectangles that are great for prototyping.” Which reminds me of how I like to hoard business cards, which are the perfect size for notes or putting together an outline.) And the physical cards led to immediate insights about what had to be fixed. For instance: “Secret Hitler uses several different kinds of cards, and we found that players were sometimes confused about what was what…Once the policy cards were a different size and shape, players could easily differentiate them from other cards in the game.”

And while this sort of prototype seems like an obvious step in testing a tabletop game, it can also be useful for games that are meant to be played in a digital form. In his excellent book The Art of Game Design—which Kevin Kelly of Cool Tools has called “one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction”—Jesse Schell writes:

If you are clever, you can prototype your fancy video game idea as a simple board game, or what we sometimes call a paper prototype. Why do this? Because you can make board games fast, and often capture the same gameplay. This lets you spot problems sooner—much of the process of prototyping is about looking for problems, and figuring out how to fix them, so paper prototyping can be a real time saver.

Schell goes on to note that this approach is more intuitive for a turn-based game, but it can even be useful for games that unfold in real time. To prototype Tetris, for example, you could cut out pieces of cardboard with a razor blade and move them around the table: “This would not be a perfect Tetris experience, but it might be close enough for you to see if you had the right kinds of shapes, and also enough to give you some sense of how fast the pieces should drop.” And even for a game like Doom, you could put together something with graph paper, paper tokens, and a metronome to tick off the seconds: “This will give the feeling of playing the whole thing in slow motion, but that can be a good thing, because it gives you time to think about what is working and not working while you are playing the game.”

And what all these approaches have in common is the fact that paper, which is inherently rather slow and clumsy to manipulate, forces you to think more urgently about what is interfering with the user experience. Anything that the player shouldn’t have to think about consciously while playing, like physically keeping track of the cards, ought to be ruthlessly edited out, and the paper prototype magnifies such problems so that they can’t be ignored. (They can also be revealing in other ways. Temkin notes, delightfully, that the game piece being handled by the players who were assigned the role of Hitler became more worn than the rest, since it was the role that generated the most anxiety.) And this seems to be as true of outlining a novel as it is of testing a game. When I use cards to map out the action of a story, I stack them in piles—sorting each card by character, scene, or theme—and I can tell at a glance which piles are larger than the others. A stack that seems too small should either be beefed up or combined with something else, while one that is too large to handle comfortably should be culled or split into two or more pieces. You can even draw conclusions from which cards have become tattered from being handled the most, and I imagine that for projects of a certain size, you could even weigh the cards, as Darwin did, to get a quick sense of each section’s relative bulk. You don’t get this kind of information when you’re laying out the whole thing in text files, as I’ve recently found myself doing, which is just a reminder that I really should get back to my cards. In writing, as in any creative endeavor, you can’t afford to ignore any potential source of insight, and if you put it down on paper, you’ll do a better job of playing the hand you’ve been dealt.

The weight of paper

When Charles Darwin was writing The Origin of Species, he was faced with a tricky problem: how would you compare the areas of the different kinds of rock shown above? A quick look at the map by the geologist Henry Darwin Rogers—no relation—is enough to establish that some formations are clearly larger than others, but it isn’t immediately obvious how to quantify the difference more precisely. Darwin’s answer was an elegant one: “I have estimated the areas by cutting out and weighing the paper.” And while his solution reminds us, in the words of Stanley Edgar Hyman, that “there is something formidable and relentless about [Darwin’s] active involvement” in personally investigating everything that affected his argument, I also like how it testifies to the weight of paper. We often treat paper as a two-dimensional surface with zero thickness, but it isn’t, of course. In the old days, anyone who sent a letter by airmail became acutely aware of its physical properties, and publishers still have to think about it today. Above a certain size, a book becomes harder and more expensive to produce, which has subtly influenced the length of the books we’re used to reading. (A few titles, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker or Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, seem determined to push the limits of how many words can be packed between two covers.) And while I’ve spoken frequently here about the importance of using pen and paper to work out ideas, I’ve generally thought of it in terms of the act of writing with ink, and I’ve realized that I haven’t given nearly enough emphasis to the properties of the paper itself.

I got to thinking about this while reading a blog post by the tabletop game designer Max Temkin—most famous for Cards Against Humanity—on the testing process behind a game called Secret Hitler. It’s full of useful advice, like this: “Jon Sharp taught me a great rule for iterating based on observed player feedback: ‘double or half.’ If something isn’t working, double it or cut it in half to quickly diagnose the problem. I like to think of this as the ‘Dr. House’ approach to game design.” But what I enjoyed about it the most, aside from its fantastic pictures of game prototypes, is how the physical feedback provided by the paper itself informed the design process. Temkin started testing the game with blank playing cards and generic card sleeves, and for those who are trying to go even cheaper, he recommends pasting slips of paper over cards from the free sample packs you get at Magic: The Gathering events. (Temkin writes: “Nobody wants them except for game designers, who usually jump at the opportunity to fill their backpacks with cheap cardboard rectangles that are great for prototyping.” Which reminds me of how I like to hoard business cards, which are the perfect size for notes or putting together an outline.) And playing with physical cards led to immediate insights about what had to be fixed. For instance: “Secret Hitler uses several different kinds of cards, and we found that players were sometimes confused about what was what…Once the policy cards were a different size and shape, players could easily differentiate them from other cards in the game.”

And while this sort of prototype seems like an obvious step in testing a tabletop game, it can also be useful for games that are meant to be played in a digital form. In his excellent book The Art of Game Design—which Kevin Kelly of Cool Tools has called “one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction”—Jesse Schell writes:

If you are clever, you can prototype your fancy video game idea as a simple board game, or what we sometimes call a paper prototype. Why do this? Because you can make board games fast, and often capture the same gameplay. This lets you spot problems sooner—much of the process of prototyping is about looking for problems, and figuring out how to fix them, so paper prototyping can be a real time saver.

Schell goes on to note that this approach is more intuitive for a turn-based game, but it can even be useful for games that unfold in real time. If you were prototyping a game like Tetris, for instance, you could cut pieces out of cardboard with a razor blade and move them around the table: “This would not be a perfect Tetris experience, but it might be close enough for you to see if you had the right kinds of shapes, and also enough to give you some sense of how fast the pieces should drop.” And even for a game like Doom, you could put together something with graph paper, paper tokens, and a metronome to tick off the seconds: “This will give the feeling of playing the whole thing in slow motion, but that can be a good thing, because it gives you time to think about what is working and not working while you are playing the game.”

And what all these approaches have in common is the fact that paper, which is inherently rather slow and clumsy to manipulate, forces you to think more urgently about what is interfering with the user experience. Anything that the player shouldn’t have to think about consciously while playing, like physically keeping track of the cards, ought to be ruthlessly edited out, and the paper prototype magnifies such problems so that they can’t be ignored. (They can also be revealing in other ways. Temkin notes, delightfully, that the game piece being handled by the players who were assigned the role of Hitler became visibly more worn than the rest, since it was the role that generated the most anxiety.) And this seems to be as true of outlining a novel as it is of testing a game. When I use cards to map out the action of a story, I stack them in piles—sorting each card by character, scene, or theme—and I can tell at a glance which piles are larger than the others. A stack that seems too small should either be beefed up or combined with something else, while one that is too large to handle comfortably should be culled or split into two or more pieces. You can even draw conclusions from which cards have become tattered from being handled the most, and I imagine that for projects of a certain size, you could even weigh the cards, as Darwin did, to get a quick sense of each section’s relative bulk. You don’t get this kind of information when you’re laying out the whole thing in text files, as I’ve recently found myself doing, which is a reminder that I really should get back to my cards when it comes time for my next big project. In writing, as in any creative endeavor, you can’t afford to ignore any potential source of insight, and if you put it down on paper, you’ll do a better job of playing the hand you’ve been dealt.

A new bag of tricks

Back in the early sixties, a Soviet patent clerk named Genrich Altshuller embarked on an absurdly ambitious project. He wanted to formulate a set of rules for innovation, a kind of universal recipe book for inventors and engineers, based on the characteristics shared by the patent applications he had inspected. The result, which Altshuller claimed was based on an analysis of more than two hundred thousand patents, was a theory of inventive problem solving, best known as its Russian acronym TRIZ. It’s a complicated system based on the concept of a contradiction matrix, in which elements of a problem are paired off and assigned to solutions that have been useful when applied to such conflicts in the past. For our purposes here, the details don’t really matter, although you can find as much information about it online as you feel like absorbing. What’s particularly enticing is his set of solutions, which he classified under forty general principles of invention. They include such headings as “Segmentation,” “Taking Out,” “Asymmetry,” “Russian dolls,” “Mechanical vibration,” “Periodic action,” “Feedback,” and “Porous Materials.”  It’s a bit of a grab bag, but each entry represents an approach to solving a problem that has worked before, and the headings are both general and just specific enough to spark a promising train of thought.

In his invaluable book Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly says of the Altshuller method: “I like to think of it as Oblique Strategies for engineers.” That’s a shrewd comparison, especially because there’s an element of randomness involved. If you’re stuck on a problem, you can pick one of the forty principles out of a hat and see how it applies to your situation. Take, for instance, the principle of “Another Dimension.” As summarized by one popular presentation, it includes the following hints:

1. If an object contains or moves in a straight line, consider use of dimensions or movement outside the line.
2. If an object contains or moves in a plane, consider use of dimensions or movement outside the current plane.
3. Use a multi-story arrangement of objects instead of a single-story arrangement.
4. Tilt or reorient the object; lay it on its side.
5. Use “another side” of a given area.

And although these rules are intended for inventors and engineers, it isn’t hard to see how they could apply to the problems of a writer, playwright, sculptor, director, choreographer, or anyone else who has to break away occasionally from an obvious line of action.

What I find most intriguing about Altshuller’s approach is less the forty principles themselves—most of which have only a tenuous connection to what artists do, although they’re useful as analogies—than the underlying premise behind them. When you’re working in any field that requires a sustained engagement with complex projects, you inevitably end up with a wide range of tools, to the point where it’s hard to keep them all in mind at once. You carry a lot of craft unconsciously, of course, and you apply many of the rules intuitively, without being totally aware of why or how you’re doing it, which is fine as long as it works. But there also seems to be an upper bound on how many such tools you can comfortably internalize. There are always going to be rules or approaches that don’t occur to you, simply because the lore of your chosen field is too vast or specialized for any one person to hold in his or her head. As a result, one of the most productive things any creative professional can do is to maintain a list of the rules that seem to consistently work, so that you aren’t depending solely on memory or instinct to resolve issues as they arise. You might refer to that list only rarely, but when you’re stuck on a problem without any obvious solution, the best approach is often to test every tool against it one at a time, hoping that one of them has some kind of effect.

Ultimately, Altshuller’s forty principles are really just an unusually comprehensive attempt to catalog the tools available. Every artist ends up doing much the same, although probably less systematically, and using a more restricted sample set. You write a lot of drafts, make a mental note of the tricks that work, and if you’re particularly diligent, you’ll also record them more formally—hence the checklists that so many authors and artists are always writing up for themselves. And it’s important to strike the proper balance between the rules you discover on your own and the ones you get from somewhere else. A rule, like a philosophical precept, never seems real until you’ve rediscovered it though your own experience, and a writing trick that you’ve figured out through trial and error will always seem more vivid and applicable than one you’ve appropriated from a set of rules you read in a book. It’s also easy to fetishize approaches like Oblique Strategies or the Altshuller method, which are really nothing but someone else’s catalog of tools. Yet there’s a very real sense in which it can be helpful to apply the lessons of a stranger, or the principles of an unrelated field, to your own problems. Sometimes an answer can emerge only from tackling the same issue from a new angle, or with the benefit of somebody else’s experience, and when your own bag of tricks seems empty, it’s good to know which other ones exist.

Triumph of the vernacular

At the top of my reading list this week is the wonderful book Built by Hand, which, like so many other worthy titles, I first discovered through Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. It’s a survey of vernacular buildings from throughout the world, as presented in more than four hundred pages of gorgeous color pictures by the photographer Yoshio Komatsu, who seems to have traveled to every corner of the globe in search of striking regional architecture. We see stone and adobe houses in Ollantaytambo, Peru; earthen roofs in Burkina Faso; bamboo and palm cottages in Myanmar; thatched granaries in Indonesia; and that’s only a sampling I found by flipping to random sections. As Kelly notes, the result is the fulfillment of what classic works like Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects promised with tantalizing hints, and it’s a true privilege to read. (The book is sadly out of print, and used copies run about $75 online, but I was able to get a copy through interlibrary loan. There’s also a Kindle version available that seems to have all of the photographs, although browsing through them appears to be an issue for some readers.)

And leafing through this book is an emotional experience in ways that have little to do with architecture itself. Moving from the image of a lime-plastered cottage in Ireland to palm houses at the edge of a river in Papua New Guinea, I’m constantly reminded of Christopher Alexander’s one overriding question: “Which of the two is a better picture of my self?” It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly every house or structure here stands as a compelling picture of the human self, bursting with beauty, intelligence, and resourcefulness. Superficially, it might seem that it romanticizes the past, but really, it’s a celebration of the present, and of the immense diversity of building styles and modes of existence that exist on this planet right now. Each building serves as a window onto a human life, and one of the most compelling aspects of Built by Hand is the quiet revelation it provides, on page after page, of the men, women, and children who reside in these homes. It’s really a series of snapshots of lives picked up on the fly, and the result is more fascinating than most photojournalism designed to convey a particular message.

As a writer, I’ve been interested in vernacular architecture for a long time, for the same reasons I’m drawn to such extraliterary fields as art, music, and film. Unlike so much housing in the developed world, which is imposed uniformly on its surroundings without much thought for context, each house in Built by Hand represents a solution to a particular set of problems. Constraints are imposed by location, resources, and the materials at hand, so each building becomes an expression of the world that produced it. In places like the southern region of Chile, for instance, where wood is abundant, houses are covered in shingles; elsewhere, where nothing but earth is available, local builders do remarkable things with packed mud or adobe. As in most great works of art, utility and beauty go hand in hand; the shape and layout of each home is determined by climate, setting, and cultural needs, and the result feels all of a piece to an extent we rarely find in the products of mass production. Rarely have I seen choices in any medium depicted so vividly: each detail is the result of a conscious decision, shaped by cultural experience, and it sets a high bar for those of us who make an effort to create anything at all.

What vernacular architecture expresses, more than anything else, is the pragmatism of collective activity over time. Each house is rooted in generations of trial and error, as builders experimented with new techniques and gradually established what worked and what didn’t, and it stands as a reminder of how limited individual effort, even by architectural “visionaries,” can seem by comparison. It’s the visual analog of the oral tradition, in which stories are imperceptibly reshaped in the telling by countless performers until each element glows with rightness. When you read Built by Hand, it’s hard not to draw comparisons with other fields of activity, in which our obsession with the new and different, while sometimes worthwhile in itself, can lead to the neglect of crucial information that has been accumulated over time. The builders honored here are as anonymous as oral poets, and their anonymity ultimately serves the work: the ego is lost to the benefit of the building, which, paradoxically, results in a structure that expresses the self more fully than one in which the architect seems to scream for our attention. Is this an impossibly high standard to impose on ourselves? Maybe. But it happens across the world every day.

Cool tools and hot ideas

In 1968, in a garage in Menlo Park, California, a remarkable publication was born. It was laid out with an IBM Selectric typewriter and a Polaroid industrial camera, in an office furnished with scrap doors and plywood, and printed cheaply on rough paper. Modeled after the L.L. Bean catalog, it opened with Buckminster Fuller, ended with the I Ching, and included listings for portable sawmills, kits for geodesic domes, and books on everything from astronomy to beekeeping to graphic design, interspersed with a running commentary that cheerfully articulated an entire theory of civilization. The result was the original manual of soft innovation, a celebration of human ingenuity that sold millions of copies while retaining an endearing funkiness, and it profoundly influenced subcultures as different as the environmental movement and Silicon Valley. As I’ve said before, the Whole Earth Catalog is both a guide to good reading and living and a window onto an interlocking body of approaches to managing the complicated problems that modern life presents. Its intended readers, both then and now, are ambitious, but resistant to specialization; interested in technology as a means of greater personal freedom; and inspired by such practical intellectuals as Fuller, Gregory Bateson, and Catalog founder Stewart Brand himself, who move gracefully from one area of expertise to the next.

And it had an enormous impact on my own life. I grew up in the Bay Area, not far from where the Catalog was born, and I’ve been fascinated by it for over twenty years. Leafing through its oversized pages was like browsing through the world’s greatest bookstore, and as I photocopied my favorite sections and slowly acquired the works it recommended, it subtly guided my own reading and thinking. In its physical format, with its double spreads on subjects from computers to ceramics, it emphasized the connections between disciplines, and the result was a kind of atlas for living in boundary regions, founded on an awareness of how systems evolve and how individuals fit within the overall picture. I became a novelist because it seemed like the best way of living as a generalist, tackling big concepts, and studying larger patterns. It provided me with an alternative curriculum that took up where my university education left off, an array of tools for addressing my own personal and professional challenges. Looking at my bookshelves now, the number of books whose presence in my life I owe to the Catalog is staggering: A Pattern Language, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, On Growth and Form, The Plan of St. Gall in Brief, and countless others.

The Catalog has been out of print for a long time, and although the older editions are still available in PDF form online, I’ve often wished for an updated version that could survey the range of books and tools that have appeared in the fifteen years since the last installment was published. Much to my delight, I’ve recently discovered that such a work exists, in a somewhat different form. Kevin Kelly, a former Brand protégé who later became the executive editor of Wired, once wrote: “It is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.” It seems that Kelly has slightly modified his point of view, because last year he released Cool Tools, an oversized, self-published overview of hardware, gadgets, books, and software that comes as close as anything in decades to recapturing the spirit of the Catalog itself. Cool Tools originally appeared as a series of reviews on Kelly’s blog, but in book form, it gains a critical sense of serendipity: you’re constantly exposed to ideas that you never knew you needed. I’ve been browsing through it happily for days, and I’ve already found countless books that I can’t believe I didn’t know about before: Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Richard D. Pepperman’s The Eye is Quicker, James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, and many more.

I can quibble with Cool Tools in small ways. Personally, I’d prefer to see more books and fewer gadgets, and I especially wish that Kelly hadn’t confined himself to works that were still in print: some of the most exciting, interesting ideas can be found in authors that have fallen off the radar, and with used copies so easily accessible online, there’s no reason not to point readers in their direction. And we get only glimpses of the overarching philosophy of life that was so great a part of the original Catalog‘s appeal. But I’m still profoundly grateful that it exists. It serves as a kind of sanity check, or a course correction, and I’m gratified whenever I see something in its pages that I’ve independently discovered on my own. My favorite entry may be for the Honda Fit, my own first car, because it sits next to a parallel entry for the blue Volvo 240 station wagon—”the cheapest reliable used car”—that my parents owned when I was growing up in the East Bay. I spent a lot of time in both vehicles, which serves as a reminder that who I am and what I might become is inextricably tied into the culture from which the Catalog emerged. Cool Tools probably won’t have the cultural impact of its predecessors, but it’s going to change more than a few lives, especially if it falls into the hands of bright, curious kids. And that’s more than enough.