Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 January 2005
Day 1 consists of generating a list of 36 future blog posts that describe a positive pathway for the planet between now and 2025. The introduction is designed to provide a rapid-fire overview of the future worth creating, one that will give the reader a series of "handholds" for the chapters that follow.
I come up with the list by sketching out a map of the world and then generating perceived data points either within or between regions, the theme obviously being one of progressive integration. I work off of five regions: Western Hemisphere, a "wide" Europe stretch to include Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East/North Africa/Central Asia, and S/E/NE Asia-Pacific. Then I start debating how many each should get. Then I add in an overarching "global" list. Wanting a round number and finding myself in the low 30's, I settled on three dozen. Figure about 800 words intro, roughly 100 words a blog entry (to include title), and maybe a couple hundred words to wrap it up.
Tonight I finalize the first 24 headlines-from-the-future. I'll finish the other 12 first thing in the morning and then crank the text tomorrow night. Deciding the headlines is most of the battle, because once you have them, you pretty much know what you're going to write.
By structuring the Intro in this way, I'm trying to provide a bridge to the last section of the conclusion in PNM, or the "ten steps to a future worth creating," basically taking that list, expanding it twice, gonna decide who's naughty or nice, and so on. It doesn't work out exactly the same, but that's because the greater granularity and sense of competing sequences (by region) means I have to think through things with not just a cumulative sense, but an interlocking, sort of puzzle-pieces logic. I mean, you can't have this thing going on over here if this other thing's going on over there.
The headlines-from-the-future drill is something I developed in the Y2K workshop series and then used repeatedly in the New Rule Sets Project. It works well because you can't ask people to spin out entire scenarios off the top of their heads, but you can ask them for logical headlines one might read if any one scenario unfolded over time.
My assumption is that the same will be true for the reader: rather than try to spin some fab 360-degree description of 2025, replete with flying cars, I'm better off hop-scotching my way from here to 2025.
My sense for tomorrow is, I will write a terse sort of delivery that mimics the form of the original "list" of country profiles that I did in the March 2003 PNM article for Esquire. Now, this blistering sort of start presupposes that the Preface really fits the bill and gets the reader all ready to rock and roll.
If, in the editing process, Mark and I don't think this section really works as is, or can't work as placed, then we'll either ditch, move, or I'll rewrite it. I like the idea of starting with something so structured because it will force me into a serious ordering mode for the book's entire vision, so if tomorrow just turns out to be one big exercise in pre-writing, then that's okay, because once I get rolling, I know I won't be needing two days for each section, having written PNM's twice-as-many sections on a day-after-day pace that many would find numbing but I found quite in-the-groovy.
The first substantive chapter (meaning one full of sub-sections) will be the easiest for me to write, because it starts inside the Pentagon and then moves out to cover the entire security system—sort of a functional rewriting of PNM as a whole (meaning I focus on the mechanisms for implementation). So, even if I falter in this Intro, I'm confident of being able to plow through the next chapter with ease.
In many ways, by starting with the Intro in this form, I'm giving myself a tougher-than-usual task, which is what I did with the opening section of PNM. When I got done with that one (Playing Jack Ryan), I was completely under-whelmed because I thought, Geez, I spent a whole day writing and I didn't get very far into the book! But because it was a tough write for me (we edited and reedited that section quite a bit to establish tone), it really got me in shape for the rest of the effort. It was like sprinting out of the blocks.
Anyway, that's my operating theory coming off of Day One . . ..
Judging by baby's breath, she's either asleep on my chest or finding what I'm typing to be absolutely mesmerizing.
Time for both of us to hit the hay.
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