Allow me a morning meditation (minus constructive conclusions.) A wandering wonder. About process. About creative risk. About composing, crafting, constructing, carpentry,… Allow me a moment to meander from brainstorming and “ciphering” to dialing in details. Because details matter. But how we discern details, how we wend our way to destinations can be circuitous. Maybe even *should* be circuitous.
Come along if you’re comfortable considering common building blocks for carpentry, design, poetry, storytelling, art, etc. Come along if composing a creative life may be more mysterious and adventurous than predictable recipe. Come along if my peculiar processes may be little more than mine and peculiar.
I’ve waxed wordy previously on “ciphering”. Problematizing and problem solving. Planning, predicting, re-planning. Little by little, incrementally dialing in details. Two steps forward. One step backward.
I first heard the term “ciphering” in 2005 when we were renovating the Lapine House. Context offered some clarity: “ciphering” was used to describe job site problematizing, brainstorming, tweaking and tuning a step-by-step action plan, and generally massaging blueprints and construction schema into completable carpentry.
From a linguistic perspective, describing the process of analyzing plans, troubleshooting an action plan, and navigating inevitable impediments as “ciphering” fascinated me. Not deciphering. Not decrypting.
[…]
“Ciphering” — both the process and the term — have served me well over the years…
I adopted this enigmatic turn of phrase from the get-go. Whether it’s a foreshortened abbreviation of deciphering or a clever conscription of “cryptic decoder” into construction parlance, I like it. And it works again and again.
(Source: Deciphering Ciphering)
Ciphering, in the sense that I’ve described, isn’t always a tidy, linear process. On a construction site the goal is to get from concept to plan to building as efficiently as possible. Dialing in the details is critical. But it’s not always a straightforward journey.
Creating — whether with wood or words, masonry or pencil and pigment — is a looping process of drafting and revising, of adding and subtracting, iterating and distilling and winnowing. Metaphorical language imperfectly approximates parts of the process.
A passage in Karuki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, an intriguing quiver of essays gifted to me by my sister, might obliquely offer some insight.
I started with a simple style, light and breezy, and then took time fleshing it out bit by bit in later works. The structure of my novels, too, was skeletal at first, but I built it up in stages, making it more three-dimensional and multilayered until it was strong enough to handle the heightened complexity of long narratives. In this fashion, my works grew in scale. As I said before, I began with an internal image of what I eventually wanted to write, but the process of getting there happened naturally. No detailed planning was involved—only after I had arrived did it hit me, “So that’s how I got here!”
— Karuki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
To be fair, Murakami is talking about writing, not carpentry and not construction. But I’m taking the liberty of blurring boundaries between these creative endeavors.
Start out simply. Conjure the skeleton. A quick, preliminary sketch. Then begin to flesh out the skeleton. Gradually add layers, dimensions, complexity. Incremental, advancing, retreating, advancing again. Adding and subtracting. Augmenting and revising.
Murakami is describing his writing process. I am dilating his description, wondering if it applies more broadly to composing a creative life. To creating. Recreating. Poems. Stories. Buildings…
Brainstorm, experiment, iterate, revise, dial in details,…
The images and video in this post were recorded in January 2023. I was designing the icehouse loft stairway and planning effective and timely structural integration to in coordination with framing of the staircase. Asher Benjamin, as so often during Rosslyn’s rehabilitation, provided wise and reliable counsel. In a by now familiar quest, answers accrue gradually, solutions waxing and waning, concept coalescing eventually into construction plan.
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