Tag Archives: writing-tips

Roasted lamb shank, mashed potatoes, and vegetables cooked by the author in May 2025.

On Little Things

On Little Things – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Click here to buy a copy of my book Travels in Time Across Europe which tells the stories from my year living in London that began 10 years ago this week.
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This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.

Last Wednesday, after publishing “On Democracy, Part II” I took my place in the driver’s seat of my car, the Mazda Rua, and went out on a day trip to Jefferson City to join the protest against the congressional redistricting underway here in Missouri. I wanted to drive long distance at highway speeds again like I used to four times a year on my Long Drives East and West between Kansas City and Binghamton. There’s a lot of little things about those drives that I miss now that I’m more rooted here in Brookside. Today, I don’t drive every day. Often times if I can I’ll choose to walk to wherever I want to go in the neighborhood. It’s healthier to be sure, and I get the same free time away from the obligations that crowd my desk to listen to music, podcasts, birdsong, or to just think. These walks aren’t terribly taxing, Apple Fitness likes to remind me that the difficulty is “easy” to “moderate,” yet each one adds up into a sum which says that I am healthier today in mid-September than I was in mid-February or mid-March, let alone a year ago now. Moreover, I loved driving even just about town for that free time. Drivetime was often my podcast time. Now, I’m also reassured that I’m not operating a large and potentially dangerous vehicle while I’m listening to an engaging conversation or story; instead, I can focus on the story itself and not split my attention between that and the road.

So, last Wednesday I did try to recreate the things I loved most about those road trips that marked the beginning of this decade. On the outbound drive I listened to a fascinating discussion about political philosophy and space policy on Planetary Radio and on my return trip I listened to the pilot of the new audio drama Star Trek: Khan. Yet as much as I was thrilled to be back on the road and experiencing things that I felt like I had lost, even at my own volition, I still found that some of the little things got to me. For one, I was annoyed at getting stuck behind a semi-truck on the outbound drive for about 10 miles east of Sedalia and even more frustrated that I couldn’t pass a pair of semis that were ahead of me on the return drive as we transitioned from the two-lane divided highway in Cole County back to the one-lane country road that is US 50 in between the state capital and Sedalia. I know well that I control how I react to things, and therefore that I ought to react better to most things today than I did in my younger years, yet getting stuck behind those larger, slower vehicles on the stretch where passing was far more difficult really annoyed me. The beauty of a country drive is lost somewhat when you’re staring at the same big box retailer’s advertisement on the back of their vehicle for mile after mile.

These little things are what give our experiences life. The great, grand gestures that get remembered are one thing, yet they cannot be sustained without the small tokens of affection or whispered advice that comes from living and making the choices that define who we are. I believe that we are fundamentally formed by our experiences for good or ill. I’ve often ended up resorting to grand actions to try and solve questions or puzzles that find their way onto my desk. Marking something off a checklist is one of the most satisfying things I can do in my life. Those grand acts often become boxes which I can fill with the little things that I undertake. Currently, I am working on editing my translation of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique to send its book proposal off to an academic press. I have enough of my translation edited to send to them now, the first 16 chapters to be precise, yet there’s more still I need to do. This publisher prints page-facing translations and requires that the original text be sent alongside the translation. So, now I am spending my time typing out the original Middle French text of these first 16 chapters to be included in my proposal. There is a Wikisource page for this book, taken from the 1878 French edition that I could copy and paste from, yet it lacks the folio numbers from the original that are vital signposts to navigate the text and has enough nineteenth-century re-renderings of the sixteenth-century French original that I decided it was better if I just went ahead and typed it out myself. The first chapter took me about an hour to do, so I figure in all I might be able to have most of this typing done by the time I publish The Wednesday Blog next week.

Each character here is a little thing that together add up to the surviving thoughts and memories of a man who lived 450 years ago who exists in the scholarly memory of his time yet rarely in the spotlight. In my work, I hope to turn that spotlight on him and demonstrate his erudition and centrality to the cosmographic profession as it existed in the 1550s and 1560s. All this boils down to the same solution I’ve used to get through big projects for years. On Monday I smiled hearing a friend say essentially the same thing with her work in the history of mathematics, that the best way to solve a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts and figure it out piece by piece. A decade ago, this week when I moved to London, I found that the only way that the move was not overwhelming was to think of each thing I needed to do separately. My frustration rose when I found that I couldn’t make sense of a particular facet of one of the things I needed to do. One particular moment of note here was when I was summoned to the international student office to provide visa papers to confirm that I could legally study in the United Kingdom well after I’d started my coursework. Something got lost in the shuffle, but it was serious enough to scare me a little. When I moved to Binghamton, I had similar bureaucratic problems from issues getting my New York residency owing to my Missouri driver’s license having cracked in two, to a year later having big issues proving my residency to my university because I forgot to cross a t somewhere on a form.

Again, I choose how I react, and in the years since I’ve learned to take little things in stride and think of them in the broader context in which they exist. I believe doing the little things can show fidelity to a greater cause because it shows that I’m there for the long run, not just in the good moments. That’s something I learned from Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. I think perhaps the best metaphor to explain what I’m trying to say to you, dear Reader, is that we should approach the things in life like we approach cooking. Recipes break down the task of cooking into smaller pieces that are more easily attainable. In May I made an Easter roast for some of my best friends that comprised several recipes I’d never tried before that day, and I truly didn’t know if it had worked until I finally sat down and took a bite of it. The roasted lamb shanks were perfect, as were the mashed potatoes, and the flourless chocolate cake that I rounded things out with was excellent and just as good the following day. In each recipe, I not only took things one at a time but even experimented a bit here or there based on my own experience from cooking similar things. For one, I had to quickly rethink how I was going to cook the lamb shanks because they were larger than nearly all of the pans I had. For another, I realized later than I wanted that in melting the chocolate chips for the cake I should’ve encouraged the process along with a spatula here and there. Each of these little things rounded out with a fine Tempranillo wine from Rioja to make one of the best dinners I’ve yet cooked.

I have a lot to do right now, and in every respect I’m on course to complete the things I have in my docket. The work would be overwhelming if I looked at it as a great mass, yet it is far easier to approach in small bites. That’s the big reason why I’m ending the Wednesday Blog one month from this week on 15 October. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and looking ahead I can use the time that I devote to writing this blog and recording the podcast working on other things great and small that need my attention. This publication is made up of a great many little things, small ideas that flower with their peers and culminate in an essay each week that I usually feel proud of writing. Little things make the lives we live.

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On Editing

On Editing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to write to you about the revealed joys found in the experience of editing. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I want to write to you about the revealed joys found in the experience of editing.

I spent most of last Thursday editing a chapter I’m contributing to a new book about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. My contribution argues that the bard was inspired in his descriptions of Caliban and the play’s island setting by André Thevet’s accounts of Tupinambá beliefs and the role of magic in their society, and the sense of Brazil as the archetype of the insular natural world across the sea at the turn of the seventeenth century. There’s a lot in its 32 pages, and it’s been a good effort on my part since I first saw the call for papers for this book two years ago. I wrote the first draft between March and June of this year both here at home in Kansas City, and while I was on my European trip this June; I spent most of my time in the San Francisco International Airport G Concourse United Club writing paragraphs for this chapter. 

Until last Thursday, I’d only edited it on my computer. This is a far faster way to edit text, it allows me to work as I’m reading through the draft. This method is still relatively new to me, I feel fortunate that I was taught to write by hand first and to edit with pen and paper. That’s been more challenging with my dissertation, in Binghamton I didn’t own a printer and because I could never figure out how to use the university printers, I relied heavily on the local print shop across the road from the University to print anything I needed. That meant then that up until the sixth or seventh draft I never saw it on paper, always on the computer screen for both economical and environmental reasons.

The week before last Thursday, when I returned to my Tempest chapter after finishing several other major projects, I found myself thinking that it could benefit my editing if I printed this document out at least for my last full read through before sending it off to the editor. So, returning to it just before noon on Thursday, I decided to print draft 4 of the full document, all 34 pages of it. As it turned out, there was something heartwarming about editing this chapter with pen and paper. Sure, I knew I’d save myself time by editing it while I was reading it on my computer, but I’ve found more and more that if I really need to work on a sentence, I’ll have to copy it out of the draft and into a separate document where I can look at it on its own separate from the rest of the text. This works, and this is what I often end up doing, but it’s not a problem I have reading lines on a printed page. I find I can read faster when reading something printed rather than something digitized, and now that I’m doing so many more things than just writing and editing my dissertation, moving towards these postdoctoral projects, I’m finding that I’m returning to how I read and wrote before I fully adopted all this technology.

Even though I now edit using more review bubble comments and review tracking on Microsoft Word or Google Docs than the old shorthand symbols that I learned in my elementary school English classes, I could still return to them with an ease that felt native to my sensibilities and origins as a writer and a reader. I even left the odd marginal note on draft 4 of my Tempest chapter should anyone else ever find this printed copy to see some of the things I was referencing in the additions and changes I made to this draft.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve yet learned about writing came from a policy writer who at the time worked for the offices of the European Union in Brussels. He came to the University of Westminster for a couple of days in March 2016 to run a policy writing workshop for all of us who were interested. I joined in and wrote a brief about a hypothetical crisis along the Danube between Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia (I think). While I’m less likely to become a professional political policy writer anytime soon, the most impactful thing he taught us was to leave whatever it is we’re writing aside once we’re done with a draft and return to it later. Like a good dough, our writing needs to rise for a while before we return to it and work on it some more. I took a week between finishing draft 4 and returning to it to complete the edits that make up draft 5 of this Tempest chapter, and I’m certain the finished draft benefits from that gap. It’s something I do here with the Wednesday Blog on those weeks when I’m able to write things in advance. The words you’re reading, or hearing, now were written on Thursday afternoon about an hour after I sent draft 5 off to the editor. I’ll return to them sometime on Tuesday, October 15th, and read through them again when I record them for the podcast.

The Wednesday Blog podcast actually grew out of my editing sessions for the blog. You see, I traditionally edit by reading my writing aloud; if it doesn’t make sense to my ear then it needs to be rewritten. Nearly three years ago then, at the end of November 2021, I decided one night after dinner to start recording those read-throughs and release them as a podcast version of my blog. Of course, the version you get in your podcast player each week is more polished than the first draft, but with these essays I usually don’t need to do as many edits. This is a different style of writing than my academic work, less formal, and more personal.

Editing also reminds me to express what I’m thinking in a clearer way. An early lesson in teaching that I received, and nearly all of my lessons in teaching have been on the job while I’m teaching, was to speak to my audience in their own language. This is a no-brainer when it comes to speaking French in Paris, or German in Vienna, yet what I mean here is speaking to your audience in a way that they’ll understand. I like to use the words they’ve just used in my answers. This is a grammatical thing in Irish where instead of having words for yes or no we instead say the positive or negative of the verb in question. I’ve begun doing this in my English too: responding not only with a yes or a no but with a yes, I do or yes, I can, or no, I don’t understand. Clarity is the best friend of writing and good communication. A common comment I get from editors is that what I’m trying to say is just under the surface or not quite clear yet. This is a symptom of how I developed my writing voice first in poetry and plays and later in short stories and now factual and highly researched non-fiction blog posts and academic essays. It’s been a weakness in my writing up until now that I’ve had a hard time getting over, but I think I may have figured it out by closely reading what I’ve already done with those comments up on a screen where I can clearly see them as I read.

Sometimes the thesis or plot of what I’m writing will change significantly in the edit. There are times where my original argument simply doesn’t work, and I need to adjust drastically to save the essay or story. This happened early on with this Tempest chapter, and I’m glad I saw the flaws in my original approach as early as I did because it made the chapter I’ve written in the five drafts since all the stronger. While that may be frustrating at first, I love the way that things work when all the pieces of the story or all the sources behind the thesis line up. I love how a good edit can inspire me to keep writing and get closer to my record average of writing 1000 words per hour. This is more possible outside of my academic writing where I often stop to consult a source to make sure I’m getting it right, but even there when I can write with a great fluidity, and I know what I’m trying to say it reminds me why I do what I do.

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Correction: in my initial publication of this blog post I miswrote my average writing speed as “1000 words per minute,” when I meant to say “1000 words per hour.” I’m not Lt. Cmdr. Data.