What’s the Point?

The Problem of Focus

I had no organized plan for my 2015 retirement. All I knew was that I had 42 years of accumulated service in the U.S. Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), which entitled me to a full pension (80% of my “high three” average salary). It was time to go – I was still healthy, just approaching 68, and I could surely make better use of my golden years than staying at the Library of Congress. (No offense to that wonderful institution, only my likely role in it!)

I travelled some in my first year of retirement, tried learning piano (a failed venture), then settled into the project which has come to dominate my time and talent ever since: my blog, Warp & Woof. For some 7 ½ years now, I have explored numerous angles, multiple subject areas, and two different publishing platforms. I have developed and practiced my writing style with help from various writers’ groups, either classroom-based or virtual. Looking back at posts from years ago sometimes makes me proud (I still think my best work is pretty good) and sometimes makes me wonder: “What was I trying to say here?” The latter is a more troubling question, and frankly too common.

You can guess at the primary source of this mixed review of my work. My original concept for the blog, reflected in its title, subtitle (“Things that Matter”), and revised Welcome posts, implies my purpose is to evince foundations, basic building blocks, of much human creative endeavor — must be that old Library of Congress mindset! Its very title, “warp and woof” (sometimes called “warp and weft”), is a reference to weaving – hence the image of the loom on my home page. Threads and cross-threads interwoven. But achieving focus in my posts is often challenging. In the aggregate, Warp & Woof is really about all the things that cross my mind as I complete my life’s journey – and that’s a lot (over 160 original posts at last count)! Sigh. What is its point, anyway?

To quickly summarize Warp & Woof’s structure, it consists of five separate pages, each a collection of articles grouped together under broad, deliberately vague, rubrics. The pages labeled “Past,” “Present,” and “Future” are truly fuzzy intellectual buckets which may mean little to a reader – even I have difficulty understanding why something I write should go on one page versus another. See that Welcome post (or the blurb on each page) for a stab at my rationale. On the other hand, the pages labeled “Totems” and “Beats” do have real world subject discipline: Totems deals with all things automotive (supposedly, “car culture”), and Beats consists simply of reviews of my favorite popular music (only interesting if you share the same tastes as me!) Over the years, it seems that The Past has garnered the largest quantity of posts (65 original pieces) – pointing to the fact that the bulk of my reading is in the subjects covered there – whereas Beats has the fewest posts (only 15), and most of them are pretty old now (I don’t listen to music as much as I did 5 to 7 years ago). The other pages sort themselves out from reading material that has struck my fancy, or from life experience, or contemplation, sometimes from podcasts that pricked my interest.

One factor that mitigates against clear focus in any given piece is my planning routine. I typically make a list of topics I want to cover over an attenuated, perhaps quarterly, time frame – when I go through that list weeks or months later, I may have forgotten why I put a topic on the list in the first place. Nevertheless, I will dutifully delve into research, trying to construct an outline of the piece, then after further delay, finally sit down and write – sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph – like I’m doing now! After the first rough draft, I feel I must put it away overnight before attempting the next draft – three of four drafts are usually necessary before I consider the piece worthy of publication. But, still, I often feel when re-reading a piece much later that there was something missing in its direction … or purpose. What was I trying to say? Its grammar may be faultless, its vocabulary clever, and support for its assertions well-documented, but what was I really thinking at the time? This basic ingredient is sometimes lost over subsequent years. Some of them are excellent; I recently reread “Buick, Where Did You Go?” from February 2023 (for my last post on the world auto industry) and was notably moved by the pathos expressed in that older piece. There was no doubt about its intended focus, and its emotional content was palpable. Unfortunately, all my work is not of such high quality. A cursory scan of other Totems posts reveals repetition and lack of direction. An automotive journalist I am not. There’s EV marketing, General Motors, Tesla, “car culture” in general, drag racing, a real mixed bag – including some boring accounts of my own car shopping experience, or cars owned and remembered. What’s the point of all these posts? Do they say anything good about me?

My protracted production process, obviously, does not mesh well with weekly classroom writers’ groups where I feel compelled to produce some writing for each class meeting. It takes me longer. Feedback is great – maybe required? But, unless I can seriously revise my writing routine, I may have to settle for online feedback via social media. So far, I have found no such group, but perhaps I should put some more effort into searching different platforms (I haven’t tried Reddit or Discord). I’m not necessarily unhappy with the followers I’ve accumulated on Word Press, or Medium (selective pieces only), but my followers make no useful comments. It’s mostly the classroom formal writers’ group where somebody is likely to ask that question: “What are you trying to say?” In the meantime, all these posts on writing and Warp & Woof’s organization will continue to appear on The Present page because they deal with my psychological motivation for writing, and my thought processes. Sounds like a rough match for my original concept.

— William Sundwick