3 Index Cards
The wall had shown me the chapters. What I needed, I decided, was a way to see the claims.
So I bought index cards, the plain white kind, and a shoebox to keep them in. One claim per card. On the front, the claim, in as few words as it would go: the shop in chapter four made the dash fashionable. On the back, the chapter, the page, and the sentence that made the claim, copied out by hand.
It took most of a month. Eleven chapters hold more claims than you would think, and most of them are small: a date, a street, which apprentice married whose daughter. I wrote them all. The shoebox filled, and I bought a second shoebox and labeled both, and for the first time in a year I felt like someone running a project rather than someone being run by one.
The cards worked the way the wall had worked, which is to say at first. When I changed a sentence, I found its card and changed that too. When I couldn’t find its card, I wrote a new one, and later I found the old one, and then there were two cards for one claim, disagreeing in my own handwriting. Every round of chapter four against chapter nine went through the shoebox now. Each round took twice as long, and I could prove it.
One card fell behind the radiator. I didn’t notice. A shoebox does not tell you what it is missing.
I found it in March, when the heating went off and I could get my arm down behind the pipes. It was the card for the shop in chapter nine. It said what chapter nine said, which by then nothing else did.
I put it back in the box. I am not sure where.
A spreadsheet cannot fall behind a radiator, which was most of its appeal. I typed every card into one, a row per claim, with columns for the chapter, the page, the claim, and the sentence. When I finished it had three hundred and twelve rows. I added a column for status, and the status was a color. Green, for a note that still matched its sentence. Yellow, for check. Red, for contradicts.
That lasted about a week. Then I needed orange, for contradicts but I like it.
Orange was mostly chapter four.
Four colors are more than anyone can hold in their head at eleven at night, so I added a tab called Legend, with one cell of each color and what it meant. Then I put a note at the top of Legend explaining the orange.
I kept the spreadsheet for most of a year, and I got very good at it. I could sort by color, filter by chapter, and tell you on any evening how many rows were yellow. What I could not tell you was whether the green rows were still green. The spreadsheet knew what I had typed into it. It did not know what the chapters said. Every time I changed a sentence I had to go and find its row, and every time I forgot, the row stayed green about a sentence that no longer existed.
I write about software for a living. I mention it here because it took me this long to mention it to myself.
The script was forty lines, written on a Sunday. It read each note, found the sentence the note was about, and complained when the sentence had moved or changed. That was all it did. It had no opinion about the dash. It did not know there was a dash.
I ran it that evening. The first thing it printed was this:
ch. 8, line 77: changed. The note says 1684; the sentence says 1694.It found fourteen contradictions.
I assumed it was broken. The book had one contradiction, and I knew it by heart. I went through the fourteen one at a time, looking for the bug.
It wasn’t broken.
Some of the fourteen were the two shops, in other clothes. Some had nothing to do with them: a date in chapter three that chapter eight had quietly moved by a decade, a schoolmaster who was Scottish in chapter five and not in chapter ten. Three were things I had fixed in the spreadsheet and never in the book.
Hedda’s one-on-one was that Thursday. For the first time, I spent the twenty-six minutes not rehearsing.
“How’s the book?” she asked.
“I’m building something for chapter four,” I said.
She looked at me a moment longer than the four minutes usually allowed. Then she said, “Good,” and wrote it down.
Two weeks later her document was open on her monitor when I came in, and the line under Other had changed for the first time since I had known it.
Book: ch. 4 (tool)
Three years, and the line had moved seven characters.
The script grew. Scripts do. It needed to know which chapters to read, and in what order, and which notes to leave alone because I had not decided about them yet, so it grew a configuration file. The configuration file filled with options I added at night and could not account for in the morning, so it grew a second configuration file, to explain the first.
I spent the evenings with the script that I used to spend with chapter four. They were better evenings. The script told me when I was wrong, which chapter four had stopped doing years before, and it told me in under a second.
One night it reported the two shops again, as it did every night, along with everything else, and I looked up from it at the wall, still pinned with chapters, and at the shoeboxes underneath, and I saw what I had been looking at for three years.
The book had never failed at the sentences. Its claims lived only in sentences, scattered across eleven chapters, with nothing holding them together.
I took the chapters down that weekend. The pins left holes in the plaster, in pairs.
Two weeks later Hedda asked how the book was.
“I’m building something for chapter four,” I said.
It was still true.