The Essayist's Notebook

This is the material I cut from Quietly Subversive. I'm preserving it here rather than throwing it away. It contains some of the thinking that didn't belong in the finished piece.

https://rvw.ie/quietly-subversive

Move one thing

Perhaps this explains some of the things I've been doing for years. Take the familiar priority matrix. Important and urgent. Useful, certainly. But what happens if we change the question?

Decision for now. Decision for the next generation.

The matrix is still there. But it has become a different instrument.

Or take the briefing. We normally think of a briefing as something produced at a particular moment: written, circulated, read and eventually superseded. What happens if we take the accumulated material and organise it differently? The briefing becomes not an event in time but an object of knowledge. That is part of what I'm trying to do with Brief Me.

Or take opinion itself. What happens when an opinion isn't treated as the starting point? What happens when it becomes something that can be examined? That is why I rather like the phrase: Where opinions come to be examined. And then there is another phrase I've used for a long time: Sequence is substance. We tend to think of sequence as presentation.

First this. Then that.

But the order in which we encounter things changes what we see. Change the sequence and sometimes you change the substance. Again, move one thing. Look again.

The quiet part

Perhaps that is what quietly subversive means. Not rebellion. Not confrontation. Not telling people that everything they believe is wrong. Something quieter. Take the established arrangement. Move one piece. And wait to see what becomes visible. I don't think that makes the writer neutral. Quite the contrary.

Someone has to choose what to examine.nSomeone has to notice the crack in the floorboards. Someone has to say: Look here.

But after that, I think there is an important line not to cross. The writer shouldn't occupy the reader's judgement. The job is to make the terrain visible. To expose the possibility. To put the question somewhere it can actually be examined. And then to leave the decision where it belongs. With the reader.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly interested in the difference between persuasion and possibility. Persuasion asks: How can I get you to agree with me? Possibility asks: Have you seen this?

Those are very different acts. And perhaps the second can sometimes be more consequential than the first. Because once you have seen that there is another way of looking at something, you cannot quite return to the certainty that there wasn't.

Dig where you stand

So I don't think I have recently discovered a new way of writing. The pattern was there a long time ago. Often deliberately. What I am beginning to recognise is how much of my work it has quietly occupied. Essays. Teaching. Policy. Briefings.

The way information is organised. Even the little diagrams I've been drawing for years. Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again. And perhaps that is what someone meant by quietly subversive.

Not changing people's minds. Not telling them where to go. Just making sure they can see that there is somewhere else to go.

Dig where you stand. Then look carefully at what you find.