After a five day class at ESSA building small cabinets, I plan to spend the day putting things away, cleaning the shop, and responding to my editor on questions regarding my new book.
I got a question from a reader concerning a process in my book 25 Beautiful Boxes, which is a compilation of projects drawn from my first two books, written over 20 years ago. I'll need to go back and try to refresh my memory as to what he's talking about. He wrote, that as a novice woodworker, he was trying to build the project in chapter 20, and had questions about a particular joint. In a way that's like starting Moby Dick at chapter 89, except that fiction does not require chapter by chapter growth, the way a how-to book may.
I try to order my chapters the way we grow in skill and understanding... from the easy to more difficult, and from the simple to the complex. In fiction, no particular development of the individual is required. In how-to books, you have the option of passivity if you choose, or to use what's offered to actually change your life and the physical world in which you reside. And that's rarely as easy as it looks.
Human beings of all ages learn through the same pattern of growth. We start with the interests of the child, then move from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract. I mentioned to my reader that building a sample joint might help him to come to a better understanding of the joinery used in chapter 20. Maybe so.
In any case, I'll look back at the book and see if I can figure out how I might help.
Make, fix and create... assist others in learning likewise.
No comments:
Post a Comment