I was interested in how good my outline would be for supporting a vomitout.  My hope was that it would be satisfactory, but in fact it’s turning out not so good.

Looking back, I padded the outline with bullet points that were not fleshed out enough to be real guidelines to the drafting.

For example, I had a bullet called “Tragedy of the Commons”.  Not a bad idea, but I needed more detail on just how I would move that theme forward in the draft, and, when I got to that part today, I didn’t have a clue.

What I’ve ended up doing is falling back on more reading and research instead of using the time today for drafting.  Not the most terrible outcome in the world, but I’ll know better the next time I do an outline for a book :-).

Another thing that’s emerging: I’m not treating the subject matter as if it were self-help.  Having a self-help orientation to this book has always been a touch problematic.  All of the 7 problems could be treated as observations about society as well as self-help, and my kneejerk reaction in this draft so far has been to treat the material as “current events”.

In part I set myself up for it because of the way I kicked off the chapter.

My scheme was to kick off each chapter with a master anecdote that sets the theme for the chapter and frames the big issues in a vivid way.

I started off this chapter, on Individual Wealth and Commonwealth, with a depiction of the Trump election in 2016.  Vivid enough, certainly, but hardly the master anecdote for a chapter in a self-help book.  Starting with such an anecdote cried out for a more social or political treatment, and that’s the way the draft has skewed.

I’m getting good stuff out, and I think there’s a lot I can use, but I’m a little nervous about reasserting the self-help focus of the book.

All of the 7 problems are big social problems — in one way or another — with a “social” aspect and a “self-improvement” aspect.  I think I’m going to have to balance them somehow, since I don’t want to leave all the social observations out.

Well, work in progress…

One bit of good news as well: I’m finding an interesting thread in the Tragedy of the Commons stuff.  It turns out that the Tragedy of the Commons is closely related to the game-theory game called Prisoner’s Dilemma.  There’s an very interesting thread of stuff from game theory on both PD and TofC.  Herb Gintis’ book Game Theory Evolving has a terrific chapter on the topics and what they say about individual wealth and commonwealth.  So that’s all goodness.  Gintis’ book is from 2000, and he’s gone on with the topics of cooperation and competition, so there’s grist for the research mill there.

Onward and upward.