In 1965, the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth set up an installation titled One and Three Chairs. It consisted of three things: a photo of a chair, a physical wooden chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair.”
Kosuth was asking the question that haunts every writer: Which one is the real chair? The object, the image, or the definition?
Now shrink the problem down to a single word: red. A car, a winter coat, and a traffic light can all qualify as red. Yet the red we see in our mind’s eye is not guaranteed to match the red in front of us. Within one tidy syllable, different inner worlds are already at work. As Kosuth suggests, the way we describe things does more than just label the world. If we rush that description, if we grab the first thing that comes to mind, we risk leaving the reader with nothing more than a dictionary outline instead of a living object.
If words are this slippery at the level of a single color or a single chair, what hope do we have when we reach for abstractions, creativity, justice, memory, originality? The temptation is to compensate by adding more and more language, as if sheer volume could force precision. But in practice, honest writing lingers with something small until it becomes specific enough to feel true.
That lingering takes time, and in my case, often an embarrassing amount of it. Rereading some of my past articles, I’ve come across my writing on Lynley Dodd and Bjarne Stroustrup. The draft about Dodd lived in my Obsidian vault for years, as almost nothing, just a single line about “antennae” that had caught my attention and refused to leave.
Where do ideas come from?
I find ideas everywhere. I tell children that I have ‘ideas antennae’ sticking out of my head, ready to collect anything that takes my fancy.
The Stroustrup piece began even smaller with a video interview I watched in August 2023, only to publish the article almost a year later.
But then of course marinating time is very good too. I find with my work particularly, that to be able to put it away for a while and come back to it, the mistakes or the awkwardness suddenly jumps out at you. I spend a very long time in the marinating process!
Of course, this is where the usual writing advice gently clears its throat. Writers are told to produce 500, 1,000, even 3,000 words a day, to “turn up at the desk” regardless of mood, to treat output as a kind of moral virtue. By that standard, a draft that sits for years, with only a single metaphor about “antennae,” looks less like discipline and more like negligence. So, which is it, good practice or procrastination? Perhaps neither. Perhaps the real work happens between “always be writing” and “I have nothing yet to say,” when the chair is only beginning to become a word.
But waiting is not a passive act. If marination is the process, what is the marinade? What do we soak these ideas in while they wait? We soak them in the Particular.
Finally, remember this fundamental principle: the more you narrow the field, the better and more safely you will work. Always prefer a monograph to a survey. It is better for your thesis to resemble an essay than a complete history or an encyclopedia.
Umberto Eco ― How to Write a Thesis
In How to Write a Thesis, Eco contrasts the anxious student who tries to cover everything with the one who chooses a tiny, well‑defined topic and accepts its limits. The first drowns in encyclopedic ambition; the second has a chance to actually say something. A good thesis, Eco argues, is less an encyclopedia and more a stubborn little essay that keeps returning to the same object until it understands what it can and cannot claim about it. His advice sounds academic, but it doubles as both reading philosophy and writing philosophy: choose one small corner, stay there long enough, and let it stand in for the rest.
Writing this article feels similar to Kosuth’s three-chair problem. A draft, an interview, and a favourite quote are just three partial chairs I kept rearranging until something clicked. The rest is mostly waiting, the last part where the reader steps into the white space of the piece and decides which chair to sit on.