I receive news headlines online from the Washington Post. It is unusual for one of their tech headlines to capture my interest, let alone to inspire a creative writing idea. But yesterday, a headline about a tech book review caught my eye because of the book’s title: The Human Face of Big Data: How information is changing us, and what it all means by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt.

I clicked and found a string of wonderful sentences at the opening of cultural writer Ted Anthony’s review of this book:

We question. We research. We catalog. We quantify. We aggregate, calculate, communicate, analyze, extrapolate and conclude. And eventually, if we’re fortunate and thoughtful, we understand.

I liked reading these words. I liked saying them, too. I liked the momentum they built. I liked the way the words reminded me of Pablo Neruda’s rhythms in Memoirs: “We came up losers…We came up winners…They carried off the gold and left us the gold…They carried everything off and left us everything…They left us the words.” I liked the way I was reminded, too, by the several short sentences of Caesar’s famous words in his message that he’d been the victor against Pharnaces II of Pontus in the city of Zela: “‘I came, I saw, I conquered,” and those of the French poet Victor Hugo in “Veni, vidi, vixi” (“I came, I saw, I lived“) written upon the death of his 19-year-old daughter.

In all of these examples, the tone created by the rhythm of short subject-verb sentences in a row, creates a readiness to listen to the importance of what the author addresses.

In addition to the enjoyment I received from saying Anthony’s sentences and hearing the literary echoes from them, the word “data” in the book’s title enhanced the way I experienced the review’s opening sentences. The word in combination with the sentences Anthony wrote reminded me about how the data the heart collects when allowed to do so is gold for writers.

Using the sentences seemed a perfect template for writing rewarding personal essays about people who puzzle us, situations that bother us and events that make us wonder. Separating Ted Anthony’s six sentences into a list and writing between the lines, we might better understand what is on our minds vis-à-vis many topics.

We question.

We research.

We catalog.

We quantify.

We aggregate, calculate, communicate, analyze, extrapolate and conclude.

And eventually, if we are fortunate and thoughtful, we understand.

After I wrote this list, I settled on a situation I wanted to explore. It involved a decision on my part: remarrying 26 years ago to a man younger than me and from a different background. Another time, I might write about a parent’s refusal to heed doctors’ warnings or a friend’s betrayal or a time I passed up an opportunity. But this time, I’d write about my decision to remarry.

I would then use those six sentences of Anthony’s as subheads and write between the subheads.

In addition, I would use the word “data” in the title with an epigraph that says, “With Thanks to Ted Anthony for his opening in the Washington Post review of The Human Face of Data.”

Having decided to explore my decision to remarry 26 years ago, I created a title and then changed the “we” in Anthony’s sentences to “I” because it felt more fluid for my investigation:

Collecting the Data About Us

With Thanks to Ted Anthony for his opening in the 12/4/12 Washington Post review
of The Human Face of Data

 

I question.
Here I wrote as many questions as I thought would set up the topic of why I agreed to remarry. Here are some that I created:

Was it the way I loved looking at the auburn in your hair under the kitchen lights as we washed the dinner dishes? Was it the way I loved the specks of brown in your hazel eyes when we spoke of politics and restaurants? Was it the way I loved the melody in your voice messages? Was it my need to have company in the kitchen, listening to oil sizzling in the pan, oven buzzers and toaster bells? Was it the way my children smiled when you arrived? The way they sat at the Commodore 64 eating up your instruction on creating programs? The way they walked to the pet store eager to spend the $5 you gave them?

I research.
Here I knew I would write about doing research on the success of second marriages, on their success when children are involved, when the partners come from different backgrounds and geographies.

I catalog.
Here I thought I would make up my own catalog of the facts I found and the empirical observations I had made over years of the marriage.

I quantify.
Here I knew I wanted to play with the word “quantify.” When I looked at an entry in Wikipedia for the word, I found this among the definitions:

In grammar, a quantifier is a type of determiner, such as all or many, that indicates quantity. These items have been argued to correspond to logical quantifiers at the semantic level.

I liked this. Soon a sentence came to me: “You were the definite article, my demonstratives, and my possessives: the, this, that, these, those, my, yours, his, her, its, our, and their of me.”

I might in the end make this a section of only that one sentence. Varying the length of the writing between the lines adds interest.

I aggregate, calculate, communicate, analyze, extrapolate and conclude.
Here I thought I’d include scenes and anecdotes from 26 years together raising kids, working together in business, and now being grandparents. These scenes would include times of loneliness, times of traveling, times of arguing, times of joy, times of sorrow. Writing a series of scenes in whatever order they came to mind would, I thought, create writing that resonated with this subhead.

And eventually, if I am fortunate and thoughtful, I understand.
In the essay I set out to write, understanding might be about the way those attributes I listed at the very opening in the questions I posed contributed to our adhering to one another, to our coming together after feeling we have drifted apart or been pushed apart by the seismic aspect of being in a relationship.

I won’t know what I understand until I have finished the essay, but I am definitely interested in doing so to find out.

****

Ted Anthony’s review has me thinking I’ll look for the $30, five-pound book he discusses. For now, though, I love reading the review, the opening and the ending, too:

Save to the cloud and fire up the iPad tonight, sure — but do it with open eyes and probing mind. “Not everything that can be counted counts,” warns a saying that Albert Einstein loved, “and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Writing between the opening sentences of Ted Anthony’s review and calling an essay “Data,” or a phrase with that word in it, can help us as writers tune into some of those things that count but can’t be counted — those things that lie at the bottom of our hearts and minds.

Isn’t that exactly why we write?