Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

In case the name’s not ringing any bells, a Rube Goldberg machine is an overly complicated piece of engineering that can seemly go awry and grind to a halt at any point.

Do you remember the game Mouse Trap? A boot kicks over a bucket sending a marble down a stair and through a chute to a pole with a hand on top holding another ball that drops down through a hole into a bathtub — on and on it goes until the mouse cage comes rattling down, trapping the poor mice below. That game was my first exposure to a Rube Goldberg machine and I thought it was incredibly fascinating and clever.

Well, I was recently reading in Fast Company about Syyn Labs, a team best known for the Rube Goldberg machine it built for the band OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” video. This fun-loving and hard-working team learned when constructing their RB machine to put the most unreliable parts first, so if they didn’t work, it didn’t take as long to reset before testing again. And it took them 6 months to make their contraption and 85 takes to film it in a single shot.

So what does this have to do with writing?

Over the past three months, I’ve been trying to write faster. To get that first draft down and only then go back and edit the hell out of it. I have a tendency to nit-pick myself to death over nuance, or what I perceive to be nuance in word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, etc.

So I flew through the first five chapters of my new book, was driven to get it down. Then slam, I hit a roadblock — I needed to do some heavy-duty research before continuing. And I’ve been beating myself up for it over the past three weeks. Was I falling back into my old habits, I wondered, deluding myself that I was being productive when I was merely not writing?

But what if the writing process is the same as making a Rube Goldberg machine? What if the beginning comprises the pieces that can most easily go awry, and so it’s not such a bad idea to stop and make sure all your ducks (or dominoes) are in a row before continuing? Maybe getting that basis right is important and then you’re ready to fly through the rest before you go back and edit, edit, edit.

Is a Rube Goldberg machine just a diversion or is it something more? Is art just a diversion or must it be something more? Sometimes I think it’s pointless to wonder about such ideas while other times I feel the need to reach a conclusion, or at least to form an opinion.

Maybe all art is a form of Rube Goldberg machine, and all Rube Golderg machines are art — overly complex ways of saying/showing the simplicity of a thing so that we can marvel at it.

That works for me today.