What You Ask of a Fact

I had one weird fact this week, and three different essays came out of it. The fact: sixteen LLCs in Colorado's public business registry list an effective registration date of January 30, in the year 3. Not 2003. Not 1903. The year three.

The fact is identical for every essay. The essays are not identical. They aren't even adjacent.

The first essay was a data engineering piece. The column says DATE. The values include a year that predates the assembly of the New Testament. That gap, between what the column promises and what it actually contains, is where production engineering happens. The piece was sober, short, and went to the engineering site.

The second essay was a comedy bit. Sixteen Colorado businesses, by the state's own records, have been continuously operating since before the Library of Alexandria burned. Probably set up by Roman traders who got a tip from a passing oracle about the long-term commercial viability of the Front Range. The piece was unserious and went to the absurd site. The fact didn't move. The lens did.

The third essay (this one, on the site about craft and tools) is about the lens.

Most people who collect interesting source material treat each piece of it as locked to a single use, the use that occurred to them first. You see a weird thing in a dataset and you write the engineering version. You file it. You're done. You used the fact.

You did not use the fact. You used one direction of the fact.

The thing I keep failing to do, until I force myself, is to sit with a strong source long enough to ask what else it could be. The default move is to recognize what kind of essay a source obviously is, write that one, and move on to the next source. The move that produces more, and produces better, is to ignore the obvious genre and ask what the same fact would say in three or four different rooms.

A bug in a federal dataset is, by default, a data engineering anecdote. That's the room it walks into wearing its badge. But it can also be a comedy bit. It can be a reflection on the gap between expected and actual data. It can be a piece about institutional memory, about what a database remembers when humans have forgotten. It can be a piece on clerical errors as inadvertent fiction, on the way every public record is a draft someone forgot to revise. Each of those is a different angle, not a different fact. The fact is the same sixteen rows. The angles are produced by what you ask of them.

This is how good source material gets used up too fast. You take a real moment and write the obvious essay. A week later, you take another real moment and write its obvious essay. After a year you have fifty essays and fifty burned sources, none of them squeezed. The pile of strong material in front of you starts looking thinner than it actually was, because you only ever asked each item one question.

The opposite mode, which I have been forcing myself into this week, is to assume every strong source has at least three drafts in it, and the first one is rarely the best one. Before I sit down to write, I list three possible angles. I write none of them. I leave the list overnight. The angle I find on the second morning is usually different from any on the list, because the act of listing helped me see what I was actually after.

This isn't a writing trick. It's a way of treating raw material with the respect it earned by being interesting. Real moments are scarcer than the time you have to spend writing about them. Squandering one by taking the first angle that occurred to you is, in the long run, the most expensive thing a working writer does.

There's a related move that serious painters and serious comedians both seem to know. The painter doing studies of the same scene from a different angle, in a different palette, at a different time of day, is not redoing the painting. They're asking what the scene actually is. The comedian who can take a single news item and write a five-minute set, a tight three-minute bit, and a two-line cold open is not recycling. They're using the material at three different temperatures.

Writers don't talk about this as often, possibly because the unit costs are higher and once you've written an essay it feels permanently spent. But the source isn't spent. The source is the same. The piece is what you made from one cut of it.

The discipline I'm trying to build is the assumption that every fact has more drafts in it than I noticed the first time. List the angles before I commit. Accept that the first angle is the obvious angle, and the obvious angle is usually not the strongest one. Squeeze the source.

The sixteen Colorado LLCs are still going to be there next week. They're still from the year three. There are at least two more essays in them that I haven't written yet, and the obvious-to-me one is already filed. The question that produces the next one is the one I haven't asked.