Tim Queeney has written several adventure novels, and has just released a non-fiction book entitled Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.
Show notes:
Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.
If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.
Most people know what rope is but have no idea of its origins and how it has influenced not just sailing but much of civilization. I asked Time why he decided to to write this book. “After my dad had died, I had a bunch of rope that was in a milk crate. One day, I pulled out a piece of rope and looked at the knot in it. And I said, ‘I don’t really need a knot here for what I’m doing.’ And I looked at the knot and I realized, wow, my dad’s fingers tied that knot. I can’t untie that. I’ve got to keep that in there because that’s a physical manifestation of what he was in the world.”
Tim is a sailor and was the longtime editor of and columnist for Ocean Navigator, a magazine for offshore sailors. He also taught celestial navigation for 25 years. Ocean Navigator magazine is for “offshore sailors, or people who want to be offshore sailors. Transatlantic or sailing across the Pacific, pretty serious sailors.”
I pointed out that I don’t have much rope in my home, that it’s not something that I use often. I’d expect to see it on boats, on ships, or at construction sites. Tim pointed out that, “it’s widely used in many industries. For example, arborists, the people who work on trees, they use lots of rope. The military uses quite a bit of rope. For heavy-duty moorings that natural gas tankers tie to, for example, in deep water, it makes much more sense to use rope than to use wire, because wire is much heavier, and if it’s deep enough, the wire can’t even support its own weight and will break. And rope is also used by alpinists, cavers, and spelunkers.”
This book is a microhistory; it looks at one item and how we use it, how it developed, and this lets us look at history through a lens that is unfamiliar. Tim said, “You don’t think about rope, because it’s been so omnipresent through history that it’s been sort of forgotten.”
Rope doesn’t survive well over time, and Tim said that, “the oldest piece of rope was found in a cave in southeastern France, and it’s 50,000 years old. It was made by Neanderthals. The scientists who found it have made the case that this represents abstract mathematical thinking by Neanderthals. This is a very tiny piece of three-strand rope. In order to make three-strand rope, you need to first twist the strands in one direction, either right-handed or left-handed. Then you have to twist each of those three strands together in the opposite way that you twisted them individually, so the two twists work against each other to help keep it together. This 50,000-year-old little piece of cordage exhibits both the S and the Z twist, and it’s three strands. It definitely requires that you’re paying attention and thinking about what you’re doing when you’re making this.”
Rope dates back to the dawn of time, and, in his book, Tim says, “As important as rope is, however, there’s good evidence that it wasn’t the absolute first of humanity’s world-changing tools. We’ll never know, but the sequence probably goes something like this. Fire, stone tools, and then the twisted strands of the first ropes.” Tim added, “We’ve found 50,000-year-old rope, and we know that rope degrades. So I think that even the earliest humans, when they were making stone tools, they were thinking about things like, how do I organize things? How do I keep things together? And I think pulling some vines off of a tree and then saying, maybe there’s a better way to make this rope, and figuring that out.”
In order to organize his voluminous research, Tim relied on Scrivener. “Scrivener was great for this because the Binder is an amazing way of organizing everything, keeping it all in one place. Having to go back and forth in another word processing program, where you were keeping things in separate folders or separate files, that would be a nightmare.”
“And it was great to be able to open multiple windows so that I could have the Binder on one side, my text for the chapter in the middle, and then I could have research information on the right in a window. It really made things easy.”
When he had finished the manuscript, Tim had to cut it from 93,000 to 75,000 words. I asked what he left out. “I had a long section on the Hitchcock movie Rope, but it was a bit tangential. While the rope is an interesting and necessary prop, it doesn’t have that much of a role in the movie. But I was fascinated by the way he shot the film and used movable walls and to shoot everything in the length of a film magazine.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.