"Will I ever write a book?"

[glendower]

At the old fora, there was a discussion with this thread title, which I think had great advice from people like Hegemony and Ergative. I don't suppose anyone saved it, or pieces of it, and could re-post here? I've looked through the 13 pages under "research" at thefora.org and don't see anything like it. It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.

Many thanks!

[mamselle]

I might have, I'll have to see if it survived a mn XHDD loss awhile back.

I, too, miss many parts of the old Forum.

M.

[traductio]

It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.

You have amazing recall.

At any rate, even if people can't find an old copy, I'd be happy to contribute to a new thread. Weird as it sounds, I hit my stride in book writing (manuscript for book #4 will be at the press in July, manuscript for book #5 is in the works). I'd be glad to share.

[mamselle]

Absolutely interested in your input, Traductio.

What has worked for you, and what did you start thinking would be good, but wasn't?

Just for starters...

M.

[traductio]

[W]hat did you start thinking would be good, but wasn't?

I wrote the manuscript for book #2, beginning to end, three times. It wasn't my dissertation book (that was #1), but my editor thought I was still in dissertation mode. I don't think I was, but the reviewers of the second manuscript (the first didn't make it out for review) agreed with the editor.

The lesson I learned was invaluable, however. Well, two lessons, really. First, if everyone thinks my manuscript reads like a dissertation (even if it isn't), it doesn't matter what I think. I just had to eat the humble pie and start over.

But -- lesson two -- what the reviewers were really saying, I think, was that I didn't yet own the project. I might not have been writing for my dissertation committee, but I was writing for the editor, for the reviewers, etc. The turning point for me was when I said, fine [grumble grumble expletive expletive], if that's the feedback you're gonna give, I'll just write the damn book the way I want to.

That was the moment I owned the book, and that was the decision that forced me to look at some knotty contradictions I had been long ignoring, mostly because I didn't think I could untie them. I couldn't, but it was during revision three (which passed review no problem) that I hit upon the book's key ideas.

Now I can't imagine the book without those key ideas -- what was I thinking for versions one and two? I mean, I didn't even know what I was really arguing.

I'll come back later to talk about the way I've taken that process further.

[glendower]

It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.

You have amazing recall.

Not me, my browser. It kept offering that URL till I felt it was trying to tell me something. Thanks for your contributions to the new thread, and to Mamselle for checking her files. Though in what is usually a book field, I got tenure on articles, but I do want to write a book. Actually, three, but one thing at a time! I have maybe half a draft, and hope to have much more by the end of the summer.

[mamselle]

Yes, as I've been saying I have about 4 book-joeys and 12 article-joeys in the pouch.

I've chosen 1 book project for now, and one article, and I'm trying to concentrate on those.

I'm also working on two chapters with a mind to sending them out first, rather than trying to write the whole thing. The first (intro) chapter will set up what's needed to frame the work; the next one covers the first historic period I'm looking at, with a structure that I expect to mirror in the following (chronologically ordered) chapters.

I started the book project in the summer, using Saturdays to write all day, longhand. I thought I'd have time to transcribe stuff at other points in the week, but I'm only now getting rid of the three other tasks that were preventing that, and I'm starting now to try to figure out the time frames.

At some points, I feel like I do know what I want for it and how I want it to go. But at other times, I don't, or I don't trust what I think I know.

I also believe, on the one hand, that it shouldn't matter what one's status as an independent scholar has to do with anything, but I suspect it could, even when blind review is supposed to be in place.

But that, as I keep saying, doesn't mean the work doesn't want to be done. And it seems to have picked me to do it, so I am.

So, all the help anyone can offer is most appreciated!

M.

[traductio]

Oh, I know what it's like to have the books wanting to get out!

I thought I'd come back and say something about how I wrote book #3 and manuscript #4. I've been finding myself investing a lot of energy in teaching (I really love to teach), much of it in trying to overcome the deficiencies of the books available for my topic (communication theory, as it happens).

So on a whim, I took six of my lectures and reworked them to draw out the thematic links more clearly show the progression from one to the next. Then I sat down and, under each slide, typed out the words I'd say if I were giving the lectures. It was a way to get around my perfectionistic tendencies. I mean, my lectures are always extemporaneous (I prep the slides, but that's it) -- the words will flow if I let them.

So I let them. Then I copied and pasted the words from each slide into a word-processing document and, well, revised the heck out of them. Spoken language and written language are not the same, of course, but the books kept something of my voice. It was one of the thing the peer reviewers liked for #3 (and will hopefully like for #4) -- they're books about communication theory, but grounded in my students' concrete concerns.

This technique wouldn't work for every book. The one I'm working on now is far too conventional for that trick to work. And for #3, I went into the process thinking I'd never publish the book anyway, so I could write it however I wanted to. I'd use it as material in my classes, so I didn't have to worry about hypothetical peer reviewers. (Of course, I did eventually have to worry about them, and it took some searching to find a publisher willing to take a risk on the manuscript. But that wasn't my concern as I wrote.)

Anyway, I thought I'd share the technique in case it might be useful for others. It certainly has proven useful for me.

[mamselle]

That sounds like it would help with several of the articles I need to do--they were all born as Ppts and they're all clamoring to get into long pants and grow up to become "real," published pieces.

Trouble for me is, I can seem to imagine a performed reading/Powerpoint presentation very easily, and all the work that goes into the slides then needs to be transcribed, translated, or...something...into article format.

What you're talking about there might help. My slides can get complex; I like creating something more like a book page with the text and images, rather than the spare (arid, to me) three-point, ten-word lines I know are the standard (and I can follow that standard in text-only, but turn me loose on images, and...ummm....well....visual inebriation might describe it...).

One or two of the books are really probably going to be compilations of several presentations that have been riffing on the same theme for a few years now, too. So perhaps I should look at what you're talking about with those in mind.

And since this is supposed to be about books, I'll curtail the derail.

M.

[traductio]

I think what really helped was that I was writing down lectures where I'd already thought through all the things I struggle with in writing, especially the transition from idea to idea. In my teaching, I find I have to be very deliberate about showing my work, so to speak, or about how we get from A to A' to A'', before we can even get to B. With that preliminary work out of the way (it took me hours of working slides before I could "deliver" them in written form), the writing could be a lot more fluid.

[apl68]

Not academic, but...now researching and outlining a novel that I hope to begin actually drafting next week.  My creativity that has been missing so completely for the past two years had suddenly returned!  It is supposed to be historical fiction, so my academic training is actually coming in useful.

[traductio]

Not academic, but...now researching and outlining a novel that I hope to begin actually drafting next week.  My creativity that has been missing so completely for the past two years had suddenly returned!  It is supposed to be historical fiction, so my academic training is actually coming in useful.

That sounds fun. Happy writing!

[euro_trash]

At the old fora, there was a discussion with this thread title, which I think had great advice from people like Hegemony and Ergative. I don't suppose anyone saved it, or pieces of it, and could re-post here? I've looked through the 13 pages under "research" at thefora.org and don't see anything like it. It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.

Many thanks!

I remember the thread! Hegemony has some fantastic advice. I wish we still had access to all of that content ugh

[Parasaurolophus]

Since your browser still has the URL, it's probably worth checking archive.is to see if they managed to save a snapshot of the thread at some point.

Probably not, but it's worth a try!


Otherwise... thanks for the advice already given in this thread! It's super useful. I've been plodding along on a publisher's book project (it's not really my own), and am looking forward to doing all this work for myself in the future. (Although I have to say, the publisher's project has been really instructive--I've learned a lot about corners of my subfield I didn't know anything about before, and some of those corners are really, really cool.)

[mamselle]

You've posted something that looked like "sectioning" in the research thread, related to your book project--can you say more about that?

I was trying to figure out if it would be a useful way to think of parts of what I'm working on, but wasn't sure if you meant what I was taking from it.

M.