Inspired by some recent personal (a birthday) and professional (more on that below) milestones, I’ve got a reflective post for you today. Hopefully those of you with book-writing aspirations find it helpful, and those of you who read books find it interesting to learn more about how they come to be!
As of last week, my book is officially “in production.” Essentially, that means I’ve finished writing and editing it and passed it off to the publisher to transform it from a Word doc to a physical object with a cover and pages and all that jazz. (I believe there will also be ebook and audio options for those of you who aren’t into pages!) It won’t be available until sometime next year, because it turns out there are a lot of steps in the transformation process, plus also covid-supply-chain-something-something. (Apparently, pre-pandemic this process was shorter.) But for now I thought I’d share a few reflections about the process of writing it, in the vein of ‘what-I-wish-I-knew-when-I-started-this-whole-thing.’
A book is not just an extra-long journal article. For me, one of the hardest parts of writing was learning how to craft an overarching, book-level argument. To do it successfully, you have to find an effective way to toggle between the big picture and the small details. That’s hard in part because the big picture is really big! The manuscript I turned in is just shy of 90,000 words. It was extremely difficult, for me anyway, to hold all of that in mind at one time. In most daily writing sessions, I was focused on the level of the page or section; at most I was thinking at the chapter level. You have to do that, I think, in order to get a draft together, but then every so often you have to think bigger, like the painter who steps a few feet away from the canvas to take in the overall effect. Reread the intro, say, and then think about what piece of the argument the current chapter needs to add. Or review the intro sections of each individual chapter and make sure they build on one another appropriately.
The length of the manuscript, and of the writing process, also makes it very likely that your thinking, and sometimes even your writing style, will evolve in ways you need to go back and correct for later. By the time I got to chapter 6, for instance, I was accidentally reframing some of the concepts I’d introduced in chapter 1—or, worse, dropping them from the text altogether. Stepping back from time to time helped me catch those inadvertent shifts—or some of them anyway. The rest, I relied on the feedback of others to spot.
It will take way longer than you expect. I started collecting data for this project in 2017, a whole lifetime ago. I started writing the book in earnest in early 2022 and naively expected it would take a year or so to finish. I’d already written a dissertation on the topic, so I figured it would be relatively straightforward to convert that into a book. Alas, ‘twas not the case. Though there’s a lot of overlap between the dissertation and the finished manuscript, I wrote most of the latter from scratch (as opposed to editing the dissertation).
Why? For one, the genres are just too different, even if many of the underlying ideas are the same. I’ve heard the dissertation described as a thing you write to prove to your committee members—the folks who decide whether you deserve a PhD—that you know stuff. Unsurprisingly, that generally makes for rather dull reading. If you want to speak to people who are not experts in your field, as I hope to do, you have to learn to tell compelling stories and to push a lot of the scholarly literature to the endnotes. For another, I collected a bunch of new data after the dissertation was done, which I then had to figure out how to incorporate into the book. In the end, that data became the final chapter, but before I landed on that structure, I tried a bunch of other time-consuming approaches that involved weaving it throughout the existing material.
The process also drags out because of all the life things that inevitably come up, but which I still somehow manage to underestimate every time I make a plan. In my case, that was planning a wedding, packing up my life in Boston, moving across the country, figuring out how to be a professor, developing and teaching new classes, and attempting to keep a few other side research projects moving forward. Many days, I was lucky to get in an hour of book-writing time. And it takes a lot of hours to finish a book.
But, do not despair—you will finish this thing someday. When you’re in the thick of any major project, it feels interminable. And when you are just chipping away, a little each day, it’s easy to despair about the gap between where you are and where you need to go. But keep at it, and an outline becomes a shitty draft. A shitty draft becomes slightly more polished prose. One chapter becomes two. Eventually, a book takes shape.
The catch is that you’ll never feel fully done. When I tell friends about finishing, I often get a reaction along the lines of, ‘Wow, that must feel so good,’ or ‘You must be so proud.’ And I do feel proud, but—and this probably reveals something about my psychology—my dominant feeling in the final days of working on the manuscript, and even now a few weeks later, is more like anxiety. Is it good enough? Shouldn’t I have found a way to incorporate this idea? Did I cite all the right people? Did I forget to thank someone in the acknowledgments? Should I have written more about this limitation of the data? Will everyone hate it?!
I suspect that if I kept working on this book for another year or two, I could make it marginally better. But I want you to be able to read it! On my more confident days, I think you will love it! Plus, I want to move onto the other research ideas I’ve been putting off. At some point, you just have to call it. Leaning on the judgment of others—mentors, editors, peer reviewers—can help you figure out what the right cutoff point is.
And perhaps one final bonus lesson is that life will go on, and work will go on, after the celebration ends. I’m excited to finally have time to think about my next big project, though the wide-open universe of possibilities is a little daunting. For now, I’m exploring a few ideas that have been percolating in the back of my mind. Here’s where I could use a little help. If you fall into one of the categories below and are willing to do an informal, confidential interview with me, will you reply to this email?
A therapist or counselor who works with couples and/or individuals dealing with relationship struggles
A parent who has faced challenges implementing your preferences re: your child’s gender socialization
This one’s abstract, so let me give you some examples: Maybe you prefer to dress your child in gender-neutral attire but your mother keeps sending you pink tutus. Or, you’re trying to teach your child to be accepting of gender diversity but are getting pushback from your spouse, whose views about gender are different than yours. Etc.
It's early days, so who know where any of this will go! Whatever I decide to research next, you’ll hear about it here in the months to come.