Astrid Bracke writes on twenty-first-century British fiction and nonfiction, ecocriticism, narratology, climate crisis and flood narratives. Her monograph, Climate Crisis and the Twenty-First-Century British Novel, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. This is the first of four blog posts she will write for AcWriMo 2016.

So you want to write a book. Perhaps there’s an idea that you want to explore and didn’t get round to in your dissertation, or you’re ready to go into a wholly different direction. Or you feel you have to write a book to get the right job, or have a better chance at funding money. A few years ago I wrote on writing a book proposal. This series is about writing the book, from start to finish.

In this first post, I discuss how writing a book is different from writing a dissertation.

Most importantly, writing a book is a much more solitary endeavour. While getting your PhD you wrote under supervision. The meetings with my supervisor were a way for me to check whether I was on the right path and to discuss my ideas. Not working in such a framework can be a real relief to many. Perhaps you fundamentally disagreed with your supervisor, or felt tied to departmental themes. Writing a book frees you from all that: it’s your book and your choices. This can be paralyzing at times, and even lonely.

It also means that getting feedback on your work requires more initiative. And where first you might have gotten the feeling that at least you were accountable to someone (your supervisor), now you’re not really accountable to anyone but yourself. If your book is under contract with a publisher you’ve got a deadline, but that’s not quite the same thing. They might check in with you, but a supervisory relationship, for good or for bad, doesn’t exist.

There’s a few ways in which you can create a supportive environment for yourself while writing a book. The first is to use your network to get feedback – or to expand your network. I drew up a list of scholars who were working on themes related to my book and asked them for feedback on individual chapters. I already knew these people: I’d talked to them about my project at conferences, had provided feedback on their work or published in special issues they edited.

Yet even if you don’t already personally know them, scholars are generally happy to help. There might be someone whose work you use a lot, or who gave an interesting paper at a conference that ties in with your research. Indeed conferences are great places to ask people whether they’d be willing to read your work. Whether you know them or not, it’s important to be clear on your expectations: with the exception of one scholar whom I know well, I never requested feedback on more than one chapter, asked people to reply by a certain date and offered to repay the favour (and of course thanked them again in my acknowledgements).

Conferences are also a great way to create the accountability that is lacking when you’re no longer a PhD student. Use conference papers not only to try out your ideas, but also to make sure that you finish certain chapters by a certain date. The added benefit is that you’re likely to get useful feedback.

Another way of creating accountability and alleviating the possible loneliness of writing a book is by looking for writing buddies. For a while a friend and I would agree to send each other (parts of) chapters and articles. We’d set a clear deadline and meet for coffee that day. We wouldn’t necessarily read each other’s work, but making the promise to be done with something by a certain date did stimulate us. And discussing our work over coffee was often inspiring. You may even get together with a group of colleagues, or join a MeetUp group of academics. Sharing your deadlines with others and having the chance to talk about the writing process provides some of the structures that being a PhD student, often surrounded by other PhD students, offered.

I was really surprised about the time it took me to write the book, compared to writing the dissertation. Writing the book took me about a year, working on average one day a week, versus around three years nearly full time for the dissertation. The reason why it took so much less time is, I think, because writing a dissertation is much more about the process and about learning the ropes.

This is also the final difference between a dissertation and a book. A dissertation is what in the traditional guild-system would be the product of an apprenticeship. In the dissertation you demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the area you’re working in and that you’ve read (almost) everything. In a book, many of these concerns do not apply. If in writing the dissertation you have to prove that you’re worthy of being part of a scholarly community, in writing the book you show that you are.

In my next posts I’ll write more about the process of writing a book from start to finish, from planning the work to communicating with the publisher.

Allan Johnson is Assistant Professor in English Literature at City University of Hong Kong.  He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as well as articles and chapters on an array of writers including James, Stoker, Conan Doyle, Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Eliot, Cather, Waugh, Doctorow, and Hollinghurst.  You can find ot more about Allan at his website: http://thisisallan.com, and follow him on Twitter @thisisallan.  Below is his reflection of writing habits and systems.

During AcWriMo 2015 I have been sharing some of my observations on managing large-scale writing projects such as books, observations which have grown largely out of the initially difficult transition I faced between finishing my first book and then moving on to the second.  In previous weeks I have written about managing the different forms of energy required in a large-scale project and measuring and evaluating progress.  This week I will be rounding things off with a summary of my weekly review process, which ties together each of the elements I use in project management and helps keep the whole system running smoothly.

My own weekly review is based partially on David Allen’s GTD Weekly Review, but has been adapted heavily and transformed as I began to explore the specific requirements of advanced long-form academic writing.  I have set up each of the following tasks as scheduled tasks in Things, where they appear each Friday to make sure that I keep on track.  Although there are several other steps in my weekly review related specifically to teaching and administration, below are the elements related directly to my research, which, anyway, forms the bulk of my weekly review.

Process Evernote Inbox: I have been a committed Evernote user for years (and am, indeed, the Evernote Higher Education Ambassador), so all of my devices, browsers, and RSS readers have been set up to easily send notes to Evernote.  By the end of the week, my Evernote Inbox will have a number of articles, websites, book reviews, or blog postings that may or may not be related to my research at hand.  I first scan through my Evernote Inbox and assign relevant tags as necessary and if any particular note will need further attention for my research project, I create a task in Things to remind me to do that next week.

Review Projects and Yearly Planning Calendar: After processing my Evernote Inbox, I move to my projects currently underway and my yearly planning calendar which organises all writing tasks for the year.  By measuring and evaluating progress of my work during the week I am able to assess if I am still up to date with my plans for the year and can make changes as necessary.

Review Upcoming Tasks: I make a great effort to update iCal throughout the week so that I have a good record of precisely how much time I spent on various tasks, rather than just a reminder of how much time I had planned to spend.  Reviewing the past week can provide good insight into the rise and fall of energy levels, and may suggest the need for reassessing writing and research plans for the coming week.  This might create additional tasks to add to Things such as a trip to the library on Monday morning for secondary sources, or requesting a particular article not available through my library’s databases.

Process Things Inbox: By this point in my weekly review, my Things inbox has accumulated quite a few new tasks.  Many of these might not be ‘tasks’ at all, but really events that can be scheduled in iCal (for example, a library visit is an event rather than a task because it can be scheduled for a specific time).  Once I have scheduled all events in iCal, I then move to the remaining tasks, which I tag as necessary and advance through Things in a typical GTD task-management process.

Review Upcoming Week: My calendar for the coming week will by this point be quickly filling up with repeating events (e.g. classes, department meetings) and newly scheduled events.  Now is the time that I can move around and adjust sessions for drafting and rewriting—I have already set this week as weekly repeating events, so now it is just a matter of moving them to where they best fit in my schedule.

Review Future Objectives: I always like to end my weekly review (and, thus, my Friday afternoon) with a brief review of my future goals and objectives, such as plans for a new article or ideas for a conference presentation.  I keep these as tasks in the Someday folder in Things, and it is always useful to review my new steps and to keep these in mind as I move forward into the following week.

Allan Johnson is Assistant Professor in English Literature at City University of Hong Kong.  He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as well as articles and chapters on an array of writers including James, Stoker, Conan Doyle, Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Eliot, Cather, Waugh, Doctorow, and Hollinghurst.  You can find ot more about Allan at his website: http://thisisallan.com, and follow him on Twitter @thisisallan.  Below is his reflection of writing habits and systems.

Over the past two weeks I have been writing about some of the difference between finishing my first book and my second book.  My first book began life as my doctoral thesis, and thus much of the writing process was comfortably braced by my supervisor and my fellow PhD candidates, all of whom, even if their topics were completely different to mine, contributed to the sense of camaraderie and research community.  Once I began drafting my second book, however, I discovered that not only did I need to begin to think more about project management, but that I needed to think about project management in different ways that I had before.  After a year of false starts and failures on the second book, I began to reconsider the management of energy levels in academic writing, and develop some habits and systems to make the best use of my energy rather than just my time.

As I described last week, the differing types of energy required during the drafting and rewriting stages means that I measure progress in these areas in different ways: while drafting I measure progress by words written each week and while rewriting I measure progress by time completed each day.  But, of course, assessing progress is only one part of the problem.  There is still the matter of scheduling the time that is needed in order to achieve this progress, and over the past three years I have developed several habits and systems that have helped:

1. Set goals for number of drafting and/or rewriting sessions you plan to do each week. For the past three years, my stretch goal has always been to spend three hours drafting and three hours rewriting each day, for a total of 30 research hours per week.  I have always considered this ideal as something to aspire toward, and rarely have I achieved it.  My actual goal is 20 research hours per week, with a mixture of time for drafting and rewriting.

2. Set up repeating calendar events for periods of drafting and rewriting, even if these will rescheduled at a later point. When I look at next week’s schedule in iCal during my Weekly Review (more on that in my next post), I will already have two three-hour sessions each day scheduled for drafting and rewriting.  Many of these sessions will be moved, shortened, or, sometimes, deleted, but because I have already set these up as repeating calendar events, I receive a constant reminder to keep pushing forward and the amount of work that I should, ideally, be committing to the project.  Using repeating calendar events also means that I don’t have to manually add events to my schedule—it becomes just a simple matter of dragging and dropping to where they best fit.

3. Front-load the week. Every week is different, with different amounts of time spent in meetings or required for teaching preparation, administrative roles, and other surprise tasks and urgent deadlines.  While some things like one’s teaching schedule or a regular weekly committee meeting don’t more around a lot, there is still a great deal of flexibility needed throughout the week.  For this reason, I try to schedule as many of my drafting and rewriting sessions early in the week so that if things do come up, these can be pushed back to a later date.  Beginning each week with a sprint also means that occasionally I get a free Friday afternoon!

4. Use the Note field in a digital calendar to make a note on where to begin tomorrow. Both creative writers and academic writers agree that it is important to end each day of work by making a note of where you left off and what to begin with tomorrow.  Turning this into a ritual at the end of the working day can provide a sense of finality to what one has achieved that day, and set up tangible goals for the next day in order to hit the ground running.  Rather than making these notes in the document itself, I add it to the Note field in iCal: this gives me access to a snapshot of my progress on any of my devices, and gives me a record of what I managed to accomplish each day.

5. Complete a Weekly Review on Friday afternoons and a Monthly review at the end of each month (more on these reviews next week).

Professor Helen Sword (The University of Auckland) is the author of the hugely popular Stylish Academic Writing. Below is an excerpt from her book which offers her top 10 tips on titles.

1.  What first impression do you want to make on your chosen audience? Remember, your title announces your intention to be serious, humorous, detailed, expansive, technical, or accessible—possibly several of those things at once. Double-check that your title matches your intention.

2.  Take a look at the publication list on your curriculum vitae. How many of your past titles contain colons? In each case, can you clearly articulate your reason for needing both a title and a subtitle?

3.  If you use colons frequently, try crafting a colon-free title. As an extra challenge, see if you can come up with a colon-free title that is both engaging and informative.

4.  If you seldom or never use colons, or if your titles are informative but not engaging, try out the “catchy: descriptive” trick. First, formulate a snappy but appropriate title (for example, “Snakes on a Plane”) to go with your not-so-snappy descriptive subtitle (“Aggressive Serpentine Behavior in a Restrictive Aeronautical Environment”).

5.  Next, ask yourself whether your title would still make sense without the subtitle. In some situations – for instance, a disciplinary conference or a special issue of a journal, where the context may supply all the extra information that is needed – you might find you can get away with just “Snakes on a Plane” after all.

6.  Identify some typical titles in your discipline and analyze their grammatical structure: for example, “The Development of Efficacy in Teams: A Multilevel and Longitudinal Perspective” becomes “The Abstract Noun of Abstract Noun in Plural Collective Noun: An Adjective and Adjective Abstract Noun.” Now see if you can come up with a title that does not use those predictable structures.

7.  For inspiration, find an engaging title from a discipline other than your own and mimic its structure. No one in your discipline need ever know.

8.  Make sure your title contains no more than one or two abstract or collective nouns. (Many academic titles contain seven, eight, or more!) Abstract nouns (analysis, structure, development, education) and collective nouns (students, teachers, patients, subjects) have a generic, lulling quality, particularly when they occur in journals where the same noun is used frequently, as in a criminology journal where most of the titles contain the nouns crime and criminology.

9.  Avoid predictable “academic verbs”, especially in participle form: for example, preparing, promoting, enforcing (law); engaging, applying, improving (higher education); rethinking, reopening, overcoming (history); predicting, relating, linking (evolutionary biology).

10.  Include one or two words that you would not expect to find in any other title in the same journal. Concrete nouns (piano, guppy, path) and vivid verbs (ban, mutilate, gestate) are particularly effective. Proper nouns (Wagner, London, Phasianus colchicus) can also help individualize your title and ground your research in a specific time and place.

Allan Johnson is Assistant Professor in English Literature at City University of Hong Kong.  He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as well as articles and chapters on an array of writers including James, Stoker, Conan Doyle, Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Eliot, Cather, Waugh, Doctorow, and Hollinghurst.  You can find ot more about Allan at his website: http://thisisallan.com, and follow him on Twitter @thisisallan.  Below is his reflection of writing process.

Last week I wrote about managing creative energy by dovetailing the drafting and rewriting phases so that one chapter or portion of work can be in the drafting stage while another is being rewritten and revised.  The primary reason for doing this is that these two stages of the writing process rely on very different forms
of thinking and commitment.  Spending a full day on just drafting or just rewriting is an easy road to burnout, but spending a little bit of time each day on both of these activities becomes much more manageable and keeps the project moving steadily ahead.

On an ideal day I would spend three hours on writing, three hours on rewriting, and three hours on teaching and administration, but, of course, that ideal day almost never happens.  Since the academic life is filled with commitments and interruptions that can easily whisk one away from research, I began to think about how best to manage my writing progress alongside these other responsibilities and while keeping the project on track.  While I still use the Pomodoro Technique during some parts of a project, I soon discovered that it perhaps wasn’t the most useful way to organise all aspects of the writing process.

Because the drafting phase of any writing project is about creative exuberance, about finding the connections between ideas, and, ultimately, about using writing to think through the argument, focusing exclusively on the amount of time spent in the process may not be the most useful indicator of accomplishment.  When drafting a new chapter, I might be reading key sources, writing short summaries and observations, or developing my own lines of thinking and interpretation.  After the first or second week of drafting a chapter, I might not have written many words, but at the end of the three months I usually spend on drafting, I had better had something in the region of 10,000-15,000 words that can be further refined and developed during rewriting.

For this reason, I set incremental word count goals during drafting, based on weekly word count rather than time spent writing or daily word counts. By the end of the first month I aim to have at least 2000 words written (most of this time, of course, will have been spent in secondary research) and then in each subsequent week my goal is to complete an additional 1000-1500 words. Thinking holistically about words-per-week allows for the periods of additional research necessary for ideas to formulate while still keeping me on task.  And, as I try to integrate digital and analogue tools in my research for their best-intended purposes, I keep track of the growing word count in a rather old-fashioned sort of way: a blank monthly calendar pasted into my Moleskine.

But because the rewriting phase is much more connected to analytical precision, focusing on details, and, ideally, shaping the earlier draft into something accessible to others, I needed to set a much more regimented daily practice for myself in which could maintain focus and built forward momentum.  For this reason, I continue to use Pomodoro during the rewriting phrase.  I use Pomodoro Pro which not only provides all the necessary timer features, but keeps track of time spent on projects (very useful data for my monthly self-review, which I’ll explain in a future post).

Because drafting and rewriting rely on such different forms of the thinking and energy, it is important to track and evaluate progress using a method best suited for each stage.  While drafting, I use a pleasingly old-school method of noting my weekly word count in a notebook to allow for the rise and fall of creative energy through the week while still keeping my work focused.  And when rewriting, I use a rather more contemporary time management technique to keep forward momentum through the analytical precision required of rewriting.

Allan Johnson is Assistant Professor in English Literature at City University of Hong Kong.  He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) as well as articles and chapters on an array of writers including James, Stoker, Conan Doyle, Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Eliot, Cather, Waugh, Doctorow, and Hollinghurst.  You can find ot more about Allan at his website: http://thisisallan.com, and follow him on Twitter @thisisallan.  Below is his reflection of writing process.

I was fairly certain that my second book would be rather a lot more straightforward than my first.  My first book, based largely on my doctoral thesis, began life during three chaotic postgraduate years throughout which I seemed to be writing every moment of the day, was next completely reshaped once I began my first academic job, and then finally went through several more revisions while working with editors and readers at Palgrave Macmillian.  It was nearly six years of false starts, abandoned topics, and the sort of writerly malaise that frequently besets persons of the tweed.

Surely the second book was going to be an easier undertaking…

For AcWriMo 2015 I have committed to finishing my second book, which, after nearly two years of flat-out work, is now nearly complete.  I began the project certain that I had learned from my previous mistakes and knew how to independently manage a book project.  When I was writing my first book I became obsessed with time management strategies, and read nearly every book on the topic (David Allen’s Getting Things Done is still a classic, and should probably be required reading for every new postgraduate student).  I learned how to manage goals, track progress, and plan my time, and with the constant, supportive motivation from my supervisor and the rest of my PhD cohort I was able to achieve what I had set out to do.  But when it came time to begin my second book, I realised that the core support network surrounding research student was no longer there, that no one would be pushing me to finish, and that suddenly I had to apply a very different type of energy to the project.

After several months of settling into a new city and trying somewhat unsuccessful to get to work on my second book, I began to read about the difference between time management and energy management, a theory developed by business writer Tony Schwartz.  If my second book was ever going to see the light of day, I needed to understand how to manage the energy required for the project, and, indeed, figure out what that energy even was.

Wisdom abounds about the difference between the drafting and rewriting stages of the writing process—it’s one of first things that composition students learn about—but to my mind, and especially when considered in the context of long-form writing, the vital difference between drafting and rewriting is the nature of energy involved.  Each stage relies on radically different forms of thinking, focus, and commitment, and taxes your intellectual and emotional reserves in rather distinctive ways.

It’s a rare, perhaps completely imaginary, academic who can spend six uninterrupted hours committing words to the page in a first draft; equally as rare is someone willing to spend the same length of time revising and editing an early draft.  We’ve all managed to do that a few times with a looming deadline or a conference presentation the next morning, but ultimately it is not sustainable.

What is sustainable, however, is managing energy in a way which allows for these two processes to be interwoven.  With a bit of focus, it’s not too difficult to spend three hours drafting in the morning and then three hours rewriting something else later in the afternoon.  The schedule that I set for myself took this into account, and tried to make best use of my energy resources by dovetailing these two distinct aspects of the process.

Dovetailing the Writing Process (The Plan)

The schedule I set for myself broke down the year into quarters, and aimed to allow time for the creative exuberance of drafting alongside the analytical precision required of rewriting without burning out.  Managing my energy by dividing my attention between these two unique taxing stages of writing meant that I could produce three chapters each year, and, ideally, a full manuscript in two years.  In practice the process was a bit less orderly.

Dovetailing the Writing Process (The Reality)

I have kept an Evernote note to organise and record progress on my research since I began my job at City University of Hong Kong.  For three years I have reviewed and updated the table at the end of each month.  While the table reminds me that I am very close to finishing the second book, it also doesn’t allow me to forget that my writing in 2013 moved around chaotically between several different projects.  There was no clear strategy.   Two of the articles in which I invested some considerable time (referred to here vaguely as ‘Gatiss’ and ‘Joyce’, and about which no more shall ever be said) ultimately had to be abandoned.  I became quickly dazed during drafting and, with no clear sense of how to proceed with the work, left them behind.

But in January 2014 I began my first attempt at dovetailing the writing process in order to better manage my energy and avoid sacrificing any more writing.  Although my final record of work isn’t quite as orderly as my initial plans, I did manage to largely achieve what I had set out to do, and (if my AcWriMo goal is achieved) do it with one month to spare. By managing my energy rather than my time, I was able to produce considerably more work of publishable quality than I did during the wholly discouraging year before I began the second book.