How to write scholarly books productively and joyfully
It is probably the most common question I get from fellow academics about scholarly writing: what is your process? They ask because without fail my team puts out about 2-4 books per year quite apart from journal articles or special issues of journals and other kinds of writing. How do you do it? What lies behind these seemingly impossible levels of output? What, in short, is your process?
I thought hard about the question and seven things came to mind.
1. I write every single day whether in the air or on terra firma. On average, about three to five hours per day. On sabbaticals, 12 hours per day. It has become a habit and out of the habit, fluency. It’s like playing the piano (I dabble). If you do not practice every day, your listening audience will notice. Thing is, writing has become part of who I am, an enjoyable pastime so that if I do not do it regularly, I feel there is something missing. At book launches, people often ask: where do you find the time to write? There is this standard response: As you can see from my circumference, I only like two things in life: eating and writing. And yet, nobody has ever asked me where I find the time to eat.
2. I write to get something down before I get it right. This is the most valuable lesson I was taught about writing during my early academic years. Do not try and write a masterpiece with the first draft. Get it down and then rewrite as many times as you wish. Today’s technology makes that very easy—imagine when authors wrote with a feather or on a typewriter long before cut-and-paste and storing multiple versions in the cloud was even possible. Almost all my book manuscripts go through about 10 or more drafts before being sent off to the publisher. Get it down.
3. I build the body of writing around a strong backbone. When I write a book, I know the basic backbone of the idea that I want to communicate. What, for example, explains learner disconnection from science education. Because I have that data at hand, I start to write the basic narrative (backbone) of what I found without the muscle meat and the complex nerves or blood vessels. Once the backbone is in place I bring in the added reflections, the enriching literatures, the work of theorizing and what will gradually become a well-textured account of a compelling problem around which the book is centered. What this means is that you need to know what you wish to say in simple terms (the backbone) before adding the flesh.
4. I build smart teams around me to support the writing. There is always a group of super smart people working with me. Youngsters with formidable digital and IT skills who know to navigate
their way through powerful search engines for conducting literature reviews; experts in preparing documents for ethics review; graphic designers who can make data come alive in a text; computer-based data analysts; and two kinds of editors—those who can engage my writing conceptually and those who are straight up-and-down grammar folk. Of course, I have to guide them on what to do and I often do the first tasks e.g., data analysis of densely layered ethnographic content. But the routines are done by others. This frees me up to do the tasks of thinking and writing and analyzing and re-thinking as I draw on these support teams.
5. I commit to tight schedules. I typically finish writing a book within 3-6 months. The thinking and doing before the book writing could take a year or two or more. But once I start writing, it is over within a short period of time. Publishers will tell you, we are always ahead of schedule. When reviews come in, I usually do the corrections immediately, typical turnaround within a week. In my head, the first draft is due by X; the feedback will go out by Y; the proofs will be checked by Z; and so on. It is very frustrating being the editor of a multi-chapter book where you are dependent on other authors. But in such cases, too, we have a machinery that brings (most of) them to deliver around the deadlines.
6. I work with a team of readily available critical readers. Long before a publisher sends the manuscript out for review, it would already have been internally reviewed by two kinds of editors in the course of writing. One checks for grammar and technical correctness while the other looks at conceptual issues such as internal coherence (samehangenheid, in Afrikaans) and the evidence for claims. As a chapter gets drafted, off it goes to my internal editors. Much time is therefore saved than when one waits for the whole document to be completed.
7. I try to bring joy to the book making process. My team is positive, engaged, and excited about doing books. We celebrate a research grant won or when author copies are received. We eagerly wait to hear whether our book is shortlisted for an award. We built a cabinet that shows off our books to those coming to the office for meetings. You will hear the analogy: a book is like giving birth, hard labor, and then the joy of something new being brought into the (scholarly) world. The joy of writing interesting books carries and sustains the book making process among members of the team.
8. I build the body of writing around a strong backbone. When I write a book, I know the basic backbone of the idea that I want to communicate. What, for example, explains learner disconnection from science education. Because I have that data at hand, I start to write the basic narrative (backbone) of what I found without the muscle meat and the complex nerves or blood vessels. Once the backbone is in place I bring in the added reflections, the enriching
literatures, the work of theorizing and what then becomes a well-textured account of a compelling problem around which the book is centered. What this means is that you need to know what you wish to say in simple terms (the backbone) before adding the flesh.
