4 posts tagged “scholarship”

Last night I sat down to work on the book. I drove to my favorite local coffee shop -- a warm, friendly space named the Green Muse -- and settled down with an iced coffee. The space was cozy, the coffee was good. Several people smiled at me. I pulled out my laptop and a draft of my book prospectus.  I tried to work. And . . . I just felt all wrong. Completely wrong.

I fought the feeling for a while, but eventually left the coffee shop and drove home. On the way, I began to sort out the feeling. It was this:

For the first time, I felt that I had lost my scholarly self. It wasn't that I didn't want to work on the book. I just felt so far removed from any of the scholarly practices and conversations -- and the time needed for intensive work -- that had defined my scholarly life for so long.

• I felt, for the first time, that being an independent scholar was an unnatural, impossible thing.

• That you cannot write scholarship in isolation, the way one can write creative works. You have to be at the conferences, in touch with the other scholars, teaching in the field, in a university department.

• And you have to be putting more time into it than I have been willing to commit. I want to write. But I also want to run, to play music, to cook, to spend time with friends, to read other books, to travel, to fix up my apartment. To get enough sleep at night.  To have a child. Good scholarship isn't something one does on the side, unless you're willing to devote all of your spare time to it. It just takes too much time to keep up with the literature, conduct research, write, and maintain collegial contacts.

Today I'm feeling better. Had a good little breakthrough on the book proposal this morning. But I'm feeling fragile, and sobered. I will finish the book. But then?  I may decide that I cannot be a scholar. At least not the kind of scholar that I have always strived to be.

I feel . . . a little . . . crushed . . . . Though I have chosen every step that brought me to this place, and would chose that path again.

Over at The Long Eighteenth blog, David Mazella has posted a few very helpful comments about the revising process from dissertation to book. He also includes a depressing (and slightly nauseating) sequence of photographs comparing the book proposal (looking good!) to the actual book (flat and deformed). And over at Serendipities, another post on the topic, this one accompanied by a short bibliography.

We need more spaces to talk about this process. It seems to disappear from scholarly conversations, as if we all know how to make that first book happen.

Germano's From Dissertation to Book, by the by, was not my favorite read on this subject. I've relied more frequently on Luey's Revising Your Dissertation and Germano's Getting It Published.

Is web 2.0 my friend or enemy? 

Today I sat down to take notes on Matt Brown's book and to begin revising my book prospectus. Within moments, I found my mind wandering back to the web -- other academics' blogs that I have begun following, this blog, my Goodreads page. Mind wandering, I contemplated the potential for these social networking sites to provide a scholarly community for someone writing on the fringes of academia. Or can blogging make the private work of writing more public, and therefore help me to stay focused and responsible to my schedule?

Meanwhile, I was not writing, or taking notes, or doing research.

Writing is HARD.  Thinking is HARD. The mind seeks distractions, and finds them. Writing is not a solitary process. It requires the support of a community. But it also requires time apart -- quiet time, alone time. Here's to finding the courage to sit alone for a little while, every morning, doing the hard work I love.