writing

On “Writing a Journal Article in Twelve Weeks”: Or, on finishing the God Damn Book

Daniel Tubb

A long time ago, when I was a new professor writing my first academic article, I used Wendy Belcher’s brilliant “Revising a Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.”1 Now, as a not-so-new professor with a book to finish and writing projects to work on, I’ve decided to return to Belcher’s 12-step program. It’s mid-January. It’s busy with administrative work, but I’m beginning to see the light. So I’m going to take some time to think about what it would take to finish the book this year. I think the end of August would be a good time. So, how do we get there?

On Hard Deadlines.

To have a few books, things that stand out. Finishing is one of the hardest parts for me. And when I think back to the times I finished big projects, it was when there were two things. A hard and immovable deadline and a commitment to work at the beginning. That is, I had both a carrot and a stick. That is, there was an important, immovable deadline that had financial and time implications.

To finish my master’s degree, I had committed to a two-week bike trip with friends. I was also going to start a Ph.D. program that September. My thesis had to be submitted by August, so I could defend in September. The PhD program had funding and I had the trip to look forward to with friends. In short, two carrots, and the stick of having to find a job if I didn’t finish. I finished, in the train, to catch the flight, for the bike trip.

For my Ph.D., I was going to be a postdoc at Yale, and my son was about to be born. So again, financial incentive (the job), and something else I wanted to do (be a father). I finished a few days before my son was due.

For my first book, I had a deadline from my publisher and my series editor. I saw my editor at the conference, and he asked where the manuscript was. He put the fire in my belly. As the book was tied to my tenure file, I felt that without the book, I didn’t see how I could get tenure. The combination worked.

For the second book, I had a self-imposed weekly deadline to edit an article, and got letters published in a magazine. So that worked, too. Same thing being book review editor. Short, regular, weekly deadlines.

On Making a Commitment.

The other thing that is consistent with the times that I’ve finished work before, from the MA, was that I was able to work on the book every day. For my MA and PhD, that was easy. I decided and was able to focus on it. I lived in Ottawa, I had few commitments, and I decided to write with friends, go to coffee shops, go to the office, and work on it. Not necessarily every day, but most days. It became so that if I hadn’t worked on it, I felt anxious.

But for the book, and especially for the second round of revisions, I ended up creating a writing group of peers and students. This worked in several ways. Sometimes it was a project of writing simultaneously and in place with people. That is, in a coffee shop or online. Other times it was a public commitment to spending a day of writing, with consequences if I did not write.

Twice I made a public commitment to write or revise a thousand words a day for thirty days, or I would donate $50 to a political campaign I didn’t support. I wrote—no matter what. I wrote. Even when the writing left me exhausted. But, every time I completed it, I had a rush of exhilaration at the forward momentum.

What to do?

So, where does that leave me on the Atarraya book? It’s January 19, and I am thinking about how to finish. I have the outline of the book. I know where it is going. I know where I am going, broadly speaking. I just have to do the work. To finish the book.

What would it take to get there? A few things. First, a carrot? Something better to do. I have ideas. But, scheduling a family vacation at the beginning of the summer, with the kids, would be an idea. This would give me time to finish. Another carrot, the promotion deadlines are at the same time, so put in a draft, with a publisher letter. Maybe I could make a commitment to the publisher with a submission deadline?

A traditional stick is a little harder. Why is that? Well, I have tenure. So I’m not going to lose my job. So that’s harder. But, a public commitment would be another option. I’m not sure if I want to do that, or if the political kind is the best. The stakes feel high. But I know that the positive reinforcement has been less successful.

What’s another option? Scheduling time to write with other people.

When to do it?

When I look back, the projects I’ve done and completed were things I did in the morning. So, that I was able to “check-out” at about 10 am, having done a good day’s work. At times, I’d also do a chunk later. But, it meant I had two bursts of writing. Two bursts that were time-constrained.

What can I learn from this?

Looking back on Belcher’s Writing a Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, I can see it get me started on finishing my first book. I hope it can help me finish my third.

Update

I wrote to a friend:

Do you have a contract for your book?

I’ve been reflecting on what has worked in the past on finishing books, and what hasn’t worked. I’ve realized that in every case, I finished big projects when I had a carrot and a stick, after a long period of open-ended thinking.

• MA was bike trip and PhD funding;
• PhD was my son and Yale PostDoc;
• My book’s first draft was promotion ($$$) and fieldwork;
• My books’ second draft was tenure file and Shivi giving me an ultimatum.

The other work I’ve done consistently was regular deadlines (Anthropologica book reviews were due twice a year because the journal was going to press) and my book of letters was done on a weekly basis.

In the case of the book, both times, I also had a negative public commitment. e.g. give money to a politician I didn’t like, if I didn’t write regularly. This is easy enough to do, I could make a negative commitment. Albeit, I am not sure what it would be.

If I could get a draft in, I can come up with strong carrot. I could plan a vacation trip with family on July 1. I could also plan to submit an application for promotion on July 1. Promotion is a carrot, and I think with a complete manuscript draft submitted to press, I could get that.

But, I think it would help that case, and give me external pressure, if I got an advance contract to do it.

I was waiting to get a contract until I’ve completed the book. But, maybe looking at my past patterns, that’s a mistake. What do you think?

Aim for a draft July 1, and aim for an advance contract, and aim to have that as my submission date to the publisher? anything I’ve ever finished, has also been finished in about 6 months of really hard work.

References

  1. Belcher, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition. A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. ↩

Writer’s Diary #40: Makeshift Writing

Daniel Tubb

Writing is often seen as a pursuit of perfection—the perfect sentence, paragraph, or article. But perfection is the result, not the method. Perfectionism tells us little about the process of writing. Instead, the secret is to embrace imperfection, and approach writing as a makeshift endeavour. It is something cobbled together. Words and ideas are improvised. Perfection, if it is to come, emerges out of an iterative imperfect process. This is the essence of what I think of as makeshift writing. A mode that is temporary, contingent, ever good enough. The point is not to achieve premature perfection, but to work into the words and let the ideas develop, on the page.

Too often, as writers, planning becomes paralyzing. What is the argument? What is the outline? What is the conceptual insight? Research becomes endless. So much so, that it impedes writing. To write this way, is to fall into a trap. The trap is the idea that a piece of writing comes out perfect, and that it must follow a strict, logical series of steps. The goal might be such a piece of writing. But, the getting there is far messier.

The makeshift writing I have in mind is a practical, embodied labor. It happens not in the realm of the perfect analytical structure and theoretical contribution. But in the countless moments of revisions on the page. To write through makeshift is to embrace messiness. A call for makeshift writing is a call to write, to get the words down on the page, and then to improve on them. To iterate. Makeshift is a riposte against the idea that words emerge perfect.

As an anthropologist, maybe one way to approach writing as craftwork is to approach it as an ethnographer might. To think about writing is to embrace an autoethnographic observation of ones practice. It is to consider writing as a process. As a labor practice. To think of writing as labor is to think of it less as intellectual labor, but as a practical, embodied labor of the countless steps and interventions made as a writer. Could focusing on this labor, on the actual practice of writing and fixing verbs and revising tens and making small changes and looking for repeated words and all the other little tricks of a writer’s toolbox help demystify the process?

This process of writing is, for me, ever makeshift. The trick is to begin then to make changes. To be being willing to cobble something imperfect and then improvise and iterate to improve it. To bring together ideas in unexpected ways, and then to work and rework them until they make sense. Makeshift is about approaching the words not as if they were the pursuit of perfection, but to do so as a practical kind of craft work that can be honed through imperfect, iterative hard work. Makeshift writing is a way to get the words on the page, to keep working with them, to keep moving, even in the face of imperfection. It’s about embracing the process, the labor, the craft of writing itself, and it is about how, through this embrace, that something good enough begins to emerge. Something that is meaningful and true, and just maybe, near perfect.

Writer’s Diary #33 – Emergent structure, or work more; think less

Daniel Tubb

This morning, I did a lot of fiddling and reworking the text of a chapter, looking for it order. I read, printed it out, made tentative edits, and reviewed it. I moved chunks of text around, created an outline, and made changes iteratively. After the morning, I have the beginning of an outline.

I can’t see through the project, but I can begin to feel like I could maybe move through it and begin to make sense of it.

What did I do?

I worked at it from 6:00 am to 9:15 am. I read bits of it but moved them around in an outline. I did some queries and a little programming, but mostly I organized, reorganized, worked, and revised. I had no plan. But I read and edited and outlined and moved and renamed. I had a shower, and remembered a scene, and went and found that, and I started to find some order.

Is it perfect? No. But I can begin to get a sense of the chapter.

Tomorrow, I will keep at it.

Mostly, it feels like a structure is emerging. That’s more than I had on the weekend. It feels great.

Writer’s Diary #28 – Anthropic’s Claude-2-100K

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday I listened to the latest Hard Fork episode, which features an interview with Dario Amodei, one of a group of OpenAI employees who left to start Anthropic, OpenAI’s competitor. The interview is quite interesting for someone like me who doesn’t know this area well. But it made me want to check out Anthropic’s new [Claude 2 AI] (https://claude.ai/login).

Claude 2 is not available from Anthropic in Canada, but I got access through Quora’s Poe app.

I’m an anthropologist, a writer, and I’m interested in these big language models and teaching and writing. On the one hand, there is a lot of disruption. I’m on sabbatical, but I don’t know what that means for student essays. But I’m fascinated by AI as an editorial assistant. Many writers rely on editors, but for a long time those editors were unpaid, often female relatives. AI provides me with a free editor and critical reader, for the first time not a family member or friend.

Working with Claude 2-100K yesterday, I came to a couple of realizations.

First, 100K makes Claude much more useful and less stupid than ChatGPT. A few weeks ago I had the idea of using ChatGPT 4 to rearrange a book of fragments. Much of my work involved condensing fragments into summaries for ChatGPT 4’s short memory, or at least the short memory I have access too. With Claude 2-100k, I could give the AI the whole draft. We discussed several possible outlines. With the ChatGPT 4 model I have access to, it always felt like I was at the limit of the AI memory and capacity. With Claude-2-100k, the answer was much slower to come, but was feedback on the entire damn manuscript. My first book took 8 months. This took under a minute.

From there, I had a long, free-flowing conversation with Claude 2 about my book, its ideas and theories, and then we turned to writing and the differences between how Claude 2 writes and how I work. Frankly, Claude 2 just felt much more thoughtful and interesting to talk to than ChatGPT 4.

ChatGPT feels like it has less memory, is dumber, and frankly more prone to nonsense. It seems smart at first, but on further review it is often very formulaic.

Maybe Claude 2 will seem that way to me, but yesterday it seemed like a much more interesting interlocutor than I’ve had on this book, ever. What it says about me that I say this about a large neural net running on servers, converting text into tokens and then running complex vectors and matrices, leaves me very confused. What does it mean to be human, I wonder?