In this continuing series, Rachel Toor interviews scholars about their writing process and influences. Recent columns have featured interviews with Lillian Faderman, Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Carlo Rotella, and Helen Sword.
Advice
“Allow yourself to be terrified to take risks and take those risks anyway.”
Advice
“The failure to support new scholars with stable university positions is the biggest threat to research innovations.”
Advice
“Part of my personal political project is naturalizing the sound of expert information in a Black American woman’s voice.”
Advice
How West Virginia University Press landed an award-winning story collection and what its success means for small academic presses.
Advice
“I know many people say never write when you can be distracted. It’s the opposite for me. Distraction is important.”
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“In graduate school I learned how to find facts, but the profession only wanted them presented in a certain way.”
Advice
A Holocaust scholar and philosopher talks about writing, faculty retirement, and scholarly friendships.
Advice
A Johns Hopkins historian, whose new book on Black women’s suffrage is out this month, shares the legal, academic, and artistic influences that come together in her work.
Advice
A Harvard social historian of the African diaspora and Atlantic slavery seeks to tell unfamiliar stories “without letting the power of anti-Blackness stand in for Black history.”
Advice
“For some academics,” says Eve L. Ewing, “inaccessibility is the coin of the realm. For some, you prove your expertise by restricting your own legibility to as few people as possible.”
Advice
What’s it like for an academic to see his book turn into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?
Advice
“Since I was in graduate school, I have had a problem with the exclusive use of the third-person voice,” the MIT professor says.
Advice
“Write the kind of book you enjoy reading. If you’re not a part of your own audience, you’ll be faking it.”
Advice
“There is nothing I am not interested in. That’s my strength. My weakness is there is nothing I am not interested in.”
Advice
“If you don’t understand the need to make an argument in scholarly writing, you don’t understand scholarship.”
Advice
Much like the “sharks,” publishers prod and poke and quickly suss out whether you have what it takes and whether they’ll invest in your book.
Advice
Does waiting to hear a verdict on your work get easier as you advance in your career? No, it does not.
Advice
Naomi Schneider, an executive editor at the University of California Press, talks shop about publishing.
Advice
A new essay collection on “what editors do” is an essential read for anyone who hopes to get published.
Advice
“There’s deep pleasure in working on your chops, and deep reward in being part of a community of inquiry with students who are working on theirs.”
Advice
“Most scientists I know are wonderful storytellers, but they are taught from early in their careers to edit out the story, to redact the personal.”
Advice
Frustration is “not an impediment to successful writing,” but “a necessary part of the process.”
Advice
“Journal reviewers can seem like angry trolls, blocking the bridge to publication.”
Advice
“I look at the words on the page as if I were arranging flowers in a vase.”
Page Proof
“In academic writing you’re given a lot of latitude to be boring.”
Page Proof
“It’s an incredibly arrogant act to publish anything.”
Advice
“Good prose requires dedication to the craft of writing, and our profession simply doesn’t reward it.”
Page Proof
“You have to write a lot to get better at writing,” so “don’t stop.”
Page Proof
“I still have the standard anxiety of a struggling musician: Regardless of the gig, I want to be invited back.”
Page Proof
“I can’t tell whether any improvement is because I became a woman, or because I finally grew up.”
Page Proof
To be called a “popularizer” is the kiss of death for an academic only if the actual writing is sloppy and sensationalized.
Page Proof
“Ideally you want to be an id on the first draft and a superego on the second.”
Advice
“Good Lord, I certainly learned nothing about writing from grad school!”
Page Proof
Why a philosopher applies Kantian ethics to writing.
Page Proof
How a Stanford professor, known for his work on “historical thinking,” learned to trust his own voice.
Page Proof
A Princeton historian is a teacher, scholar, and collaborator — but not, he says, a writer.
