How I write

Here is how I write:

I start with an introduction; far too frequently (or not; it feels worn to me, but perhaps others might disagree) with a particular anecdote that has stuck with me throughout my research.  I then draw a problem from it.  This is often the first time around dissatisfying.  It feels banal or vague or unnecessarily complicated to me.  But no matter.  There are words on the page, and I find almost always the hardest paragraph of a paper is the first.

Then I plunge in.   I hate rhetorical questions in papers – they call too much attention to the author – but find myself sometimes using them in first drafts to push myself forward.  I have notes upon notes, lists of quotations from primary sources, but generally I don’t organize them beyond the Word document that I created in the archive or library.  I remember the particularly juicy quotations, and often find as I refer back to locate the exact citations I will find others that are useful or relevant, either in the paragraph I’m working on or in the page or so I’ve just written.

In part because of that, every two or three paragraphs I go back and edit.  Heavily.   I add material.  I twist my prose, deleting all the semicolons which I sprinkle throughout without realizing it.  I rewrite the introduction to more closely mirror the argument I’m developing.  I frequently delete vast swaths of material that I now recognize was either 1) me beating around the bushes, trying to enunciate the idea that the final sentence on the page summed up, or 2)me getting carried away in the historiography or falling in love with primary sources that set up the context in which my argument happens rather than advancing the argument itself.  I cut and paste.

I not infrequently find myself with a brilliant idea, or realize that for my argument to proceed I need a protagonist to take a position that I vaguely remember her taking. Then I go prospecting through my notes for a quotation which illustrates it.  I trust myself to have absorbed the atmosphere of the sources enough to draw such general impressions from them.

Sometimes I go to the last page and write in CAPITAL LETTERS trigger phrases that remind me where the argument I’m developing is supposed to go.  Example, from a paper I’m working on right now:

DIFFERENCES – REGULAR CELEBRATION; ‘FRONTIER’ AND METHODIST V. PURITAN MONTHLY (AT LEAST) ADMINISTRATION; ORDINATION – TO NEW WORLD; COMMUNITY RATHER THAN CONVERSION

When I reach the conclusion, I’m impatient.  I generally dash off something that I am not satisfied with.  The important thing is that I have said everything I wanted to say.

Most of my first drafts are too meaty.  There’s too much primary material in them, too many vague sentences that reflect me trying to work out what I am arguing in the paper.  I tell too many mini-stories, because recapping is easier than pushing my own argument forward.   The argument, for that matter, is often unclear.  The transitions are generally weak.   Much of my rewriting is generally done in the first sections of the piece.   If there is a good paper here, I chisel it out, like Michelangelo did with his sculptures, paring away the useless to reveal the clean lines of a good article.

I have no idea how historians did this before the word processor.