Trust the Process
How books get made
I enjoy talking to other authors about how they write, so I’m going to go out on a limb and hope that some of you might be interested to learn more about how the book that you hopefully have ordered by now1 got made. I freely admit that this is a self-indulgent post, but perhaps you’ll find it of interest.
Here’s a rough timeline. In 2016, I started thinking about a book about demobilization. In 2017, I gave my first conference paper about the subject. In 2018, the book proposal I wrote was rejected. In 2019, I put the project on the shelf for a while (rejection is hard!), but by the end of the year, I had secured an advance contract. In 2020, after the worst of the first few months of the pandemic, I began writing seriously. On October 28, 2021, I submitted the manuscript of The Horrible Peace to UMass. By May 2022, I had responded to the peer reviews and received board approval.
You can imagine, then, how eager I am to see the final product, which I hope will arrive around the end of this month.2
What to say
I don’t know exactly when I figured out the table of contents, but I know it was after the first book proposal was rejected. My best guess is late 2020, which is to say, about four years after I first started thinking about the book. I knew the book was about demobilization, but figuring out when to begin and end that story, not to mention how to tell it, proved to be really difficult.
What I learned from this process is that I have to start writing in order to figure out what I want to say. I should have learned that when I wrote my first book, but since that was my doctoral dissertation, I benefitted from the scaffolding provided by my supervisor and a doctoral program that gave me intermediate markers to hit. It’s simply not possible (for me, at least) to do all the reading and the research first, and then start writing. Writing is thinking.
Every chapter folder in my Horrible Peace files has a document in it entitled “cuts,” in which I dump paragraphs that just don’t seem to work like I had hoped. I’ve also got a folder called “miscellaneous writings” for the book that contains misbegotten outlines and descriptions of various rejected ideas, not to mention several defunct chapters—tens of thousands of words, all together. When I finally hold the book in my hands, I’ll feel the weight of those words, even if you don’t.3
But it’s not just book projects that produce words and ideas I don’t end up using. I have two saved drafts of posts for this blog that will almost certainly never see the light of day. One is on policing and the other is on the changing character of war. I thought I knew what I wanted to say about both topics when I sat down to write the posts. It wasn’t until I had flailed away at them for a while that I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
(The only thing I did figure out about policing is that it’s worth watching this strange video of South Korean police drilling for riot control.)
How to say it
A student once complained that I couldn’t stop editing his work. He would send me a draft, I would edit it, and then he would write some more and send it back. He assumed that I would pass over the parts I had already edited, but I never did.
I understand why he was frustrated—he thought he had cleared the hurdle, but I kept making him clear it over and over again.
I probably shouldn’t teach that way (sorry, anonymous student), but that’s how I write. It’s a commonplace to say that writing is an iterative process, but I think that obscures what really happens. “Iterative” sounds intellectually agile and MBA-approved, but it’s actually repetitive and grinding. When I have all the research and reading in a good enough place to start writing a chapter, I can usually produce about 1,000 to 1,500 words per day.4 But I don’t really know if those words are worth anything until I re-read them the next day. I always have tweaks. Always. As the chapter builds, I re-read it every day, from the top. Often, large sections end up in the cuts document; occasionally, those words get brought back from the dead.
An author’s fears
For me at least, writing and publishing are precisely calibrated to create anxiety. My writing process means that the best I can hope for is something I’ve read a hundred times and finally declared “good enough.” I can always come up with things I wish I’d done differently, both stylistically and in terms of the argument.
Meanwhile, the publication process is full of long wait times filled with judgement. While you wait, editors judge whether to offer you a contract. While you wait, peer reviewers judge you. While you wait, presses judge whether that contract deserves their support. While you wait, book reviewers judge you.
As an author, then, you spend so much time second-guessing the decisions you made, and so much time waiting for others to judge those decisions, that you can get yourself to a pretty bad place. Every book I read now that’s even tangentially related to the subject of The Horrible Peace raises questions I wish I’d thought about—and it’s too late. The literary agent Anna Sproul-Latimer has a Substack that sometimes provides concrete advice on how to get published, but more often consists of extended discussions of mental health, relationship management, and other tools that authors need to equip themselves with to endure the publication process.
All that means that when you reach the end of the process, and you hold the book for the first time, you know better than anyone else all that it contains (and all that it doesn’t). What you don’t know, until that moment when you open the box, is what it looks like or feels like in your hands. That’s literally the opposite of how you interact with books when browsing in a bookstore. It’s an amazing, weird, and wonderful feeling, full of pride and terror.5
I’ve already started researching my next book. I think it’s going to be perfect.6
Using the discount code MAS073 for 30% off the paperback.
The 20 months from submission to printing is the slowest publishing experience I’ve ever had, out of six total book projects. A more normal timeline is 12-18 months. The delay can be mostly explained by the fact that one of the peer reviewers agreed to review the manuscript but then never responded to the editor’s emails.
Sorry that was super pretentious.
The Horrible Peace is about 127,000 words including all the extra bits like the bibliography; most chapters are 6,000-8,000 words.
My wife jokes that my two single-authored books are kids three and four, and that is a true reflection of her contribution—I wouldn’t have kids or books without her. But holding a book for the first time is actually very different from holding a baby for the first time (I mean obviously, and I love my children more, for the record, but humor me for a second). Babies are beginnings; books are ends.
After all, the Philadelphia 76ers are NBA champions, right? … <checks notes> … oh dear.