“Writing is a process.” That was the mantra that was drilled into my head by countless teachers since about fifth or sixth grade. Yet it wasn’t until I wrote my first book that I developed a thoughtful, individualized writing process that worked for me. So in this post, I wanted to share my writing process, not because it was anything special, but because I found it helpful to hear about other scholars’ processes while I was trying to develop one for myself. This post is a continuation of my (much interrupted and delayed!) series about my experience as a first-time book author. Whereas my last post was about my writing routine, that is, how I made writing a part of my regular schedule, this one is about the different stages in my process for drafting the book. The process described below has become my for just about all of my research, though I modify it slightly for each project.
(By retrospect, a part of me wonders why I didn’t develop my own writing process sooner. Were other scholars this late to figure it out too? In my case, I think part of the reason is that writing came very naturally to me from a young age. Many of my grade school teachers preached the importance of writing as a process that started with prewriting, which included preliminary activities like brainstorming, outlining, and freewriting before working on the rough draft. But I often found that prewriting made me write slower and forget my ideas. After all, I usually had most of the paper already organized in my head before I sat down to write anything, and my process entailed nothing more than a few rough drafts of the entire paper followed by a final draft. It wasn’t until graduate school when I faced far longer and more difficult writing tasks that I appreciated the need to for prewriting and writing in stages.)
To explain my writing process, I actually have to start with how I organized my primary sources. Most archives assign specific numbers to every document or folder, with a folder sometimes containing multiple documents. When conducting archival research, I routinely entered the number of every document/folder I collected (or took notes one) into a spreadsheet. Then, I added keywords for each entry. My first book was a political history of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) during the rule of Ngô Đình Diệm from 1954 to 1963, and my keywords were typically the names of political figures, political parties and factions, religious groups, ethnic groups, place names (province, city, or, if more general, region), dates and/or date ranges, laws, policies, controversies, and historical events. I entered the keywords for an entire batch of folders in one sitting and checked at the start of every batch to make sure that I was consistently using the same keywords across batches. My repertoire of keywords changed over time, and I sometimes went back to update keywords from previous batches of folders. I used this same process to keyword articles from historical periodicals too. This organization was the foundation upon which I developed my writing process.
My process started with a prewriting exercise that I think of as a book sketch. The book sketch – which may or may not be a term I made up – was a sort of glorified table of contents in which I identified the topic, date range, and a few events and issues to be covered in each chapter. (I’m describing it as a book sketch because it wasn’t ever detailed enough to be considered an outline.) Next, I sorted my mass of archival sources into different “baskets” based on the book sketch, with a “basket” for each chapter. A “basket” consisted of relevant document/folder numbers as well as the attached keywords that related to the chapter. Including the keywords was critical, both because many archival folders included multiple documents covering a variety of topics and years and because I needed the keywords to remind myself later of why I included any given source in the basket. With that preliminary planning and sorting done, I moved on to individual chapters.
Each chapter started with prewriting on a smaller scale. First, I produced a chapter sketch that broke down the body of the chapter into sections. I didn’t spend any time thinking about the chapter’s introduction or conclusion initially. Based on the chapter sketch, I sorted through the “basket” associated with the chapter and selected the archival sources whose keywords were relevant to the section I was working on.
Second, each section required prewriting as well. I took notes on the selected documents for that particular section, identified the different topics to be covered in the section, and created a separate word doc for the notes about each topic. I gave these word docs easily identifiable names based on the order that I expected to consult them. For example, the notes for the first section of chapter 4 might be entitled, “Ch 4.11 notes – name of first topic,” “Ch 4.12 notes – name of second topic,” etc. I also took notes on relevant historical periodicals, memoirs, and secondary sources.
Afterwards, I created a section outline from memory without consulting the notes I had just taken. Unlike the earlier sketches, this outline was actually very detailed and served as a roadmap for drafting the section. I completed each section in chronological order and revised each one just enough to give me a sense of how to start the next section. Along the way, I periodically updated the chapter sketchby adding, combining, or rearranging the different sections to reflect the changing draft.
After I had drafted the entire body of a given chapter, I completed that chapter’s thesis paragraph, historiographical review, and narrative hook. It was then time to think about the chapter as a whole, and I worked my way through the draft from the introduction to the end of the body, revising, deleting, and adding material at every turn. When I felt like the chapter articulated a reasonably clear and structured argument, I worked on the conclusion and then revised the entire chapter with the newly written conclusion in mind. I often felt unsure about certain revisions, and I saved different drafts as separate files so I could go back and consult earlier versions. I gave gave the files names like “Ch 4 draft – 1,” “Ch 4 draft – 2,” etc. I also changed the font color of the older versions to blue or green while keeping the current version in black so I wouldn’t accidentally get mixed up if I had multiple files open at a time. I revised each chapter just enough for me to feel that I had a solid foundation to start the next chapter, and in between chapters, I went back and updated the book sketch.
I think I wrote the introduction to the book after I had completed about half of the chapters, and my institution organized a manuscript review for me when I finished everything but the last chapter and conclusion. My manuscript reviewer gave me incredibly helpful feedback for revising the introduction and first three chapters and helping me figure out what direction to go in for the last chapter and conclusion. In fact, I had originally envisioned sixth chapter but thought it made more sense to break off my envisioned sixth chapter for a standalone article. The book’s conclusion was the last piece to be drafted. With the full manuscript in hand, I then engaged in several rounds of holistic revisions before sending it off to the publisher.
Looking back at my process now, I think what jumps out at me is that I actually started with a rather vague sense of the book, and the only detailed outlines I ever created were for individual sections, not entire chapters and certainly not the entire book. Put differently, my process built the overarching argument upward brick by brick from the primary sources. In contrast, some scholars favor the opposite approach. They freewrite their first draft of a chapter from memory without checking their primary sources and later revise the draft as they take notes and read their sources more carefully. Thus, these scholars start with the overarching structure and build downward based on the primary sources, replacing bricks and shifting them around as needed, so to speak. This alternative process is most likely much faster. Yet I think I prefer my time-consuming method because it’s compatible with the way my brain works and the current state of Vietnam studies. The slower process enables me to sift through a lot of material and select the most relevant, whereas I fear I would skip over important documents if I followed the quicker process. Also, juggling a massive amount of Vietnamese-language archival documents while trying to freewrite in English would be quite difficult for me. Moreover, Vietnam studies is an underdeveloped field. There isn’t a density of research on many topics, and any given monograph may be adding a larger proportion of new knowledge to the field compared to monographs in more developed fields. Such conditions make it much more difficult to hold together a narrative in one’s head sufficiently to freewrite an entire chapter.
In the end, my grade school teachers were right about the importance of prewriting, but I had to experiment on my own until I figured out a method that worked for me.
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