As I mentioned elsewhere, my first book was not based on the dissertation, and I actually researched and wrote it from scratch while on the tenure track. The difficulty of such a task forced me to follow a punishing writing routine and develop an effective writing process, as described in previous posts. But neither of those things were enough to push me over the finish line. The sheer quantity of writing that I had to produce often left me feeling like my well of creativity had run dry, and I felt like I was repeating the same words and sentence structure over and over again. It wasn’t writer’s block in the sense of being stuck, as I generally knew what historical events and ideas that I wanted to convey. It’s that my brain was exhausted, and my prose felt stale. And I felt stale too! I realized that I had to come up with strategies to replenish my supply of creativity. This post describes my three main strategies for reigniting my creative process and is a continuation of my series about my experience as a first-time book author.
There is a great deal of good advice regarding writing strategies for academic writers, such as avoiding jargon, varying sentence structure, and the like. All that advice is very good, but this post is not about those things. In fact, I found it almost impossible to follow such advice when I felt like I had squeezed every last once of originality from my soul. When I was that tired, I couldn’t even come up with alternative sentence structures or synonyms for commonly used words. Instead, what I needed were strategies to inject some life into my thinking so that I could follow such advice.
DRAWING ON THE CREATIVITY OF OTHERS
One of the greatest challenges for a first-time author is to learn to write narratively rather than just analytically. A satisfying book needs to have compelling stories, not just interesting arguments. Although no one expects a research monograph to be as exciting as a novel, it makes for a far more enjoyable reading experience when a monograph features both a strong argument and a narrative arc because stories make it easier to understand complex arguments. The problem is that historians aren’t generally trained to think or write like novelists. Not to mention, we are constrained by our primary sources, and we can’t kill off historical figures or make up events for the fun of it. (If only!)
The most helpful solution I found to this problem was to listen to free online audiobooks, especially novels, to help my brain shift from thinking in a purely analytical mode to a more narrative one. I chose to listen to audiobooks rather than read them because I needed to give my eyes a rest after hours of staring at the computer screen. While I got ready for bed in the evening or did chores around the house, I listened to books that I hadn’t read in years, including the full Anne of Green Gables series and a couple of Jane Austen titles. I think I may have even listened to some classic Winnie the Pooh. Back in high school, my English teachers had taught me about plot structure, including the exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution. I also remembered learning about the importance of characters and settings. Now, listening to audiobooks retrained my brain to listen for and think in terms of plot, characters, and settings rather than just thesis statements, evidence, and historiography. That shift in thinking stayed with me when I returned to my own writing. Just as I wanted every chapter of my book to have an argument, I also wanted each chapter to have a cast characters and a distinct plot line about those characters’ conflicts with each other. So I tried to think like a novelist and turn historical figures into fully fleshed out characters, play up the drama of historical events, and bring the central conflicts to a resolution by the end of the chapter. I fully confess that my first book is a dense academic text that does not read like a novel at all, but I believe that my attempt at writing narratively resulted in clearer prose.
Besides a strong narrative structure, novels also boast a rich vocabulary, full of verbs and adjectives that burst with emotion and action. Their sentence structures are varied too, sometimes short or long, elegant or simple, concise or effusive, and abrupt or gradual, as required by the story and characters. Listening to novels infused my brain with a fresh flow of words and sentence structures that I could use to dramatize the story that I was trying to write. Music with evocative lyrics produced a somewhat similar effect on me. Thus, it was the creative genius of great novelists and songwriters that helped me revive my flagging and much weaker creative impulse.
LEARNING FROM JOURNALISTS
In trying to tell a compelling narrative, I sometimes found it difficult to transition from reading primary sources in Vietnamese to writing my book in English. My first book was about the evolving relationship between Ngô Đình Diệm and the anticommunist political opposition in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). I knew my readers would likely be unfamiliar with most of the politicians, parties, platforms, coalitions, debates, and realignments that I wanted to write about. But what words in English was I supposed to use to describe politics that played out in Vietnamese? How was I to make RVN politics comprehensible to my mostly American readers when there were no American counterparts for the various groups and individuals that my book covered? Only some of my primary sources were in English, so I only had a few examples of how to write about Vietnamese politics in the English language. The problem proved especially vexing when I was tired, and it felt like I was perpetually reaching for a word without being able to remember it.
I listen to a lot of National Public Radio (NPR), and I found to my surprise that it helped me find the right words. NPR’s political coverage aims to explain the complexity of American politics in terms that are easily comprehensible to the average American. I listened carefully to the vocabulary that the radio hosts and reporters used in their stories, such as extremist, moderate, grassroots, pragmatist, finding common ground, bread and butter issues, etc. These words are everyday words that American journalists use to talk about politics to American citizens, and this vocabulary is specific to modern politics but not to any particular political system. Therefore, I tried to use that same sort of vocabulary to describe politics in the RVN, when appropriate. For example, I initially described a certain political candidate as championing bread and butter issues, but then I remembered that butter was actually an imported luxury food in the RVN rather than commonplace fare like it is in the West. So I opted for kitchen table issues instead. It’s not a perfect fit, as many Vietnamese I know like to eat while sitting on the floor (because tile floors are nice and cool in tropical weather), but it’s better than bread and butter issues. Using American political vocabulary to describe RVN politics was an attempt to render the unfamiliar familiar to my American readers.
If the first strategy was to draw creativity from novelists and songwriters, then I would describe this second strategy as learning from journalists or others whose job it is to explain complex topics to the public. Had my research been about another topic, I might have chosen instead to listen to podcasts, read self-help books, or listen to free audiobooks of popular nonfiction.
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS…
Yet even audiobooks and NPR could only do so much when my mind felt utterly drained. Then, the only thing left to do was to give myself a writing break and get some exercise, though I still felt the need to be strategic about it. Before exercising, I would think through the particular intellectual problem that I was wrestling with in my writing, and I would keep the problem in the back of my head as I went on a run or a hike. More often than not, I came back from my exercise more relaxed and with some ideas for how to solve the problem.
Of course, these strategies didn’t just help me reignite my creative process. They helped me endure the stress and anxiety of life on the tenure track. My writing routine felt less severe after a humorous novel or a catchy song, and producing a book seemed less daunting after a hike in the woods on a beautiful fall day. In short, these strategies made me feel that writing a book and securing tenure were actually achievable.
Thinking back to that time, I think I needed three things to finish the manuscript: time (hence the writing routine), an effective method (that is, my writing process), and creativity (replenished through writing strategies).
TECHNICAL STUFF
Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-leaning-on-table-3767411/