Tag: writing

What A Dissertation Is Teaching Me About Work

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment
A totally accurate depiction of me in my office.

I offer the following lessons with the assumption that: a) sharing our experiences with each other is valuable; b) my lessons are specific and provisional, especially since I haven’t completed the dissertation; and c) what works for me may be counterproductive for you.

I. Don’t mistake time spent for productivity. This is not a 9-5 job. Taking up space in an office somewhere doesn’t get you closer to your goal. I have found that if I’m doing intensive writing, thinking, or outlining, the first two hours are my most productive. Hours 3 and 4 are moderately productive. Most days, hours beyond 4 are not suitable for intensive work.

Though I would often like to work more than I do, for a whole lot of reasons it is extremely rare for me to put in an 8-hour day of dissertation work. A 4-hour day is completely normal for me. And that’s fine! Don’t let arbitrary norms of what constitutes “hard work” guide your practices.

II. Be brutally honest with yourself. What doesn’t work in your first draft? What is the hang-up that has you scared to open up chapter 3 for weeks at a time? Facing these questions and resolving them may take intellectual creativity, but they require at least as much emotional courage. The thing you’ve worked hardest at in all the world is full of errors, problems, and just plain not-very-good writing.

III. Listen to your body. Some days a pen feels heavy in my fingers. Some days it feels like lifting weights to press down the keys on my laptop. Step away. Sleep. Exercise. Don’t drink too much! Take a walk in the sun. The little voice inside saying you don’t have time take a break from the dissertation and go do something healthy is a lie. An hour of work when you’re mentally and emotionally sharp is worth more than 10 hours of foggy work.

IV. If you live by your work you’ll die by your work. Here’s the thing: when you finish your dissertation you won’t be even a little bit more valuable than when you started it. You won’t be more important in any way that finally matters. If your work is your calling you are blessed, but your work is not you. You are loved, and lovable, right now. Everyone needs to know that. This, by the way, is one of the things Christianity does for me.

V. Set Realistic Goals and Let People Help You Meet Them. At a certain point, you do have to, you know, finish this monstrosity. I don’t have any secret sauce here other than trial and error. Too-ambitious goals can leave you feeling discouraged. No goals at all can let you fritter away whole months. So tell your advisor or a writing group that you’re going to give them such and such on day x. And do it, even if you know it’s a crappy draft. And then when the feedback comes and you want to cry, remember points II and IV.

Writing a Dissertation? Take Time To Remember Why You’re Doing It.

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

It is remarkable to think about how often we approach our work in a spirit of fear. At least, that’s my story. The fears run along well-worn tracks at this point: I’ll never finish this dissertation; I don’t have what it takes; it’s so big one day of work isn’t going to make a difference; and at the end of it my reward is an impossible job market.

There are joys to consider: I love to explore the past and learn new things; writing is really hard but it’s also really rewarding to create something that didn’t exist before; history is a longtime hobby of mine and now I get paid to do my hobby! Not to mention this is my God-given vocation.

But sometimes all the joys are overshadowed and you’re left with the fears. On those days, you might need to do something else entirely, or do something that I call dissertation-adjacent. It may not be the most productive use of your time. It may not move the ball forward very much. But it may be a means of finding your way back into the material with a new spark. You’ve got to remember why you went into this in the first place, and if you can’t remember, maybe you should just stop for a while.

Today was a dissertation-adjacent day for me. Or at least, it started out that way. My dissertation looked like a big giant monster that wanted to eat my soul. So I did something else. I started trawling through old student newspapers from an evangelical college. At some point I ought to look at these particular newspapers anyway, but they’re certainly not at the top of the writing or research agenda this summer. I wasn’t supposed to be doing this today. But it was a way to try to recover the spark. And besides, I might find some useful material.

I ended up with a lot of useful sources, a new chapter outline, and some great quotes. Joy.

I’ll share an example. In the early 1970s there is a particular genre of article from black students at evangelical colleges that keeps appearing at a lot of institutions. These students are trying to find some way of communicating to the white students that it is really hard to be black there, and that the campus needs to change. Part of what makes these letters so poignant is that they are, on the one hand, a unique product of this particular radical moment when young black people were taking new pride in their identities and, on the other hand, often read as though they could have been written yesterday (because white evangelical environments remain oppressive today).

cc r.e.a. 1971

This particular black student began modestly: “I am not a writer,” he wrote. But he had a lot to say nonetheless. Here are some choice lines:

If only for a moment the true and living God would allow and grant to you, to your world, and this community the insight, the vision to see the living, the creeping, the stalking devastation brought into existence, given life and perpetually sustained by you, by your world and the character of your world. That character is Imposition. You have imposed your whiteness over and upon my blackness in your oak-like concepts, ideals and values…

How have you done this? Please try this question, is there anything black in, of or about [this] College besides its six black students or did you know how many of us there were? Why is this?…

few of you will understand this statement: THE AFFIRMATION OF OUR BLACKNESS AND OUR HUMANITY IN BLACK IS A BEAUTIFUL, LONG AWAITED GIFT FROM GOD.

And now I remember why I’m doing this.

Historians and the Creative Process

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

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When you first start out with the idea that you might like to be a historian it is easy to imagine that historians are scribes of some kind. Novelists, of course, are creators. They have to invent the stories they write. But historians only need to look at old documents and tell us what they say.

Maybe none of us were quite that naive when we started out, but I do think it’s fair to say that until we begin to really write and publish we have no concept of the extent to which historians—and all nonfiction writers I suppose—are engaged in a creative process. We, too, invent the stories we write.

In our age of proud skepticism and militant ignorance it is perhaps dangerous to suggest that historians are “inventing stories.” This could easily be misunderstood. We’re not making things up. But at every turn in a writing project, we encounter questions that require us to be creators rather than mere scribes of “what happened.”

As historians know, but the public might not, choosing what to write about is a creative and rather arbitrary decision. Lots of stuff happened in the past. It could mean lots of things. What do you cut out and what do you include? Philosophically, one could argue that everything is chaos and that there is no particular direction to events. Good luck writing history that way.

Instead of transcribing the chaos, we must make creative decisions that bring order to it. We create a narrative and sense of movement by the people and things we choose to emphasize. We are interpreters of events that don’t explain themselves. We don’t uncover the obvious meaning that was there all along; we bring meaning to it by bringing the past and present into contact with each other.

A few weeks ago there was a question going around twitter about what is obvious within one’s profession but not obvious to the public. For historians, the creative process is one of those things. It is easy for the public to believe that historians are people who know lots of facts about the past. While it is true that we end up knowing lots of stuff, that doesn’t make us historians. Without the work of interpretation—an essentially creative process—we’re just good trivial pursuit players.

Depending what we’re writing about, we may feel we get to know our “characters” in a special way. But we can’t, like a novelist, invent the quintessential episode or perfect bit of dialogue that lets the reader in on our secret knowledge. We have to figure out how all the thousands of things that the person actually said and did can be crafted to present the character we believe we have come to know.

And dialogue! Uggh! Sometimes we wish we could put words in their mouths instead of wrestling with how to communicate the essential meaning of old letters, memos, and speeches written with odd grammar in obscure contexts.

Where does the story begin and where does it end? It has to start somewhere and it can’t go on forever. These are creative decisions that, in the best case scenario, emerge organically out of the story we’re telling. While working on one dissertation chapter in the past couple weeks, an entire new chapter rose up out of the mist, unknown to me before. The ending is still clarifying itself.

One of the oddest things about the creative process is that we don’t make all these decisions at the front end and then write what we decided to write. Maybe there are a few geniuses here and there who do this, but it doesn’t work that way for me at all. Instead, only the act of writing begins to bring the story into view. In that sense, writing feels more like a collaboration—your conscious efforts, your unconscious self, and the historical actors all working together—than a solo project.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Describes Depression

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Chimamanda

In a recent profile in the New Yorker, Adichie discussed her battle with depression:

As a child, she had a kind of natural authority. Many girls wanted to be her friend, and in an effort to win her they would present her with their lunches, and she would eat them. At the same time, she had episodes of depression—the beginnings of a disease that continues to afflict her—though she did not yet have a name for them. “I was a popular child who had tons of friends and did well in school,” she says, “but then I would have moments where I didn’t want to see anybody, didn’t want to talk to anybody, cried for no reason, felt that I was bad and terrible, isolated myself.”….

She dreaded falling into that pit again. She knew that some people thought there was a link between depression and art, that it gave you insight or depth or something, but the idea that someone could write while depressed made no sense to her. “I can’t even read. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. I can’t see my life, I’m blind. I feel myself sinking—that’s the word I use with my family and friends. Well, actually, I don’t talk about it with my family much, as lovely as they are, because they don’t really understand depression. They expect a reason, but I don’t have a reason.”

This rings true. There is no reason. It just is. “I can’t see my life” is especially evocative and apt. That’s exactly how it feels. I admire Adichie’s work and assigned Americanah in one of my classes. It’s nice to know even globally famous writers are human!

The Power of a Good Biography

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

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I’m reading George Marsden’s Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Jonathan Edwards, and it’s reminding me of being a kid. When done well, biographies can be incredibly immersive experiences, far more so than any movie or television series (in my humble opinion, of course). When I was young biographies were key entry points into history and they made my imagination run wild. It was, and still is, hard to believe that other people have existed and lived different lives from mine. (Think about it).

Entering into the life of a person in another time and place and following it through to its conclusion can be extremely sobering and inspiring. It also has the happy effect of assuring me that I’m thoroughly average, will always be average, and can bask in the freedom of not being A Great Man of History.

I think I would like to write a biography in the future. But I am puzzling over the ethical dilemmas of the genre. I remember when I finished my master’s thesis (which, though not strictly a biography, had some biographical features and focused in particular on John Stennis) the chair of the history department asked me, “Wait, do you like this guy?” Because Stennis was a white supremacist it was a loaded question! And I thought the answer ought to have been obvious, but perhaps it wasn’t. I had tried very hard to understand Stennis, and I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as a historian understanding their subjects too well. But…who we try hardest to understand is an important choice, one with consequences.

At the outset of Jonathan Edwards, Marsden asks us to try to understand Edwards in his time. He wasn’t an American or an evangelical, and he couldn’t imagine social hierarchy as anything but a good thing. So far so good. But I’m not sure Marsden’s commendable sensitivity to understanding Edwards extends very well to other actors in the book.

As much as I feel I understand Edwards, so much of the world around him seems largely invisible in this book (so far; I’m 300 pages in). Why are the Indians so opaque? Why are the enslaved so invisible? To say that they were so for Edwards for long stretches of his life tells us a little about Edwards but isn’t itself a reason to render them so in a new history.

These are old qualms that have been much discussed and argued over, but I’m still confused about them. And it seems to me that biography may be a genre particularly vulnerable to this problem. Nonetheless, I see why Marsden won the Bancroft Prize. It’s a great book.

Jonathan Edwards strikes me as the sort of person I want to encounter from the safe distance of the printed page and several hundreds years. From that distance he is quite fascinating. I don’t know that I would have wanted to hang out with him. He was incredibly intense about everything.

That reminds me: the other biography I’m just now getting into is Victor Sebestyen’s new life of Lenin. If only to prove that you can always make connections between things, I would say what makes Edwards and Lenin similar is their singular focus to see their principles through to their conclusion (I admit the results were considerably bloodier in Lenin’s case).

Back to Edwards: I didn’t know anything about him beyond the sorts of things you read in general surveys of the era. (Indeed, the dirty little secret of this whole enterprise I’m engaged in is that I don’t yet know much about the history of evangelicalism!). I’m fascinated by the way Edward’s views appear to scramble and upset so much of the evangelical tradition that in one way or another claims some descent from him.

He was a revivalist who believed deeply in hierarchical authority. He sought and achieved ecstatic spiritual experiences, and he was obsessed with reason. He brooded over the machinations of the Devil and the depravity of people, and he believed the millennium might be close at hand.

I’m especially interested in Edwards’ views of the relationship between church and state and of God’s plan for New England. Do we see in Edwards the “poisoned root” I referred to the other day? I need to know more.

Does Robert Caro Misunderstand How Power Works?

~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

caro
I wish my office looked like this. There’s no twitter on typewriters.

That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?

I should begin by saying that I love Robert Caro’s books. Many years before I decided to become a historian, The Power Broker and The Path to Power fired my imagination and awakened me to the possibilities of historical storytelling. They really are astonishing achievements.

Their usefulness as a means of understanding power is less clear. But that is their stated purpose. Caro began his career interviewing people, but for decades now he’s been the kind of person people want to interview, so he has a very practiced narrative about what he does and why he does it. In an interview with the Paris Review Caro says:

I knew what I really wanted to do for my second book, because I had come to realize something. I wasn’t interested in writing a biography but in writing about political power. I could do urban political power through Robert Moses because he had done something that no one else had done. He had shaped the city with a kind of power we didn’t learn about in textbooks, which tell us that, in a democracy, power comes from being elected. He had shaped it with a different kind of power. So if I could find out and explain where he got his power and how he kept it and how he used it, I would be explaining something about the realities of urban power—how raw, naked power really works in cities. And I could do it through his life because I got the right man, the man who did something that no one else had done. I felt it would be great if I could do that kind of book—a book about political power—about national power. And I had had a similar flash about Lyndon Johnson. It was the Senate, it wasn’t the presidency. He made the Senate work. For a century before him, the Senate was the same dysfunctional mess it is today. He’s majority leader for six years, the Senate works, it creates its own bills. He leaves, and the day he leaves it goes back to the way it was. And it’s stayed that way until this day. Only he, in the modern era, could make the Senate work. So he, like Moses, had found some new form of political power, and it was ­national, not urban power. I wanted to do a book about that. That’s what first drew me to Lyndon Johnson.

There’s no question that Caro’s books are insightful. But do they distort as much as they reveal? Does Caro’s relentless focus on the life and character of a single man blind him to the broader structural forces that constrained or enabled Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson? To many historians, this might be a no-brainer. The answer is yes. But I want to sit with the question for a bit, because Caro is a corrective to our own era of skepticism of grand narratives, much less of grand men. Against our assumption that history makes people more than people make history, Caro insists that some brilliant individuals change the course of history.

But I’m still inclined to think Caro gets power wrong. See how he talks about Lyndon Johnson:

So here is this figure—a huge figure—this young man who’s rising, who’s ruthless and cruel, nothing can stand in the way of his ambition. And who at the same time has this immense compassion, along with a very rare ­talent—a genius, really—for transmuting compassion into something concrete, into legislative achievement…Lyndon Johnson, if I do him right, he’s this huge figure with these complexities. I’m trying to show him moving through American ­history, rising through it, ­political step by political step. And what was America in his times? And how did he change America? Because certainly he changed America. But you’re not making it a monumental story on a grand scale. It is a monumental story on a grand scale…

Everyone wants to say that if it weren’t for Vietnam, he would’ve been one of the greatest presidents. But “if it weren’t for Vietnam” is not an adequate phrase. You have to give equal weight to both the domestic and Vietnam. Medicare. The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. Sixty different education bills. You’re filled with admiration for his genius, over and over again. Watching some legislative maneuver, you’re saying, Wow, how did he do that, I didn’t know you could do that! And then in the same book, you have Vietnam. This last volume is a very complex book to write.

Johnson is the sun, and everyone and everything else is just revolving around him. The huge Democratic majorities in congress fade from view; the social movements that compelled Johnson to act are out of sight. The booming economy that gave Johnson the political space to try the Great Society is completely ignored. This is a very individualistic view of power. I’d be curious to hear more from political scientists on this. My understanding is that Americans drastically overestimate the power of presidents to enact their agenda. I think Caro does too, even in the case of a crazy larger than life figure like Johnson.

More basically, if Caro wanted to understand power, did he choose the wrong genre? Is biography an inherently problematic way to get at Caro’s questions? What does biography do well, and what does it do poorly? I’m not sure, but one thing I can say for sure is that I will be in line for Caro’s next book, regardless of how much I disagree with it.

Should Yesterday’s News Be In Your Journal Article?

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jah katrina
Trying too hard for relevance, or doing what historians do best?

Say you have a paper you’re thinking about submitting to a journal. Your first draft was written before November. Now, in the new political dispensation, do you go for the Trump tie-in? I’m wrestling with this question and I know at least one colleague who has a similar quandary.

Obviously a lot depends on your subject matter. It probably won’t work if your lead is, “The ancient Phoenicians, like Donald Trump…” If, on the other hand, you have a paper about American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century that’s been sitting around and you think maybe you should finally do something with it (ahem, guilty), then the question becomes much more interesting.

The advantages of the tie-in to contemporary events are fairly straightforward. Grab interest, show relevance, maybe even offer historical depth and insight to a question that’s on peoples’ minds.

But the drawbacks are pretty big too. First of all, if you’re going to try to grab attention and show relevance, why are you planning to shop it to a journal in the first place? Go for the Atlantic or something! In the journal process, there’s a risk that your references to contemporary events will not age well at all. While your historical analysis may hold up, the tie-in to current affairs may appear dated really quickly. In fact, if you submit now and the article comes out in 2018 or 2019, you could end up being dated before it’s even published.

I’m inclined to think the risks outweigh the rewards. How many books have we read that use Obama’s election as a hook? Many of them are already stale. I’m thinking through this as I write. My sense is that references to current events are likely to work best when they meet two conditions:

  1. They’re done with full cognizance that it’s not really history. We’re too close to it, too invested, with too much unknown. It may add color and grab interest, but don’t make it more than it is.
  2. They emerge organically from the historical analysis. They’re earned. In other words, can you honestly say that you’re not reaching for relevance? Does the past you’re writing about really inform the present in a vital way?

If you can meet these two conditions it’s likely to go better. I’m not entirely sure my paper meets these two conditions but I’m tempted to take the risk anyway. It’s so alluring!