The question above, posed slangily, is the kind of thing you might hear during the "informal" part of a tenure-track job interview. What timeline do you imagine for revising your thesis as a monograph? At what point in the near future do you plan to publish a book?
But I am interested here in the question in the sense of where a book fits within a larger research program. I am always reading something, always annotating and taking notes. I seem frequently to be proposing or preparing conference presentations. I work on articles, solicited and speculative. Over the course of ten or fifteen years, a scholar in the humanities can be working on many threads of a related subject.
At what point, though, does this activity constitute writing a book?
It is not a question posed lightly or answered easily. Once one admits to writing a book, the clock is ticking. I have a colleague who no longer publishes papers or attends conferences; he works only in long form. He is always writing a book, but he is also always asked how his book is coming, how much longer before his book comes out. That amounts to considerable pressure.
After my study leave -- I have had only one -- a study leave granted in order to write a book, I had many threads, and there was considerable pressure to tie them together in book form. Every chapter of the eventual monograph had been presented as a conference paper; some chapters ended up containing material from more than one presentation. But there was great discipline needed to recast that material so that it worked as a monograph. My memories of Writing the Lost Generation are ones of editing: there was so much rewriting that I have forgotten what it was like to face blank paper with an idea in my mind.
Recently, I have been confronting that very thing.
I have been studying American little magazines for almost twenty years. In that time, a field has grown up around me -- periodical studies -- from which I have benefited professionally. But a book about the magazines I study would be huge, unwieldy to write and unprofitable for any academic publisher. Over the past twelve months, I have been able to imagine a monograph of reasonable length, something in the area of 80,000 to 100,000 words, a monograph that addresses the historical range I think necessary but has a provable thesis. I have been putting together notes and have begun writing a draft of a chapter.
I think that, finally, I am writing another book.
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