How I Write

This week on the blog, I used the occasion of Carrie Wofford’s critique of Lower Ed’s weaknesses to expound on some of the process of making that book. It’s nothing personal. The timing just worked.

A post is scheduled every day this week:

 

I am closing out that week of reflection with a much more personal one about writing.

The research process is one thing. Lower Ed has something close to twelve years of my life in it. Not all of that was research. Some of it was living, some other of it was learning, and none of it includes the time I spent writing it.

Writing.

When I sat down to write “Lower Ed” I was in the final days of writing my dissertation.

The dissertation informs “Lower Ed” but it can in no way be said to be a draft of “Lower Ed”. (Although enough of the dissertation is germane to Lower Ed’s argument that I embargoed it for a million years).

Dissertations are their own genre. Mine isn’t an exception.

My dissertation tests theories of legitimation. It proposes a set of hypotheses and reconceptualizes a theoretical model for how institutions build legitimacy using competing narratives when financial actors become ascendant in higher education. It is so sexy. It has lots of really boring charts.

Nobody wants your boring charts or theory testing in a book.

I was okay with that.

But in practice the question was how to write a book from all this data I had.

The first draft didn’t go well.

My editor kindly suggested that I wait a few months to edit it after, “your dissertation brain is over”.

The second draft wasn’t much better. The editor I’d hired to work on it with  me said it wouldn’t ever get me tenure but that it was cute.

I pulled the book and its release was delayed a year.

—-

In that year I tried to forget everything I knew about that topic. That didn’t work that well but it was easier to forget everything I’d learned about making charts. That helped. It created breathing space for a manuscript to emerge.

The first step was revisiting my “so what”. Oh, yeah, I remember, this is about inequality.

Then I started writing the big story…and couldn’t do it.

As it turns out, the big story reveals itself in stages. Ken Wissoker says the intro is an on-ramp:

The intro is like an on-ramp for a diss/book, to lead you in–like Said's Orientalism or Anderson's Imagined Communities. #Dissto1stBk

— eileen chengyin chow (@chowleen) October 17, 2013

Well, I couldn’t write the on-ramp until I had written the highway. I had not written the highway.

The first thing I had to get rid of was the idea that I would write this thing sequentially.

I usually reject “chunking” my writing but in the case of a book where my challenge was too little distance from the subject matter, chunking did two important things. It helped me make the familiar strange and gave me space in my internal narrative to challenge my assumptions.

The book draft all turned when I wrote Mike’s story.

But, first, I had to trash every draft. By which I mean, I started with a clean page. Rather than “editing” or “revising”, I decided it was time to rewrite.

Symbolically it was all very deep and pretentious. I cried on the phone to a friend about it. I lit some sage like a gotdamn hippie, burning a hole in my favorite (only) coaster when I realized that I had no idea what you put burning sage in safely. Then, I opened a blank page in Word.

I’m nothing if not slightly dramatic about my “process”.

Then at the top of the document I typed two questions:

What do I know?

How do I know it?

And then I started answering the questions.

Sentence after sentence I chose one thing that I knew and then I explained how I knew it. You can probably still see this in the structure of the overall book. It is: set up, description, explanation, integration with previous explanations. Over and over again.

About Mike’s chapter, which is about how we understand risk and investment in higher education hierarchies, I started with what I knew: the risks do not outweigh the benefits. I tried to remember how I knew that. For that, I returned to my notes.

My notes are special things.

All of my field notes are in paperback moleskins. They have to be lined and they have to be moleskins. My notes are written in pencil, mechanical pencils. They have to be mechanical pencils. I have 11 books for the fieldnotes portion of this project. These are the first-level or primary notes.

Those notes becomes second level notes or memos, if you’re fancy. I go through the moleskins visually, I pull out themes and put them in an excel document. The excel document has metadata on which notebook/dates each excerpt or note is from. The notebooks are pegged to field sites or dates. This gives me a sense of temporality of events and discoveries.

These notes are attached to any paper documents I got from for-profit colleges during the field work and any pictures I was able to get surreptitiously when I toured.

These are all printed out. This must be printed out. On paper. Then I put all those notes together in a folder or binder.

Those are secondary notes. I keep those clean, meaning no annotations on them.

For different phases of the project and of my thinking, I copy a new set of the secondary notes and I annotate those.

These notes are in addition to systematic coding of documents, like the SEC filings and court cases that are part of my data triangulation. For those, I used Dedoose to organize and analyze. I also printed out the coded segments for each of my themes and the histiographs of thematic patterns from Dedoose. Those are in a folder.

When I was re-writing, my focus was on synthesis. I had to make events and data that aren’t sequential or even attached to each other in most discourses read as though they are. Hardest part of this process.

For that, I stuck to high level notes. Those were the annotated versions of the secondary level notes, the histiographs for patterns and the bibliography from my dissertation.

Writing the framework started with “what do I know?” When I wasn’t sure what I knew, I visited the major thematic codes from my notes. When I needed to know how I had come to know it, I visited the secondary notes based on my field notes and journals.

I just kept circling through those for each main point. This sounds orderly. It is…not:

I don’t like to talk about how I write. I write fast and I write a lot and I don’t have writer’s block. But I write a lot of trash to get to something usable. It is the opposite of most writing problems.

In retrospect, I wrote this book with Ken Wissoker’s advice in mind: nobody wants to read your dissertation. People want to make sense of something rather than investigate it with you. But the sensemaking can only occur after you investigate. My biggest challenge was finding a voice that balanced those two processes.

I don’t know if I got it right but after I drafted Mike and London’s chapter I didn’t burn anymore sage.

I had found a pocket where I could live.