[Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on his writing process, social media, caffeine, and exercise.]
This page will include resources we share with each other, and any reviews or suggestions you might have.
Honestly, this is the most helpful guidebook of its kind that I’ve ever read. It is absolutely and definitely helpful to academics who are not African American:
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy. The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul.
John Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schein Gold. 2001. The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure. The University of Chicago Press.
Tan, Amy. 2017. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir.
Bolker, Joan. 1998. How to Write your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. New York: Owl Books.
More on Octavia Butler and her incredible, inspiring writing habits. For example:
“After graduation, Butler, always an early riser, woke up at 2 a.m. every day to write, and then went to work as a telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher, among other things.”
Patricia Nelson Limerick. 1993. “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose.” The New York Times Book Review.
Michael C. Munger. 2010. “10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly.” Chronicle of Higher Education.
Gary Allen Fine. 1988. “The Ten Commandments of Writing.” American Sociologist.
Mallory Ortberg. 2014. “How To Respond To Criticism.” The Toast.
Judith Butler. 1999. “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back.” New York Times:
“No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world. Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense.”
Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. 2010. “Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes:
The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on results from large-scale corpus investigations. Our findings strongly support the view that academic writing and conversation have dramatically different linguistic characteristics. However, the specific differences are quite surprising. First, we show that academic writing is not structurally ‘elaborated’ (in the traditional sense of this term). In fact, subordinate clauses e especially finite dependent clauses e are much more common in conversation than academic writing. Instead, academic writing is structurally ‘compressed’, with phrasal (nonclausal) modifiers embedded in noun phrases. Additionally, we challenge the stereotype that academic writing is explicit in meaning. Rather, we argue that the ‘compressed’ discourse style of academic writing is much less explicit in meaning than alternative styles employing elaborated structures. These styles are efficient for expert readers, who can quickly extract large amounts of information from relatively short, condensed texts. However, they pose difficulties for novice readers, who must learn to infer unspecified meaning relations among grammatical constituents.
A series of novels centered on academic life:
James Hynes. 1997. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. New York: Picador USA.
James Hynes. 2001. The Lecturer's Tale. New York: Picador USA.
James Hynes. 2004. Kings of Infinite Space. New York: St. Martin's Press.
James Hynes. 2010. Next. New York: Little, Brown & Company.
Walter Mosley. 2007. This Year You Write Your Novel. Little, Brown.
Samuel R. Delany. 2006. Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews about Writing. Wesleyan Press.
Here is a short documentary film called Black Sci-Fi that includes interviews with Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. Although most of might not be sci-fi, or even fiction, writers, it’s helpful to hear what motivated these authors to write. My suspicion is that there might be some resonances with our own motivations and practices.