Well, this blog has been quiet for a while! I have a good excuse: I’ve spent the past five months since I last wrote here finishing up my book manuscript, Skim, Dive, Surface: Strategies for Teaching Digital Reading in the College Classroom, for West Virginia University Press’s series on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

I spent about a year writing this book, and it was one of the most engaging, challenging, creative processes I’ve ever experienced. I’ve written a lot of different kinds of things over the years – articles, blog posts, conference papers, creative works – but writing a book-length piece with a clear audience and purpose in mind has been my favorite experience yet.

I’ve found that with basically everything else I’ve written, the audience has always been fuzzy for me. Sure, when I write for this blog, I have an imagined reader in mind and when I submit something to a peer-reviewed journal, I also have some sense of who that reader will be. But with this book, I had a clear sense of what I wanted the reader (i.e. college educators are my primary audience) to do with the information therein (i.e. understand what digital reading is, where it comes from, and not feel worried about it) and how a long, book-length intervention would allow them to get there.

With the space of 90,000-ish words, I could also tell some stories along the way and walk someone slowly through the argument with a lot of different examples and scholarship. It was a puzzle to put it all together, and while I’m not sure I’ve totally solved that puzzle yet (I’ll still have lots of revisions to make before the book goes to press, I’m sure), I know I’ve made it past a pretty big hurdle of just writing 233 page of readable text.

This is my first book, so there is a lot that I’m still learning about the steps that will take this project from a bunch of sentences in a Word document to a thing that people can actually, like, purchase and read for themselves. But I thought it might be useful to try and write down some of the things I learned while I was doing the work of planning, writing, and revising my own first draft of a full book. In fact, one of the most common questions I get is about how I managed to get this book done with my current job.

After all, writing is not really a part of my built-in job description necessarily. I don’t need to do writing and research as part of my job requirements; this is all elective for me. Plus, I’m in a cubicle for 8 hours per day with lots of noise, interruptions, and just-in-time concerns that often need immediate response. Those aren’t necessarily the same conditions that other writers creating books may experience. (I got asked at some point if I was going to go “on sabbatical” to write my book, which, unfortunately, is not a thing you get to do when you’re not faculty…).

If you are an academic staff member or even if you’re just someone who has a 9-5 job but is interested in writing a book while working full-time, here’s what worked for me:

• Spend lots of time on your book proposal; this will give you a clear reminder of your purpose for writing and a road map to completion.  The part of my book that required the heaviest intellectual lift was the proposal for the book itself. I’d say it took me about 4 months to write a 20-page proposal; I wanted to make the most clear and persuasive case I could to a press about the value of my book and the proposal itself helped me clarify what my goals were. For an academic press in particular, the proposal is your first opportunity to explain what conversation your book enters into, who your audience is for the book, and what market you imagine existing for the book. While writing the book proposal may feel like “not writing” the book, my proposal became a core document for my process, so I was glad to have spent lots of time on it when I knew I would have space to work on it. That timing, in part, was key; I wrote my proposal largely during the summer months when things were quiet at work for me (my job’s busy times are largely aligned with the academic calendar). But I’m glad I spent basically a full summer on the proposal itself because it gave me a clear vision of my goal and purpose is in writing in the first place. That way, when the academic year got busier again, I could return to my proposal and re-read it in short spurts to remind myself of why I was taking the time to write in the first place.
• Set small, actionable goals for each week. There’s no better way for a project to fail than to set a gigantic goal and not have a clear sense of how to get there. I tried to “atomize” my writing process as much as possible by developing a “to-do” list of small things I could accomplish each week to chip away at the final product, whether that was setting a word count limit or reading a specific number of sources (and taking lots of active notes on them). Those weekly goals were not always the same, but I made sure to have clear tasks established for myself that I placed into a project management tool (I’m an Asana fan) alongside my tasks for the rest of my job. I also was realistic about my weekly goals; I knew that some weeks would be busier during my work days than others, so I tried to think through how many hours I could realistically set per week. At some points, I set word count goals (for about 5 months, I made it a goal to write 500 words per day), while at other times, I set more task-oriented goals (by the end of the process – so, for about the last 2 months – my goals were about revising particular chapters or sections at a time).
• Write a personal journey entry to keep yourself in the book-thinking mindset every day. Even if I didn’t have time to hit a word count towards a chapter in my book, I still wrote a brief personal entry to myself every day about how I was feeling about my book writing process and what I saw as my most attainable goals for that day. Some days, my goal was just, “Re-read a paragraph” from a previous chapter. Other days, I just used the personal journal entry to say, “I’m feeling really overwhelmed by other things today and there’s just no space in my brain for this book right now.” Other days still were, of course, longer writing days where I would set a particular word count or task-based goal. But no matter what kind of day it was, it was important to check in with myself and just take stock of where I was without judging myself. Some of my journal entries were just long lists of complaints about my life. That was great! The main thing I made sure of was that my the personal journal entries weren’t being too hard on myself or negative about my productivity or creativity. If I found a negative thought about my work creeping into my writing, I would literally stop myself in my prose, start a new paragraph, and try to reassure myself that I was doing the right things and that my negative feelings were normal (and also something I needed to move past and through). In other words, the personal journal space allowed me to process inevitable negative feelings while also keeping stock of where I was in my process.
• Find a local writing accountability partner to write in-person together. I was fortunate to have several friend on campus who wanted to write with me, even for small spurts of time. One of my colleagues and I wrote in two “pomodoros,” or in 25-minute blocks of time, for just about 50 minutes once per week. That might not sound like a lot, but it was just enough to ensure that I had some protected, concentrated time each week to have quiet, focused time. I managed to get a lot done in those blocks because I knew that was perhaps my only guaranteed time some weeks to get my head into my project. Plus, knowing that I had to “report” to another person to write at the same time as them was a major motivating factor.
• Find a distant writing accountability partner to keep each other motivated. I couldn’t always have space to write with someone in-person, but a few of my good friends and I hopped onto an accountability-building project management tool, called Habitica (http://habitica.com), where we each set goals for our own different projects. In Habitica, different people can join together into a “party” where, if one person doesn’t accomplish their goals, everyone in the team loses “points.” Knowing that if I didn’t accomplish certain things, my friends would get “hurt” in the accountability system was also really motivating for me. I wanted everyone in my “party” to succeed, so getting the work done became less about me and more about my community. On the days when I couldn’t write in-person, then, I could still meet some of my Habitica goals by just trying to do some small bits of writing in 15 or 20-minute increments between other meetings or obligations.
• (This one’s not fun, but…) Be prepared to work after hours. Now, here’s the reality of trying to write a book on a 9-to-5 job: you can’t expect your formal work hours to be the only time that you write. For the first months of writing, I could mostly squeeze in just a few minutes here and there every day during my work hours, which was enough for some time. But at a certain point my writing process (the last 4 months, I would say), I wound up needing to squeeze in a lot more time outside my work hours, either in the evening when I got home or, more often, on a weekend morning. I used my weekends pretty extensively to write, honestly, though I would try and make it fun for myself by going to a coffee shop and treating myself to a favorite drink while I worked. I realize there’s some immense privilege in being able to take out time for myself to work outside of work hours; I don’t have any dependents right now, and I am lucky enough to have a supportive partner who chipped in with lots of errands while giving me the space to write. But I think that even if you are in a situation where you need to do a lot of work at home, trying to squeeze in just a few minutes here and there either early in the morning or late at night can do wonders in terms of keeping you moving. For me, working outside of my formal “work hours” was often not something I minded because I just really wanted to write.
• Tweet (yes, really)! I honestly found it really generative to send out quick Tweet threads or respond to other people’s tweets about topics adjacent to my book while I was writing. While this might be a tip mostly unique to me, I found that I could often find lots of Twitter threads that were related to my areas of interest and, importantly, that were related to the issues I was writing about in my book. When I would respond to those threads or tweet out my own content, it would remind me of the freshness and novelty of my own book, which motivated me to go back into the writing process.
• Share portions of your writing along the way. Writing a book is a long road, and it can be nice to get some feedback from friends or family while you’re working so that you have someone else’s thoughts to respond to (aside from your own) before turning in a draft to an editor. I am lucky enough to have lots of friends who are writing teachers and book editors, so I cultivated a network of people who I knew were interested in reading portions of chapters and giving me small amounts of feedback here and there. At first, I felt a little worried about asking other people to read my work as I was writing because I know that everyone in my network is so busy, but I soon found out that many of my friends wanted to read what I was working on. People like to be helpful! Besides, I always offered to return the favor, and it was fun to play “editor” for other people and toggle between writing for myself and reading/writing for others.
• Stay positive! It’s really easy to be hard on ourselves as writers. I often felt guilty when I didn’t get “enough done” per writing session. So I started picking up a practice where, at the end of each session, I would just write a one-sentence note to myself about how proud I was about whatever I did. It felt good just to pat myself on the back and say, “Hey, that was great!” Even if I didn’t always walk away feeling like I was in a very complete place, acknowledging my own efforts motivated me to keep going. I’m not the kind of person who deals with negative pressure well under any circumstances, and so discovering that I was more motivated when I had a chain of other positive pieces of feedback for myself get me energized.
• Write a book because you want to do it; don’t write a book out of pressure or obligation. This is a biggie: I think a lot of people in academic staff positions (especially those who have PhDs…) see writing a book as a certain kind of professional obligation. But if you’re not on the tenure track and you’re in a 9-to-5 staff job and you don’t need to publish and you don’t want to publish… Don’t publish. It’s that simple. If you’re someone who has to write as part of your job, then, of course, you’ll make space to do it, but if you’re in a staff role like I am and you don’t want to write, you shouldn’t feel any need to do so. I’ve always loved writing; writing is my favorite intellectual activity, so writing a book for me was not only professionally compelling, but also just personally interesting, creative, and exciting. But if you don’t feel that way, and you’re just looking to get your name out into a public space, you may be better off keeping up a blog, writing articles, or pushing out social media posts. There are lots of great arguments to be made in shorter forms and that is just as awesome of a way to get yourself out there than in a book.

I’m sure I’ll continue to have more thoughts on the book writing process the more that I work through the editorial pipeline. But hopefully, some of these first thoughts are of interest to those who are contemplating writing a book. Basically, if you have an idea and are compelled to pursue it, there are lots of ways to do that on a timeline that makes sense to you. I’d be happy to connect with anyone who wants to think about this process more and talk writing craft, process, and journey!