I wanted to come back to the article I wrote about at the end of December, which is currently the focus of most of my research time. In my earlier post, I wrote a lot about the way in which that particular project had got tangled up in all sorts of other things: professional self-esteem, pandemic-related trauma, exhaustion, imposter syndrome – you name it, I probably waded through it at some point.
What I want to talk about here is a bit about how I’ve worked through the process of revision of that article, because it has been very unlike my usual process (what even is usual any more, answers on a postcard) and it seems worth charting that both for my own future reference and for anyone else Having A Moment. (A shout out here to Jo Van Every and the Academic Writing Studio for creating a space where I have been able to experiment, vent, and gently yet productively despair.) I wrote a lot about feeling stuck and getting stuck – so here are some thoughts about how this particular project has got ‘unstuck’. I should probably say that this process has taken at least six months, so it’s not necessarily been as neat as it will look on the page, and there were plenty of false starts involved!
First, though, a comment on what didn’t get it unstuck. Reading All The Things. I really, really hoped that just by reading More Stuff, I’d magically be able to sit down and work out what I needed to do to the article to make it work. Nope. That has worked fine for articles in need of less work, but this one demanded more than just a couple of paragraphs being rewritten or tightened up. Writing A List also failed miserably. I had written a bullet pointed list, at some point a few years ago, of All The Things I needed to do according to the readers’ reports to get this sorted. That proved singularly unhelpful, because the items were either so tiny that they weren’t addressing the big picture, or so huge that I couldn’t see how on earth you would start them. Again, this strategy has worked for revisions before – but not this time.
The first thing that worked, or that started to get me unstuck, was reverse outlining and forward outlining. The reverse outline was an outline (or summary) of the article in the form that I submitted it to the journal back in December 2019. In this case of this particular article, that was really important because by the time I came to do the outline in summer 2023, I had kind of forgotten what the article was actually doing on the section level – I’d lost sight of that overarching structure. The reverse outline was hugely helpful for reminding me what on earth was in there that I had thought was important in the first place. This was doubly true because when I’m working on things at the chapter length, I don’t tend to outline in great detail – I can hold that 8k-12k words in my head pretty clearly and let the structure develop as I go and through the editing process. Which had worked fine… in autumn 2019.
Once I had got my head around the reverse outline, I picked up a brand new file and did an outline of the ‘new’ article. I really needed to do this because one thing the readers had asked for was subheadings, which sounds like a really straightforward thing (and indeed is a really straightforward thing) but turned out to be a really helpful hook to hang the new structure on – what were my subheadings going to be? What direction was the article going to go in? How was that going to differ from the (frankly deeply inadequate) structure of the 2019 version? How was each of these sections going to move the argument forward? This took quite a bit of wrangling, but it did make what followed a lot easier in terms of knowing what the final product was meant to look like.
The next step was, in some ways, the scariest, and that was the creation of the Frankendraft. I came up with the term ‘Frankendraft’ because it became clear that taking the 2019 manuscript and editing that was simply not going to work – I froze whenever I tried it, and the task felt undoable. So I tricked my brain (and so many of the good tips work like this) into thinking that wasn’t what it was doing. I opened a blank document, I popped in the headings from the new outline – and then proceeded to copy and paste sections from the 2019 draft into the new document, shunting paragraphs into the sections it look like they fitted in.
This, folks, is not how I write. As most people who’ve spoken to me about writing know, my process is usually to generate a reasonably good quality first draft and then to polish it up from there. But this project – this project had gone way beyond the point where that approach was going to work. So instead it required me to dismember the 2019 article, to shove the random segments into a new frame, and then to work to stitch them back together, filling in the gaps as I went.
More or less everything I know about how I write screams that this shouldn’t work – but it has. Even though the words are the same, working in a completely new file has broke that sense of stuckness and not moving on. Going back to a document where you have footnotes that simply read [INSERT REFERENCE HERE] and has messy great gaps, rather than something looking finished and polished, has got me past the conceptual stuckness of not being able to do the Big Thinking that these revisions required.
Sewing together the Frankendraft has also let me put down perfectionism. I’m currently in the middle of writing a new section, towards the end of the article, for which there were no pre-existing words. I got stuck on that, too, not least as it’s the bit that needs to explain why my noodlings are interesting to anybody else out there in the discipline beyond people interested in my core text (and thus why Prestigious Journal should publish it). I had to do a mindmap and get brainstorming help and everything. But it is immensely helpful to be able to say to myself, as I type in my words, ‘this is just the Frankendraft – it doesn’t matter if they’re good words, they just have to be words’.
What I think I have learned is that one of the issues with this piece is that the gap between submission and revisiting was that even though intellectually I knew the manuscript needed work, on an emotional level it was somehow finished – trapped in amber. I needed a way to get it back out. The Frankendraft is an imperfect way to bring the project back to life – it is, alas, still a bit of a reanimated corpse, but at least it has the ability to change and alter, rather than being frozen.
I’m still working with, and on, the Frankendraft – that difficult section needs finishing, and then there’s the conclusion to go, and after that I’ll have to see how well my stitching has held up and whether any further transplants are needed. But it is progress, and for that I am grateful.
