I love learning how accomplished scholars and writers write. Over Scot McKnight’s blog Jesus Creed, David Moore talks writing with Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer. Here is a taste: Moore: What is some good advice you received on writing? Balmer: I love...
Martha Jones of the Johns Hopkins University is Rachel Toor‘s latest interview in her “Scholars Talk Writing” series. Here is a taste of Toor’s interview with Jones: Advice about writing? Jones: Write. Revise. Repeat. In my early career, I mistook speaking...
If you are writer you may be able to relate to this passage from Stephen Backhouse’s Kiergkegaard: A Single Life: Lengthy walks around Copenhagen were part of the authorial process, because it was on the city streets that Soren “put everything...
I am a first-generation writer. My mother and grandmothers kept diaries, but none of them wrote anything with the express purpose of having it read by someone outside the family. I had a few good teachers who encouraged my writing,...
Some helpful thoughts here from Deborah Cohan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina Beaufort: One of my beloved colleagues with whom I exchange a lot of office banter often quips, “Gosh, Deb, do you ever sleep? Are you...
Time once named him “America’s Best Theologian.” Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Hauerwas talks writing with Rachel Toor. Here is a taste of the interview: What does it mean to write “interestingly”? Hauerwas: Well, trying to help us recover what extraordinary...
Check out Alex Green’s piece at Publishers Weekly. The writers group, known as “The Squad,” includes historians Kevin Levin, Liz Covart, Sara Georgini, Megan Kate Nelson, Heather Cox Richardson, and Nina Silber. (Covart and Georgini have been guests on the The...
John Warner is the writer of two recent books on writing: Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing. Over at the Pedagogy & American Literary Studies blog, Benjamin Murphy,...
If you write books, Lauren Toor’s interview with literary agent Susan Rabiner is a must read. They cover the art of making an argument, the practice of narrative history, and the topics that are “hot” right now in trade publishing....
How do authors measure the success of their books? Rachel Toor asks this question in a very interesting piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Given my history in publishing, people often ask me for help with their book projects. One...
Last summer a group of K-8 history teachers urged me to write a popular biography of Philip Vickers Fithian. Here is what I wrote back then: I am always amazed when I talk to people who develop strong emotional connections...
Over at The Atlantic, Victoria Clayton wonders why academic writing is so complex. Here is a taste: A nonacademic might think the campaign against opaque writing is a no-brainer; of course, researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work. Cynics charge,...
The Junto blog is running a series of posts on this topic featuring some excellent historians. The posts stem from a roundtable presented at the 2017 meeting of the Society for the History of the Early Republic. It was organized...
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a story about David Congdon, an acquisition editor at the University Press of Kansas who, after arriving at his new job, found a book contract that was thirty years old. He contacted the author...
Benjamin Park, an early American historian who teaches at Sam Houston State University in Texas, has live-tweeted a great session from the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) on how to go about...
She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family and she was a guest on episode of eight of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast. And have I mentioned that she gave the 2012 American...
Dan Berger, a history professor at the University of Washington Bothell and the author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, has a helpful post up at Black Perspectives with some tips on how to write a book...
Academic historians often ask this question of other academic historians. Sometimes when a person asks this question at a social gathering they are sincerely curious about the other person’s work. Other times this question is something akin to “nice weather...
Over at Black Perspectives, Keisha Blain of the University of Iowa interviews Dawn Durante of the University of Illinois Press about how to write a book proposal for a university press. Durante acquires books in Asian-American history, Latino History in...
Do you want to write good history for a general audience? Alane Salerno Mason, the Executive Editor at W.W. Norton, offers some advice. Keep your introduction brief, and introductory People the story Let the people move Honor chronology Don’t bury...
