#5: Your Dissertation Isn’t a First Draft of Your Book

Do you believe that writing your first academic book is going to be as simple as “revising your dissertation”? In today’s episode, Jane discusses how the prevalent but pernicious advice to “revise your dissertation” actually stifles your book writing process and creates unnecessary stress. She’ll cover the reasons why revising your dissertation is an unrealistic goal, how you should approach writing your book, and the real role that your dissertation will play in the process. 

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Transcript

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Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn't have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to women and non-binary scholars in academia, as I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose. Let's bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum, and write your book the right way, your way. Hello, friends, and welcome to today's episode. I hope you're doing well because I have some strong opinions to share with you today. I want to talk to you about something that really grinds my gears, and that's the discourse around an academic's first book being a revision in scare quotes of their dissertation and the encouragement to just write your dissertation like a book. I think this conversation can be detrimental and deflating. And in this episode of the podcast, I'm going to tell you why I think that. Let's start here. You expect the dissertation to be a first draft of the book, but it's not. It has material you will use in your book. But the process of turning it into a book is like getting a gut renovation. It's not a new coat of paint or just some new wallpaper. But when we use this language of revising the dissertation, we put unfair expectations on what the dissertation should have been. And let me remind you, the dissertation had one job, just one, and it was to get you your PhD. After that, its work is done. But when you expect the dissertation to do more, you create a few obstacles, which I'm, of course, I'm going to tell you about. The first obstacle is that you beat yourself up. You had such high expectations for your dissertation. And when you come to the realization that it is in fact not ready for prime time as a published book, which, by the way, it's not supposed to be, you have a lot of feelings. You begin to blame yourself for writing a bad dissertation. You compare yourself to people who, in your estimation, had an easier time turning their dissertation into a book. Now you're wondering if you're even qualified to write a book. I want you to listen closely and remember this. Your dissertation is not bad because it's not ready to be a book. That is not the standard by which we evaluate dissertations. We evaluate dissertations by whether they earn us PhDs. That's it. So you're unnecessarily beating yourself up because you had an expectation that simply wasn't realistic. So obstacle number one is beating yourself up. Obstacle number two is that you waste time trying to rework the dissertation when your time could be better spent creating your new vision for the book. Most of the clients I work with make dramatic changes to their dissertation. These include adding or eliminating chapters, changing the framing, collecting new data that expands the scope of their argument, adding nuance to what was a broad argument, or shifting their audience. I was working with a writer the other day who was having a hard time writing a book chapter. She kept returning to her dissertation, hoping to find passages that could be used in the chapter, in the chapter of her book, but hitting a brick wall every time. Finally, with coaching, she realized that she felt really boxed in by the dissertation. She felt like she wasn't able to write the book chapter in the way that she truly wanted to, because she felt as if she had to write in a way that the dissertation passages would fit neatly in this new chapter. She was trying to do this kind of like Tetris thing where you're taking parts of the dissertation, you're taking these passages, and you're trying to make sure they fit into what should be a new chapter. So if you've experienced something similar and you find yourself trying to contort your book so that you can make use of passages from your dissertation, consider this your permission slip to start from scratch. When the writer I just mentioned decided to start with a brand new chapter outline and stop going back into the dissertation, she was able to not only make real progress on that outline in just a few days, she was also able to imagine new approaches to framing the chapter that she would have never considered if she had just stuck to what she had written in her dissertation. Now, I'm not sharing the story because I want you to set your dissertation on fire and never look at it again. Instead, what I'm encouraging you to do is evaluate it. Evaluate the argument, evaluate the framework, evaluate your evidence. Evaluate all of those things in your dissertation from a place of neutrality. There are parts that are going to be useful, and there are parts that you will leave behind. And both of those options are completely fine. When you evaluate your dissertation with the expectation that you should do X with it, that is when you set yourself up for a disappointment and also just extra work that you don't need to do. And finally, the third issue with expecting to revise your dissertation easily into a book is that you end up dramatically underestimating how much time you'll need to write your book. I survey book writers a lot. I ask people on my newsletter, I ask people on Instagram, I ask people who work with me in my programs how long they think it should take them to turn their dissertation into a book. And I hear six to nine months way too often. That is not realistic. It doesn't happen. It especially won't happen if you've started a new tenure-track job because you have a lot of other things going on. But because somewhere along the line, you decided revising your dissertation should be lightwork, you created an unrealistic timeline. And we know what happens in these instances. Rather than acknowledging that your timeline was, you know, to put it kindly, absolutely bonkers, you blame yourself for not working hard enough. So what should we do instead? First, let's just banish the word revision because it doesn't do justice to the scope of work required. Instead, let's think of this as a process of transformation. In my search for the proper metaphor to use in this episode, I thought about the process of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. The caterpillar enters something called a chrysalis, where its entire body breaks down and it develops new legs, wings, eyes, and so forth. Some parts of the body are moved around and some parts are gone forever. I'm not gonna go into all of the gory details of this process. You can Google it, but it's a true transformation. And that's how I invite you to think about your dissertation as undergoing a similar transformation. Now, if you've been listening to the episodes across season one, you might be noticing a theme. I want you to stop being so hard on yourself. When it comes to writing a book, there is a lot of technical instruction and craft involved. It's essentially like you learn it, and it's something I teach in all of my programs. Yet, where I see people get hung up is in blaming themselves for not being further along or constantly doubting their ability to write well. And for many people, this starts with the dissertation. So what I'm encouraging you to do is to rethink your relationship to your writing. The writing you've already completed, like your dissertation, and the writing that's yet to come, like your book. There's already enough noise out there about what you should be doing when it comes to writing. Don't create more for yourself. Alright, that's all for today. I promised myself I would keep my rant short. Thanks for spending time with me, and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend. Or if you're an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it's time to write your book, you could do it on your terms, your way.