Today I'm sharing a guest blog by Cynthia Miller Coffel. Enjoy!
When I started revising my book, Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers, I had my academic draft done. I had been granted the PhD, and my advisors told me they thought my dissertation could become a book. They told me—and I’ve since learned that this is gospel for dissertators who want to publish their revised work—that I needed to focus on three things:
Audience & Voice
Finding a Model
I solved the problem of audience and the problem of voice by taking the third bit of advice my advisors had given me: finding a model. I read and reread Caroline E. Heller’s book Until We are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin. Heller began her book personally, comparing herself—a wealthy graduate student in her thirties—to the homeless old women she was working with, so I began my book in a personal way, too, and compared myself to the teen mothers I was working with. Caroline Heller used italicized interludes, which were character sketches of the women she worked with, in between each of her chapters. I wrote interludes myself, each small section being a memory of my experiences as a young teacher in an alternative school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens in the 1980s. I placed these interludes next to chapters that were about my more recent experiences discussing similar topics with teenage mothers. I placed an interlude about writing with the married, pregnant, and mothering teens I worked with as a young teacher next to the chapter on conducting writing research with the teen moms I got to know recently; I placed an interlude focused on daycare in the school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens next to a chapter that discusses the benefits of housing daycare centers in schools. Using these interludes helped me keep the personal voice in the book—a voice I thought my non-academic friends might like—and it helped me express the feeling of time repeating itself that I had experienced when I worked, now as a middle-aged women, with teen mothers again. It also provided a shape to the book, as, in these interludes, I described the progression of a young teacher—my young self—through the school year.
I also read and quoted from and used as a model Lisa Dodson’s beautiful piece of research Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Story of Women and Girls in Poor America. From reading Lisa Dodson’s work closely I learned about ways of organizing my research chapters, about avoiding educational jargon in research, so that the voice and purpose of the work is clear. I also learned from Dodson that pieces of research don’t need to be written in a stuffy way: You can write your research book, as Dodson did, with passion, with a full heart.
Revision as Weaving
Revision: Conversation at Lunch
by Cynthia Miller Coffel
At lunch yesterday a colleague, Alice, told me that she had decided to rewrite her dissertation. Alice is one of the few scholars in the field of Victorian studies who has written about dance, and she has a publisher interested in her work. But since she’d written her dissertation, she had graduated from her program, left academia, married, had a child, and begun an office job that kept her busy. Over salad in the company cafeteria, though, she told our group that she had recently watched the way that, through the program NaNoWriMo, a friend had written an entire novel in the month of November.
“The thing is to just get it done, get a draft out there,” Alice said. “And my friend did it! It’s a crappy novel, I suppose, but she’s got the first draft—now all she has to do is rewrite it. And I thought, if she could do that, why can’t I? I’ve got the draft, I’ve got the proposal written, I have the university press interested, I figure from here on out it’s all about revision. I’m giving myself a year to get it done. And I’m telling you about it to solidify my commitment.”
I think Alice is correct that the first step to writing a book is just to get the damn draft done. Remember the story of how Joyce Maynard wrote a draft of her first novel, Baby Love, in three weeks? She put her daughter in daycare, told her husband she didn’t plan to cook or clean much for a month, and wrote it all out, day after day, on a typewriter at the kitchen table.
Revising Thinking Themselves Free
When I started revising my book, Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers, I had my academic draft done. I had been granted the PhD, and my advisors told me they thought my dissertation could become a book. They told me—and I’ve since learned that this is gospel for dissertators who want to publish their revised work—that I needed to focus on three things:
1) Which audience I was writing for
2) Which voice or tone I would revise in
3) Which models I would use
I wasn’t sure what kind of audience I should imagine reading my work when I changed my dissertation into a book. I knew that, since Thinking Themselves Free is about education, struggling readers, and the experiences of poor girls in school, some of its main audience would be teachers and teacher educators. I knew that since the book is about teenage mothers trying to finish high school, many women who are feminists like me, and who are concerned about the schooling lives of girls, would be interested in it. And I knew that since it contains many critiques of the education system, progressive educators in particular might like it.
But I wanted the women who were my friends at work to find it interesting as well. These are women who are smart and thoughtful readers, curious about the lives of other women, savvy about policy arguments in education. They read imaginative literature more often than they read educational research, however: they are not academics. I wanted to entice them to read my book, too.
After I had thought through who I expected my main audience would be, I thought about the voice of the book. My dissertation had begun as a series of papers which I had written in each class I took in graduate school. When the papers were all put together in chapters, the tone of each chapter was very different from the last. One chapter was written in a very reserved, formal, scholarly voice; another in a more chatty tone, describing my personal reactions to the teenage mothers I worked with; another chapter was written in a reportorial way. I knew I needed to smooth the voice out, make the scholarly chapters less so, and make the personal chapters a bit more scholarly.
Finding a Model
I solved the problem of audience and the problem of voice by taking the third bit of advice my advisors had given me: finding a model. I read and reread Caroline E. Heller’s book Until We are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin. Heller began her book personally, comparing herself—a wealthy graduate student in her thirties—to the homeless old women she was working with, so I began my book in a personal way, too, and compared myself to the teen mothers I was working with. Caroline Heller used italicized interludes, which were character sketches of the women she worked with, in between each of her chapters. I wrote interludes myself, each small section being a memory of my experiences as a young teacher in an alternative school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens in the 1980s. I placed these interludes next to chapters that were about my more recent experiences discussing similar topics with teenage mothers. I placed an interlude about writing with the married, pregnant, and mothering teens I worked with as a young teacher next to the chapter on conducting writing research with the teen moms I got to know recently; I placed an interlude focused on daycare in the school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens next to a chapter that discusses the benefits of housing daycare centers in schools. Using these interludes helped me keep the personal voice in the book—a voice I thought my non-academic friends might like—and it helped me express the feeling of time repeating itself that I had experienced when I worked, now as a middle-aged women, with teen mothers again. It also provided a shape to the book, as, in these interludes, I described the progression of a young teacher—my young self—through the school year. I also read and quoted from and used as a model Lisa Dodson’s beautiful piece of research Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Story of Women and Girls in Poor America. From reading Lisa Dodson’s work closely I learned about ways of organizing my research chapters, about avoiding educational jargon in research, so that the voice and purpose of the work is clear. I also learned from Dodson that pieces of research don’t need to be written in a stuffy way: You can write your research book, as Dodson did, with passion, with a full heart.
Revising Thinking Themselves Free felt to me the way I imagine weaving feels—I throw the shuttle, hold the warp yarn in place, throw the shuttle again, pull the weft yarn across to make the weave; I keep some of what was there in the beginning and rip out some of my favorite strands of yarn; I create a whole out of what once were separate pieces.
I didn’t tell Alice about my experience of making my dissertation into a book, there as we talked in the company cafeteria about her plan to revise, but I did remember the joy I had working those materials. I hoped that her revision experience—as she thought about her audience, about the voice of her book, and about who her writing models would be—brought her as much deep joy as my revision experience had brought me. I told her, woman writer to woman writer, to let me know if she needed any help. I told her I’d be happy to sit alongside her—metaphorically, at least—as she revised.
I also rely heavily on models. I rarely write anything unless I have read several examples. I do this to learn the language and the structure. To me, every genre has customs, characteristics, and I use models because I want my work to "fit in".
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