📝 I wanted to respond to Lars-Christian’s post asking what the point of daily writing is. Here’s what I said:
I wanted to let you know you’re not alone. With big creative projects, so many of us hit a point where it stops feeling worthwhile.
As Austin Kleon says, problems of output are problems of input. If you feel stuck, maybe reading something new would help.
For AcWriMoments Day 8, Margy Thomas and Helen Sword encouraged us to trace a lineage of the ideas we work on. I decided to do this with my dissertation because I knew it would be fun, but I didn’t realize how fun.
1984 Kimberly’s mom makes a gorgeous Blue Fairy (from Pinocchio) costume for Kimberly, launching a lifelong delight in dressing up in exquisite costumes (as opposed to whatever’s lying around) and admiring the exquisite costumes of others. Around the same time, Kimberly’s parents take her to the library often.
1988 Kimberly’s dad starts library school. Kimberly hangs out at the library school, a lot. She loves it there.
1994 A guidance counselor who is completely at a loss for what extracurriculars to recommend when she asks Kimberly what she’s into and Kimberly answers, “Reading,” suggests volunteering at the library, so Kimberly does.
1999 W. (then-boyfriend, now-husband) introduces Kimberly to Final Fantasy, a lovely video game series with gorgeous music. O., the then-boyfriend now-husband of one of W.’s housemates, says to Kimberly while they’re in the middle of playing some board game, “You should be a librarian.”
2007 Completely stressed out by being an early career high school teacher, Kimberly starts researching library schools.
2008 W. comes home from work and tells Kimberly that his current boss has inspired him to go to library school so they’re going to library school together.
2009 Kimberly and W. start library school. Kimberly’s advisor is Sandra. Kimberly loves Sandra. Kimberly gets a job as an RA in an outreach program of the School of Education, providing resources and professional development to K-12 educators. (Resources from this department saved her bacon many times when she was a teacher.)
2011 Kimberly gets a job as a school librarian split between two middle schools.
2012 Kimberly’s supervisor from her RA job tells Kimberly, “I’m taking a different job so they’ll be posting this one eventually if you want it.” Kimberly does. The school librarian situation she’s found herself in isn’t what she dreamed of. Eventually Kimberly gets that job and starts working for that outreach program full-time.
2013 Kimberly starts working on projects where she gets to interview teachers about their work. Her office is down the hall from where the School of Ed hosts all of their brown bags and she goes to a lot of them. She decides she wants to pursue a PhD so she can understand what they’re talking about better and maybe publish research about educators’, including school librarians’, good work. She figures she’ll do it part time with the tuition remission she gets as a benefit of her job.
2014 The executive director of the outreach program is fired. (Without cause as far as Kimberly knows.) Kimberly decides that instead of doing the PhD part-time, she’d like to do it full-time, since her program is probably going to be dismantled. She talks to Sandra about the PhD program where she got her master’s in library science and says she wants to work on the library as a place for writing and pop culture engagement. Sandra says there’s a model for this and it’s called Connected Learning. Kimberly applies to the PhD.
2015 Sandra invites Crystle Martin, a scholar of connected learning and leader in the Young Adult Library Services Association, to talk to students at the library school and invites Kimberly to come to the talk and then join them for lunch. Kimberly and Crystle talk about spending way too much time playing video games.
2016 - 2017 Kimberly messes around with different dissertation possibilities. She includes a chapter on gaming and libraries in her comps plan.
2017 Kimberly decides to go to Cosplay America, a costuming convention.
2018 Kimberly starts work on the gaming comps chapter. She attends a Final Fantasy orchestral concert. People have dressed up in gorgeous costumes as characters from the games. They’re so great it kind of makes her want to cry. The next day, she reads Crystle’s dissertation about the information literacy practices of World of Warcraft players. In the conclusion, Crystle suggests that people could replicate her methods to help validate her information literacy model. Kimberly thinks, “I could do that, but with cosplayers!” She bangs out a dissertation prospectus in 2 hours after literal years of hemming and hawing.
2019 Kimberly writes her comps, now with a changed set of chapters. She assembles her committee, including Crystle. She writes a blog post about the process and uses a Final Fantasy screenshot in it. She writes and defends her comps. She writes her proposal in November for AcWriMo. She attends a local con and introduces herself to the cosplay guests, telling them she may contact them to participate in her dissertation.
2020 Kimberly defends her proposal. In freaking February. She has this whole plan that involves going to conventions to talk to cosplayers. AHAHAHAHA. There are no conventions. But she interviews the cosplayers over Zoom.
2020-2021 Kimberly conducts research, scales her design way back, conducts more research, writes, defends, and graduates. She applies for a postdoc at the Connected Learning Lab, where Crystle worked when they first met. She gets the job.
2022-present Kimberly hasn’t touched the cosplay work in a long time but has worked on connected learning in libraries for the whole postdoc.
Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsOfSummer starts June 17 and the Slack is hopping right now, in case you want to join in on the fun. 📝
💬📚📝📓
…the operating instructions of scholarly publishing rarely form a part of graduate training…
William Germano, From Dissertation to Book
It’s been almost two years since I defended my doctoral dissertation. Before it was written, an editor had expressed interest in it. After it was written, I was very tired. I just couldn’t touch it. But we are in a critical moment for information literacy, and I think my research has some good contributions to make, so I’m going to start writing a book proposal.
For this project, I will be opening up my process and my reflections but not the content of the book proposal (and, if I get a contract, the book) itself. I’m starting by reading (like I always so). I’m going to read about how to turn a dissertation into a book and I’m also going to get myself up to speed on the FanLIS literature.
Won’t you join me?
In Austin Kleon’s paid newsletter post today, he asked his readers, to share how we begin.
I opened by saying, “I don’t know how I begin.” Then I proceeded to describe how I begin.
Because the biggest projects in my life have been scholarly writing projects, I thought about those. I thought about the most recent one, my dissertation, and the oldest one, my Master’s paper.
I realized that for both of these, I had a sunshine-soaked AHA! moment when I knew: this was the topic I was going to write about, this was the research I was going to do.
But then I thought about it, and that wasn’t the beginning for the dissertation. (It may have been for the Master’s paper. I don’t remember.)
In my PhD program, writing a comprehensive literature review that demonstrated our familiarity with the state of our research area was a major milestone. I went into this process with no clear research question or idea, just a set of topics that interested me. I don’t remember all of them, but they included makerspaces in libraries, gaming in libraries, and connected learning, among other things. I wrote two or three chapters of this lit review (one for each topic), flailing about, no research plan in mind, just getting familiar with the literature.
But this flailing was part of my process! I arrived at my dissertation topic by reading someone else’s dissertation and deciding to answer one of the questions she posed as a possibility for future research!
And yet, I had read her dissertation before that sun-soaked day.
What was different upon this reading?
What was different was that I had been living the night before, not working. (Work is a part of life but you know how it’s easy to forget to do all the parts of life that aren’t work? Or at least to berate yourself for not focusing on work all the time? If you’ve ever been a grad student, you know what I’m talking about.)
The night before my sun-soaked AHA!, I had gone to a concert. A video game concert. Where I saw cosplayers who inspired me. And it was putting together the dissertation I read with the inspiration I felt at that concert that led me to my dissertation topic: how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information.
So these are the ingredients in my process:
If I skip any of these three steps, I struggle to begin.
🔖📝♿ Read As a Disabled Writer, I Am a Rich Innovator by [Sarah Fawn Montgomery](www.sarahfawnmontgomery.com/l (Catapult).
This is my new favorite essay about being a disabled writer. I love it so much. It reminds me that the way I work is a way that gets work done.
“if you’re looking for a sign from the universe that it’s okay to stop trying to force your work, that it’s not just okay but good to tend to yourself in whatever way that brings you joy and doesn’t hurt yourself or someone else—this is your sign.”
📚💬📝 “…the work of critical thinking and theorizing is itself an expression of political praxis that constructs a foundation wherein individual action can be united with collective struggle.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Even in academic circles it has become much more fashionable to do work on gender than work that is distinctly feminist in outlook.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
Kimberly Hirsh