Six Things I Learned From My First Publishing Experience
I am an aspiring theologian, philosopher, and writer. And by "aspiring," I mean something more like hoping I dont suck at the one thing I really like doing. I have not published many papers. In fact, I have published only one (which you can read here, if you feel so inclined) though hopefully there are a few upcoming in the future that I am working on currently. And though it was by no means a significant article, I certainly learned a lot from it, and thought I would share the story with you, for what its worth. Hemingway (who will show up a few times here) said that its no business of others that you had to learn how to write, and you should just present yourself as always having been able. Maybe someday. But today I ignore his advice.
1.) Take Unexpected Opportunities
A few may have whispers or rumors of memory of an event that happened a long time ago (and seemingly in a galaxy far away) when I wrote a post in response to a blog by Donald Miller. Donald "The Genuine Draft," Miller (which he is called by precisely no one except by me right now), is a Portland local Christian author of very engaging and authentic reflections on struggling with faith and Christianity. If one looks at the hit counter of my little blog, and wonders how it could be so relatively high for such a dusty little corner niche of the theo-blogopshere (and in perspective, even 15k is chump change to the larger theo-blogs) it is because somehow my blog response made it through the gateways and circumvented the jewel-encrusted hoops one imagines normally impede such things, and gained audience with the eyes of the Don himself. In response he graced my little backwater of binary with an impatience channeled through the 140 character limit of twitter and voila: I was granted instant miniature fame (or infamy). However it happened, the Don, to use the horrible word spawned by recent technology, "retweeted" my blog post to his 50,000 or so followers at the time, all of whom flocked with the frictionless haste that the digital affords to defend their leader.
2.) Take Constructive Criticism, Ignore the Rest
And when they found themselves here I can only imagine they looked around a little confused at this backwater station they charged into. My blog was, as many of them pointed out, completely obscure, unknown, and (gasp!) unpopular. Perhaps expecting something big, flashy and arrogant along the lines of Mark Driscoll's haircut, what they found was so unimpressive the internet it was attached to might as well have actually been made of tubes. Or perhaps some string and old soup cans (But not Campbell's, thats like the designer label of canned soup). But here they were, nonetheless, pitchforks and torches ready and thirsting for blood. Though the rumors of my having barbecued their sacred cow were greatly exaggerated, they came for a fight, and thats what they were going to do, charity and logic be damned! There were a few thoughtful responses to be sure. But certainly the most memorable were the crazy insults. One even suggested that I get some sense punched into me (though he prefaced this with something like "I mean this in the best way possible," so I rest assured of his genuine concern for my education) while another gripped me with the iron vice of logic by noting that, from his analysis of what I wrote, it followed I had no friends. QED.
3.) Don't Be Afraid
Anyway, a short story even shorter, the whole thing blew over in a day or so. I invited Don out to beer on twitter to discuss our differences, he politely declined but apologized for any trouble he caused on my part, and that was that. However Halden over at Inhabitatio Dei was kind enough to invite me to write an article on Donald Miller for the Other Journal which was running a series on theology and celebrity at the time. I had mixed feelings about it: both because it was not a subject I would ever have chosen to be the first article I ever published, and because it was the first article I would ever publish. However steamy a turd I might accidentally write, it would have my name stamped on it forever. Presumably for some future alien civilization to chance and uncover, thereby judging our whole species' intelligence by this brain brick of an essay somehow preserved through whatever holocaust ended humanity. Needless to say I was slightly paralyzed by the fear of such a bloated significance. Nonetheless I figured that being invited to write an article was a rarity in and of itself, and how much more rare it must be for a nobody such as myself to be invited to write one, so I gratefully accepted. Even if it was a turd, it would be a publicly recognized one. No press is bad press, as they say.
4.) Don't Overthink
So I began writing. Only--I wasn't quite sure what to write. Like I said this wasnt exactly a topic I would have chosen. I wasn't a "specialist" in Donny M (if one could be). I had read Blue Like Jazz, sure, and a few blog posts, but that was it. And following the nature of a blog, his posts weren't exactly meaty representations of his thought (they were Miller Lite, one might say. I am officially going to suggest that as a blog name to him via twitter). Mercifully The Other Journal donated several of the Don's other books to me so I could read them while also avoiding the inevitable bankruptcy that would be inflicted on the precarious $8.50 equilibrium of my checking account. Father Fiction, Through Painted Deserts, and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years arrived at my doorstep and I furiously began to read.
I say furiously, but even reading three of Miller's books in a short span (I think it was about a week) is more of a pleasurable than a taxing experience. But they say you have to suffer for your art, and since I wasn't suffering I sure need to make it seem like I was. But the basic problem remained. I was chosen to write the article presumably both because of the somewhat undue fanfare of my blog post, and under what was becoming as I continued to read the Don the more and more unreasonable expectation I would write something coherent and interesting on him. I say unreasonable because a theology paper is supposed to usually a.) pick a theme in a thinker and synthesize/run with it or b.) trace the unity in a thinker's thought or c.) find a criticism or weakness and exploit it. There are other options but these are the basics.
The problem was, and this is not meant as an insult, that Miller's books themselves were not exactly ripe picking for those approaches. What they are really, are fragmentary reflections woven together and allowed meander here and there. It is a very stream of consciousness sort of writing, and it carries all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. Which is to say the coherence of Miller's books are the coherence of a life; only, as with life there are only a few places here and there in the day to day that actually make an impact. Thus when you write like you live the scenes jump between the semi-significant points without the benefit of the lived experience of traveling between them. It makes for an interesting reading experience, sort of like drifting down a winding stream in a Disney ride: you get to see a few interesting sights here and there and you get to your destination eventually but your not quite sure how the different diorama scenes interconnect. Miller's works were no Summa Theologia, they werent even useable nuggets like Pascal's Pensees. A theology paper this did not make, and so I felt stuck. I was staring at a blank page endlessly. On the upside I think this qualified me as a real writer. Whatever thats worth.
Yet in overcompensation at this aporia, I wanted to flood the white page with digital ink. So I started turning every nitpick into a thesis. But as they say you shouldnt confuse movement with action, and suddenly I found myself over the word limit without having said anything. So I began to delete things and revise them; I sewed some threads back into the overstuffed jumpsuit that my essay was becoming, and pulled at some other threads. It was a great bulky mess. On top of that in my panic I began to have something akin to stage fright as I wrote. Instead of concentrating on what to write, I was concentrating on my concentration of what to write. Even worse, in lieu of content, which was as of yet nowhere to be found, I began an over concentration on style. Which redoubled my effort to burst the word limit without so much as having a coherent thought on the page. A friend who read an early draft made the analogy of the young David struggling with all the bulky armor before he fought Goliath: my essay was in there somewhere but it couldn't breath under the weight. Like David, I had to take the armor off because it wasn't natural. It inhibited movement. I was overthinking.
5.) Do Strive For Simplicity
Not over thinking on what was meant to be an academic essay seems counterintuitive. But when you think about it (but not too much, now), over-thinking doesnt mean your paper is complex, it means its confused. Some of the best papers or books Ive ever read are at their core simple, but become complex because of rigorous application or investigation of that simple idea. Just think of your favorite book, academic, novel, or otherwise. They all start from some simple premise. The Lord of the Rings is a huge masterpiece, but at its heart its about good and evil, friendship and loyalty, temptation, corruption, etc... These are all simple themes that then manifest in complex ways. Or take an obscure example: Aloys Grillmeier's multi-volume Christ in Christian Tradition or Behr's three volume history of early Christian theology both focus on a simple theme: who is Christ? Yet the history both cover through that theme are arrays of enormously complex proposed answers.
Hemingway once said "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So I decided much like David, I needed to shed all the armor and move freely as myself. The armor metaphor was doubly apt: both because it represented the bulk slowing David down, and because, quite frankly, I was trying to protect myself by looking and sounding academic. But in the end, however good or bad my essay actually turned out, the confused and torturous landscape of prose I eventually managed to discard was just garbage getting in the way.
In fact a lot of it stemmed from the fact that I had abandoned what landed me this assignment in the first place. I went into this piece with the assumption that whatever I wrote before was not good enough for whatever I was about to write. This both caused me to freeze up, as I mentioned, and start giving undue thought to the form of my writing, but it also caused me to try and search for something that wasn't there. It gave me the impression that I had to look for some magisterial thesis, however chimerical it might be, in order to put it forward as an academic sounding opus. But the fact is, even if such complex things exist, they werent for me as a novice writer to trifle with. And at any rate, I was writing on Donald Miller (no offense Don, I like your books, but I think we can both agree the genre describing them is not "academic theology."). Coming back down to earth, however, I realized that what I had written on my blog post was actually moderately interesting, and could be developed. I had disagreed with a very simple faith/theology split that the Don seemed to be working with which had originally caused my bristles to, well, bristle. I had figured it too simple to be of any use in a real essay. But the more I looked at it, the more the simple theme wove in and out of all of his books. Finally I could set myself to writing something.
6.) Do Come Back Later
So after a few other torturous revisions, some great continual consultation by The Other Journal's editor, some rocking and muttering in dark corners, and a few final readings from friends, the essay was finished. I sent the final draft to Andrew, the editor, and that was it. The next day it was online, "published," (or whatever the digital approximation to that term is) and that was that. The article didnt get much response, of course. I dont even know how many people read it. In fact nearly the instant that it was published I felt embarrassed about it, because it had so much prior significance for myself and yet in the ultimate scheme of things it was really just a small, even a silly article. In fact the reason that I am writing reflections on it now, over a year later, is that I havent even looked at it since then. All I kept thinking and remembering over the course of the last year was the awful, convoluted mess that led up to the final draft. And my memory started to bleed that mess into the final draft itself. I had published that steamy turd I was worried about, I thought. Best to just let it fade away. Best just to not look at it again.
But I looked.
And...well, it wasn't as bad as I remembered. In fact, some of it was downright ok. I guess I didn't totally botch my first publication after all. But still, for next time (hopefully many other next-times), Ill know to stock up on aspirin first. And maybe some whiskey. It will be less painful that way. Like Hemingway wrote: "write drunk; edit sober."
1.) Take Unexpected Opportunities
A few may have whispers or rumors of memory of an event that happened a long time ago (and seemingly in a galaxy far away) when I wrote a post in response to a blog by Donald Miller. Donald "The Genuine Draft," Miller (which he is called by precisely no one except by me right now), is a Portland local Christian author of very engaging and authentic reflections on struggling with faith and Christianity. If one looks at the hit counter of my little blog, and wonders how it could be so relatively high for such a dusty little corner niche of the theo-blogopshere (and in perspective, even 15k is chump change to the larger theo-blogs) it is because somehow my blog response made it through the gateways and circumvented the jewel-encrusted hoops one imagines normally impede such things, and gained audience with the eyes of the Don himself. In response he graced my little backwater of binary with an impatience channeled through the 140 character limit of twitter and voila: I was granted instant miniature fame (or infamy). However it happened, the Don, to use the horrible word spawned by recent technology, "retweeted" my blog post to his 50,000 or so followers at the time, all of whom flocked with the frictionless haste that the digital affords to defend their leader.
2.) Take Constructive Criticism, Ignore the Rest
And when they found themselves here I can only imagine they looked around a little confused at this backwater station they charged into. My blog was, as many of them pointed out, completely obscure, unknown, and (gasp!) unpopular. Perhaps expecting something big, flashy and arrogant along the lines of Mark Driscoll's haircut, what they found was so unimpressive the internet it was attached to might as well have actually been made of tubes. Or perhaps some string and old soup cans (But not Campbell's, thats like the designer label of canned soup). But here they were, nonetheless, pitchforks and torches ready and thirsting for blood. Though the rumors of my having barbecued their sacred cow were greatly exaggerated, they came for a fight, and thats what they were going to do, charity and logic be damned! There were a few thoughtful responses to be sure. But certainly the most memorable were the crazy insults. One even suggested that I get some sense punched into me (though he prefaced this with something like "I mean this in the best way possible," so I rest assured of his genuine concern for my education) while another gripped me with the iron vice of logic by noting that, from his analysis of what I wrote, it followed I had no friends. QED.
3.) Don't Be Afraid
Anyway, a short story even shorter, the whole thing blew over in a day or so. I invited Don out to beer on twitter to discuss our differences, he politely declined but apologized for any trouble he caused on my part, and that was that. However Halden over at Inhabitatio Dei was kind enough to invite me to write an article on Donald Miller for the Other Journal which was running a series on theology and celebrity at the time. I had mixed feelings about it: both because it was not a subject I would ever have chosen to be the first article I ever published, and because it was the first article I would ever publish. However steamy a turd I might accidentally write, it would have my name stamped on it forever. Presumably for some future alien civilization to chance and uncover, thereby judging our whole species' intelligence by this brain brick of an essay somehow preserved through whatever holocaust ended humanity. Needless to say I was slightly paralyzed by the fear of such a bloated significance. Nonetheless I figured that being invited to write an article was a rarity in and of itself, and how much more rare it must be for a nobody such as myself to be invited to write one, so I gratefully accepted. Even if it was a turd, it would be a publicly recognized one. No press is bad press, as they say.
4.) Don't Overthink
So I began writing. Only--I wasn't quite sure what to write. Like I said this wasnt exactly a topic I would have chosen. I wasn't a "specialist" in Donny M (if one could be). I had read Blue Like Jazz, sure, and a few blog posts, but that was it. And following the nature of a blog, his posts weren't exactly meaty representations of his thought (they were Miller Lite, one might say. I am officially going to suggest that as a blog name to him via twitter). Mercifully The Other Journal donated several of the Don's other books to me so I could read them while also avoiding the inevitable bankruptcy that would be inflicted on the precarious $8.50 equilibrium of my checking account. Father Fiction, Through Painted Deserts, and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years arrived at my doorstep and I furiously began to read.
I say furiously, but even reading three of Miller's books in a short span (I think it was about a week) is more of a pleasurable than a taxing experience. But they say you have to suffer for your art, and since I wasn't suffering I sure need to make it seem like I was. But the basic problem remained. I was chosen to write the article presumably both because of the somewhat undue fanfare of my blog post, and under what was becoming as I continued to read the Don the more and more unreasonable expectation I would write something coherent and interesting on him. I say unreasonable because a theology paper is supposed to usually a.) pick a theme in a thinker and synthesize/run with it or b.) trace the unity in a thinker's thought or c.) find a criticism or weakness and exploit it. There are other options but these are the basics.
The problem was, and this is not meant as an insult, that Miller's books themselves were not exactly ripe picking for those approaches. What they are really, are fragmentary reflections woven together and allowed meander here and there. It is a very stream of consciousness sort of writing, and it carries all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. Which is to say the coherence of Miller's books are the coherence of a life; only, as with life there are only a few places here and there in the day to day that actually make an impact. Thus when you write like you live the scenes jump between the semi-significant points without the benefit of the lived experience of traveling between them. It makes for an interesting reading experience, sort of like drifting down a winding stream in a Disney ride: you get to see a few interesting sights here and there and you get to your destination eventually but your not quite sure how the different diorama scenes interconnect. Miller's works were no Summa Theologia, they werent even useable nuggets like Pascal's Pensees. A theology paper this did not make, and so I felt stuck. I was staring at a blank page endlessly. On the upside I think this qualified me as a real writer. Whatever thats worth.
Yet in overcompensation at this aporia, I wanted to flood the white page with digital ink. So I started turning every nitpick into a thesis. But as they say you shouldnt confuse movement with action, and suddenly I found myself over the word limit without having said anything. So I began to delete things and revise them; I sewed some threads back into the overstuffed jumpsuit that my essay was becoming, and pulled at some other threads. It was a great bulky mess. On top of that in my panic I began to have something akin to stage fright as I wrote. Instead of concentrating on what to write, I was concentrating on my concentration of what to write. Even worse, in lieu of content, which was as of yet nowhere to be found, I began an over concentration on style. Which redoubled my effort to burst the word limit without so much as having a coherent thought on the page. A friend who read an early draft made the analogy of the young David struggling with all the bulky armor before he fought Goliath: my essay was in there somewhere but it couldn't breath under the weight. Like David, I had to take the armor off because it wasn't natural. It inhibited movement. I was overthinking.
5.) Do Strive For Simplicity
Not over thinking on what was meant to be an academic essay seems counterintuitive. But when you think about it (but not too much, now), over-thinking doesnt mean your paper is complex, it means its confused. Some of the best papers or books Ive ever read are at their core simple, but become complex because of rigorous application or investigation of that simple idea. Just think of your favorite book, academic, novel, or otherwise. They all start from some simple premise. The Lord of the Rings is a huge masterpiece, but at its heart its about good and evil, friendship and loyalty, temptation, corruption, etc... These are all simple themes that then manifest in complex ways. Or take an obscure example: Aloys Grillmeier's multi-volume Christ in Christian Tradition or Behr's three volume history of early Christian theology both focus on a simple theme: who is Christ? Yet the history both cover through that theme are arrays of enormously complex proposed answers.
Hemingway once said "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So I decided much like David, I needed to shed all the armor and move freely as myself. The armor metaphor was doubly apt: both because it represented the bulk slowing David down, and because, quite frankly, I was trying to protect myself by looking and sounding academic. But in the end, however good or bad my essay actually turned out, the confused and torturous landscape of prose I eventually managed to discard was just garbage getting in the way.
In fact a lot of it stemmed from the fact that I had abandoned what landed me this assignment in the first place. I went into this piece with the assumption that whatever I wrote before was not good enough for whatever I was about to write. This both caused me to freeze up, as I mentioned, and start giving undue thought to the form of my writing, but it also caused me to try and search for something that wasn't there. It gave me the impression that I had to look for some magisterial thesis, however chimerical it might be, in order to put it forward as an academic sounding opus. But the fact is, even if such complex things exist, they werent for me as a novice writer to trifle with. And at any rate, I was writing on Donald Miller (no offense Don, I like your books, but I think we can both agree the genre describing them is not "academic theology."). Coming back down to earth, however, I realized that what I had written on my blog post was actually moderately interesting, and could be developed. I had disagreed with a very simple faith/theology split that the Don seemed to be working with which had originally caused my bristles to, well, bristle. I had figured it too simple to be of any use in a real essay. But the more I looked at it, the more the simple theme wove in and out of all of his books. Finally I could set myself to writing something.
6.) Do Come Back Later
So after a few other torturous revisions, some great continual consultation by The Other Journal's editor, some rocking and muttering in dark corners, and a few final readings from friends, the essay was finished. I sent the final draft to Andrew, the editor, and that was it. The next day it was online, "published," (or whatever the digital approximation to that term is) and that was that. The article didnt get much response, of course. I dont even know how many people read it. In fact nearly the instant that it was published I felt embarrassed about it, because it had so much prior significance for myself and yet in the ultimate scheme of things it was really just a small, even a silly article. In fact the reason that I am writing reflections on it now, over a year later, is that I havent even looked at it since then. All I kept thinking and remembering over the course of the last year was the awful, convoluted mess that led up to the final draft. And my memory started to bleed that mess into the final draft itself. I had published that steamy turd I was worried about, I thought. Best to just let it fade away. Best just to not look at it again.
But I looked.
And...well, it wasn't as bad as I remembered. In fact, some of it was downright ok. I guess I didn't totally botch my first publication after all. But still, for next time (hopefully many other next-times), Ill know to stock up on aspirin first. And maybe some whiskey. It will be less painful that way. Like Hemingway wrote: "write drunk; edit sober."
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