Hi writers! How is your semester going?
I bet the shine of the new year is fading, and a million deadlines and obligations are creeping up.
One of the biggest challenges my clients face is figuring out how to write during semesters when they are also teaching.
It’s not just a matter of trying to fit writing into their schedules—which is a huge challenge in and of itself.
But it’s also about the difficulty of balancing the short-term, hard deadlines of teaching with the longer-term, seemingly lower stakes deadlines that are usually attached to book writing.
The former feels urgent while the latter does not.
On top of that, most teachers I know are incredibly giving and generous with their time and effort.
Teachers often feel more accountable and obligated to meeting the needs of their students than to themselves.
And when you are teaching two to four classes a semester, you’re swamped!
You’re prepping lectures, planning exams, showing up to teach, holding office hours, maybe managing TAs, and of course, grading.
You’re responding to a million emails and trying to make sure all of your students get what they need to succeed in your course.
It’s a lot! And there’s so much flying at you at once that it becomes way too easy to put your own book on the back burner.
I want to encourage you to do something different this semester and not put off your writing until you have a long, undistracted period of time like summer break.
The folks I know who do this waste tons of time trying to remember where they left off last in their project.
They have to reread a long list of articles and books and find all of those documents and little pieces of writing that they did on their project but filed away months ago.
Also, they tend to put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to get a major amount of writing done when all they actually want (and need) to do is relax and recuperate from the school year.
So with that in mind, I decided to devote today’s episode to talking about the similarities between book writing and teaching.
My hope is that once you start seeing these activities as aligned rather than as completely different kinds of projects, it will be easier to incorporate writing your book into your teaching schedule.
How Book Writing is Like Teaching
In my view, the primary way book writing is like teaching is that you are centering the needs of your audience and not yourself.
Good teachers are student-centered.
What does this mean?
They think about their students’ needs and try to connect with them, presenting material in a way—and at a level—that makes sense to them.
We’ve all sat through lectures where the instructor talked AT students for an hour instead of engaging them in a dialogue.
It’s boring and difficult to learn.
Not only that, but it’s alienating because the instructor is more focused on their own ideas than what their students actually need or are interested in.
Why would it be any different with a book?
I’m going to say this over and over again today: all good books are reader-centered!
Authors of reader-centered books view their pages as a fascinating dialogue they’re having with people (and by this, I don’t mean critics or reviewers).
They don’t treat them as a monologue they’re giving to a faceless crowd.
So next I’m going to give you four strategies to help you use your teaching skills to write a reader-centered book.
1) Scaffold and present information so that your audience can follow.
Many of the first-time authors I work with are swimming in way too many details from their research that all feel equally important.
They often go way off path, writing long passages that are tangential to the main points of the book.
Or, their writing is filled with jargon or specialized terms that no regular person would be able to understand.
The reason this happens is because they’re not being reader-centered, they’re being author-centered.
You want to be speaking WITH your audience, not TO them.
So my first big tip is to scaffold information and present it in such a way that your audience can keep up with you.
Think about it—when you’re designing a lecture on a new topic that students aren’t familiar with, you need to figure out how to present the information in a way they can easily follow.
You probably need to start big and give all the background context and definitions your students need to make sense of the main topic of the lecture.
This means you always need to be putting yourselves in the metaphorical shoes of someone who is not an expert in your field and write in a way that they’ll understand.
Just like when you teach, you need to limit your usage of jargon or specialized terms or else you will lose your audience.
Never assume that your readers will understand terms that are commonly used in your field.
This is particularly true when you’re writing your proposal, which will be read and evaluated first by non-expert acquisitions editors.
Most of the time, when I read through my clients’ early proposal drafts, I give the feedback “assumes too much reader knowledge” because they’re using too many field-specific terms or concepts.
But all they need to do to fix this is to give a short definition after each term (which is something you naturally do when you’re teaching and you can see that your students don’t understand something).
For example, I’ve been working with an author whose book heavily utilizes settler colonial theory.
I’ve heard this term a million times, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means or how it should be used.
And if that’s the case for me, then it would certainly be true for many other readers.
So in her proposal and chapters, we made sure she explicitly defined how she was using the term and why it was important to her argument and findings.
2) Focus specifically on your ideal audience.
My second main tip expands on the first one.
It’s that you should focus not just on your audience, but on your IDEAL audience.
One thing I came to accept in my nearly 20 years as a university instructor was that not all students were going to love my classes.
Sometimes it was because they were only taking it as a requirement or they just had no interest in the subject matter.
Other times it was because they were juggling so many other obligations that they didn’t have the time to invest in the learning process.
And once in awhile it was because they just didn’t like my teaching style.
When I was a novice teacher, I used to take all of these things personally and feel responsible for trying to reach every single student in the same way.
The problem with this approach was that it’s literally impossible!
I learned that you cannot and will not please everyone, so it’s not worth it to even try.
Once I let go of this overwhelming sense of responsibility for each and every student, it allowed me to focus on meeting the needs of the ones who were engaged, interested, and willing to do the work.
And these became my ideal students.
The ones who took multiple classes with me and who I became personally invested in, doing things like helping them get into grad school or secure jobs after they graduated.
Knowing the characteristics of my ideal students helped me figure out at what level to teach the material, what kind of assignments were the most appropriate, and how to pace the course.
And, because I was focused on helping them rather than spreading myself thin trying to reach everyone, I was overall a better, more interesting, and more engaged teacher.
In other words, having ideal students in mind when I taught my classes allowed me to be more authentic and helped set the tone that I used as an instructor.
So now let’s think about how this relates to writing.
Again, remember that you cannot please everyone, nor should you waste time trying.
Instead, it’s better to focus on what your ideal reader needs and let the tone and content of your book reflect that.
So who is your ideal reader?
If you listened to podcast Episode 4 called “Develop Your Writer’s Voice,” I talk about this at length and give you questions to narrow things down.
And if you haven’t listened to it, I recommend you do so right after you finish this one!
But essentially, your ideal reader is someone who is NOT a reviewer or critic looking to poke holes in your argument or find fault with your study.
They are someone who you really want to read your book and be transformed in some way, either through it changing how they think about the world or causing them to feel called to action.
One important thing to keep in mind is that this ideal reader should be someone who also really wants to read your book!
And I say this because sometimes when I do this exercise with my clients, they state an ideal reader who they WISH was on board with their ideas but actually isn’t open to them.
Your ideal reader is someone who is supportive of you and your work. They are interested in your topic but might not know that much about it.
Like your best students!
Once you have a really good sense of who your ideal reader is, then it’s much simpler to figure out what needs to go into the book and what doesn’t, and what tone to use to write it.
3) You need key takeaways.
My third tip for applying your teaching skills to writing is in knowing specifically what you want your reader to take away from your book.
So when it comes to course design, every effective course has clear learning objectives that students should come away with.
They might be related to learning particular concepts, thinking critically about certain issues, or being able to write more effectively.
I remember when I was teaching Sociology 101, my learning outcomes were listed clearly on the first page of the syllabus.
To create these learning outcomes, I really had to think about the deeper meaning of the course and what I wanted them to get from it.
In other words, I had my main takeaways in mind before I ever taught the course.
And what I wanted them to get from it may have differed a lot from other Soc 101 instructors.
Why would a book be any different?
So if we continue to use an ideal reader-centered approach, we should be asking what we want our audience to actually take away from the book.
Imagine that your ideal reader has finished reading the book and someone asks them the main point.
What would you want them to say?
Would you want them to remember a particular term that you coined or be able to state your argument?
(This would require you to have an argument that’s concise and clear enough for someone to recall when it’s no longer in front of them, which is also something a lot of authors struggle with).
So as you’re writing your book, I would jot down two or three main takeaways you want your reader to have at the end.
This will help you focus your ideas more on the overall intent of the book for your audience.
4) Use the writing advice you give to your students for yourself!
So my final tip is to use the writing advice you already give your students and apply it to your own writing practice.
Many of the faculty I work with spend hours every week helping their students with their writing.
They help them develop ideas, create a research plan, assess sources, and create strong arguments.
They also help them organize and plan everything out so that they can write a long essay like a senior capstone or honors thesis within the space of a semester.
If this is you, then you’ve already created a process for your students that works.
So here’s a quick exercise:
Think of the primary writing issues that your students ask you for help with.
Next, write down the advice or strategies you usually give them to solve these problems.
Finally, take a look at this advice and see how you can potentially apply it to your own writing practice.
Summing It All Up
So there you have it—my thoughts on how you can apply your experience as a teacher to your book writing.
Let me sum up my four main points here, keeping in mind that you are trying to center the needs of your reader.
First, scaffold and present information so that your audience can follow.
Second, focus on meeting the needs of your IDEAL reader.
Third, decide in advance what the key takeaways from your book will be and make sure these are extremely clear to your reader.
And fourth, take the writing advice you give your students and see how you can apply it to your own practice.
Just remember that writing your first book is a lot like learning how to teach.
You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, but over time and with practice, it will eventually become easier.
The trick is to keep trying.
Good luck fitting more writing into your schedule, and I’ll talk to you again soon!