This episode is for writers who are having a hard time transforming their dissertations into a book.
Hi writers! Welcome back. It’s the end of another incredibly tough school year.
Congratulations—you made it to summer!
Today I’m going to be talking about the process of turning a dissertation into a book and why it’s so hard.
But before I do that, I want to offer you some advice based on my own experience of never giving myself a mental break from work when I was a junior faculty member:
You need to take some real time off!
You need time to decompress and to give your mind the space and freedom to process all the craziness and chaos we’ve experienced during this seemingly never-ending pandemic.
And for those of you who have young kids like mine who are not yet able to be vaccinated, there’s that additional layer of worry and frustration clouding our thoughts.
So please give yourself credit for keeping it all together this year and making it to this point.
A lot of academics I know only allow themselves to take a few days or maybe a week off from work before they dive back in again.
Sometimes this is unavoidable because you might be teaching a summer course or attending a conference.
But didn’t we get into this career path to have more flexibility around work?
So I’m here to give you permission to let yourself actually enjoy that flexibility, take advantage of it, and not get sucked into the culture of overwork that pervades higher education.
Deep relaxation and rest are the keys to you being able to make progress on your book when you start working on it again.
Just like seasons in nature, we aren’t meant to be performing at the same level all year long.
Beyond providing tips and advice on book writing, I see one of the key purposes of this podcast as giving you radical permission to do what feels best to you.
And here I’m not talking about listening your inner critic that’s always telling you you’re lazy and need to work harder.
I’m speaking to the most grounded, centered, and wisest part of you that knows you don’t need to “earn” being worthy of self-care.
You are deserving of being treated with love and compassion regardless of your work productivity.
One of my coaching clients shared a mantra of hers with me recently, which I love. It’s “You are enough today, you were enough yesterday, and you will be enough tomorrow.”
So take your work email off your phone.
Silence your notifications.
Take long naps or read trashy novels or take long walks in nature or meet up with friends you haven’t seen in three years or start your day with a freaking mimosa.
Trust me—the less you engage with work, the less it can control you. But that means you need to allow yourself to turn it off in your own mind.
So try not to feel guilty about having a good time even though you haven’t written in two weeks.
Or make the active decision to not plan out your next book chapter in your head when you’re playing with your kids.
The work will always be there, but not everything else will.
Okay, rant over!
So let’s talk about the challenge of turning your dissertation into a book.
Recently, I was asked by a large research university to put together a workshop for junior faculty about transforming your dissertation into a book.
It’s made me reflect on the very long and painful process I went through writing my first book, which I started working on soon after I graduated with my PhD in 2010.
Today I’m going to focus on WHY revising your dissertation is such an emotionally fraught process.
I’ll give you an exercise at the end to help you reflect on your journey from graduate student to full-fledged expert.
And in the next episode, I will give some specific and practical tips and tricks to help you as you work on revising.
Why it’s so hard to do…
Everything I’m about to say is based on both my own journey to becoming a new author as well as the experiences of many coaching clients who are postdocs or junior faculty members a couple of years into their jobs.
I’m going to talk about the emotional reasons why this process feels so hard and can end up draining so much of your energy.
So, in essence, I believe that much of the difficulty boils down to the legacies of graduate school.
I’m going to talk about two main reasons why, in order to move forward with your book with confidence, you need to acknowledge and let go of grad school trauma.
You need to grow into a new stage of intellectual development where you feel comfortable claiming your position as a world-leading expert in your field.
So what are these reasons?
Reason #1: You are no longer the same person you were when you started this project.
I mean, how could you be? You probably started researching your dissertation topic years and years—or perhaps even a decade—ago.
Think back to your younger self and marvel at how much you’ve changed and learned since then!
Back then, even the idea of doing your own research was exciting and your area of investigation was likely new and novel to you.
In my case, I first began researching the topic that went on to become the subject of my dissertation and then my first book for my undergraduate senior honor’s thesis!
I was only 21 years old when I first started the project, and I was 38 when it was published as a book. So if you’re doing the math, that’s 17 years!
What a ridiculously long amount of time to keep myself interested and motivated to work on the same topic.
And as I continued on in my career, this project just kept hanging around when all I wanted to do was pursue other new and exciting projects.
So think about it this way: our relationship with our work is similar to a romantic relationship.
When you’ve been with the same person for years on end, you’re probably going to get a little bored and start getting curious about what else is out there.
It’s just human nature.
So what did I do? I allowed myself to work on different research projects at the same time.
I found some psychologists to collaborate with and we started doing mixed-methods, community-based research on Asian American families in Boston.
I also did interviews with Chinese American workers in China while I finished up fieldwork for my first book, and those interviews ended up becoming my second book.
Neither of those projects was related to my dissertation.
But they gave me inspiration as well as assurance that I was still growing as a scholar even as I continued to work on something that was bound up in my past.
And luckily –or perhaps unluckily for me depending on how you look at it—I was single and childfree during those years, so I was able to devote a lot of time to my various research projects.
So if you are dreading opening up your dissertation because you’re sick and tired of looking at it, I get it!
Try thinking about some other ways you could re-connect with your initial sources of inspiration.
Or you could do what I did, which is to explore other things—such as new research projects—that can be done on a part-time basis that will help you keep the flame alive with your old project.
Reason #2: The entire experience of grad school and writing the dissertation is traumatizing and harrowing.
The kind of professional hazing that happens to us as students can cause deep and long-lasting wounds that solidify as self-doubt, anxiety, and imposter syndrome even when we are well beyond the PhD.
The majority of my clients have said that they used to love writing when they were younger, which is partly what led them to pursue academia in the first place.
Unfortunately, without fail, their confidence was dashed by critical advisors or folks in other positions of authority that they looked up to as impressionable students.
And after enduring years of being torn down, they come to believe all of these critiques and lose touch with the innate part of themselves that knows their own immense value and what they have to offer.
On top of that, the critiques grad students receive from advisors are often just that—critical—rather than constructive.
And many grad students end up feeling like they have to figure things out for themselves rather than rely on the people who should be guiding them but wield too much power and influence over their futures.
One of my clients, an assistant professor who was nearing tenure, told me, and I quote, “my work was torn to shreds by my dissertation chair in grad school and I was not given much guidance on how to improve. It didn’t help me to just tell me to redo it. I needed to know what to improve upon. That made me anxious and made want to keep pushing the writing off as long as I could.”
Unfortunately, she still feels apprehensive and scared to write five years after graduating.
So we can see how internalizing advisor critiques can make it difficult for many people to just sit down and write.
Writing gets intertwined with feelings of desperation and inadequacy, which can lead to unhelpful habits such as perfectionism, avoidance, and procrastination.
Another one of my clients, a junior faculty member at an R-1 university who learned English as a second language, was told time and time again by her advisor that she was a bad writer.
More than that, she was told to write her dissertation in a very specific way to please her advisor rather than herself.
When we started working together, she hadn’t written anything new on her book in nearly a year because looking at her dissertation literally made her feel bad.
But once we unburdened her of her advisor’s critiques –which we agreed were well-intentioned even if emotionally harmful—she was able to unlock her own creativity and churn out 50 pages of new writing in a semester!
It’s time for a new start!
So now I’m going to ask you a few questions that can help you reflect on, and hopefully start to let go of, the traumas of grad school that can negatively impact your book writing.
It’ll be most useful if you take some time to jot down your answers to these.
First, think back to the feedback you received about your writing as grad student. What were the exact comments that have stayed with you? Chances are, you remember the negative more than the positive.
Second, how has critical feedback you received on your dissertation influenced how you currently think about yourself as a writer?
Third, what are the top 2 or 3 negative thoughts you have about yourself as a writer?
In other words, what stories are you telling yourself about your writing that you need to let go of to move forward with confidence?
And, lastly. in what ways are these stories not true? Write down all of the evidence you have that you are a clear, persuasive, powerful writer. Trust me, you wouldn’t have been able to get to this point if you weren’t!
Summing It All Up
So I hope you’ve come to recognize the emotional aspects of turning your dissertation into a book.
It’s not only hard because you’ve never written a book before or you don’t understand the publishing process—which, of course, are also super valid reasons that I’ll address in the next episode.
It’s also challenging because it involves needing to let go of your former self.
It’s time to step into your new identity as an expert who doesn’t need to prove to others that you are fully qualified.
We need to talk about ways to process emotions from grad school so you can move forward with your book and career with a sense of empowerment, rather than deficiency.
So perhaps you can think about doing some kind of ritual to honor your younger self and bid farewell to any writing-related trauma you experienced early on.
You can write an assuring letter to your younger self or take pages of your dissertation and burn them with the intention of letting go.
Do whatever feels good to you.
Next time I’ll be back with some more practical tips and tricks for revising your diss into a book.
Until then, go take care of yourselves and get some much-needed rest!
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out:
Episode 4: Develop Your Writer’s Voice