I have begun my first real writing project on this platform: a set of essays going through French New Wave films year by year. I don’t have any particular ambitions for this project, I have no argument, no new perspective, I just wanted to set myself a writing project to follow through on as both a way to rehearse writing on cultural history and to give myself an excuse spending a lot of time watching and re-watching films I love. It also cuts down on time I waste deciding what to watch. I have a rough list; I watch something from that.

It’s going great so far as going great means that I’m enjoying how I’m using my time. I’m writing lots of notes that feel thoughtful and exciting, and I’m keeping a relative lid on the dread I feel about the political situation. I still feel that dread. I am present for what is going on, but having these movies to watch and write about gives me needed breaks and fills my time with something besides doom scrolling and a drinking habit that was hurting me (4 months sober today!)

But as I start working those notes into essays for my newsletter, I am coming up against how hard it is for those of us trained academically to write for different audiences. Many people have commented on this, and I’m not sure I have anything new, but I stumbled on a way to articulate it that is useful for me in understanding the re-training I need to do for myself and my voice. I thought it could be useful both for other academics trying to branch out and for non-academics to understand why we write this way, what purpose it served us, and why it wasn’t just a bad writing habit or willful obscurantism, but a motivated training that fulfilled a specific purpose in a specific context—a context which I fear is completely collapsing due to factors external to it, much to all our detriment, I firmly believe.

When you are training to be an academic, you are learning to write in two very difficult and complex genres. One is the dissertation itself. This is meant to be preparation for writing books and scholarship, perhaps even a draft of a book, but it is its unique genre. The other is the peer-reviewed article. This used to be a genre you would start writing and publishing only after achieving your Ph.D., but in the last few decades, the pressure to publish before you get on the job market has increased exponentially. It is increasingly unlikely you will get an academic job that can sustain you financially, period, but almost impossible without already having articles at least accepted for publication in major journals. Tight job markets make for stiffer competition and higher demands for entry. For a lot of reasons, I think this is a destructive expectation that promotes over-publication and safer, less interesting scholarship in humanities disciplines (the world of lab sciences and co-authored social science papers is not one I can speak to). But it exists and everyone in graduate school is expected to be writing dissertation chapters intending to get them published as articles through peer review before the dissertation itself has been approved by your committee.

Thus, throughout your graduate school training, you are learning to write for a narrow set of readers. They are, in order of structural importance 1) anonymous peer-reviewers whose decisions to pass or publish your article within a short timeline will determine your job-market viability 2) your dissertation chair and committee members 3) journal editors who will make an initial decision to send your article for peer review 4) job search committees 5) academic experts in your subject matter 6) other academics in your discipline 7) anyone else. Some of these reader’s motivations and reactions are pretty obscure. For instance, journal editors often responding to whatever is already in line for publication in the journal and, as a writer, it’s usually impossible to know what they will be thinking about when they read your submission. Sorry if you just sent off an article on Herman Melville to a journal that already has a special issue on Melville and a full line-up of contributors plotted out for the next year, hopefully, the editor gets the article back to you within a month so you can quickly get it sent somewhere else. You might think job committee members (the people who will hire you) would be more important, but it’s not possible to know what the composition of those committees will be, what the schools and programs posting jobs the years you are on the market (still in the future) will be looking for, who you will be competing against, and a lot of other factors. They are phantoms, not realities.

Your dissertation chair and committee are your most known readers, and the specific genre of the dissertation is a product of an ongoing conversation with them through frequent meetings and draft feedback as you write. They hopefully have a good sense of the general market, where scholarship is heading, what people are looking to read, and what has already been said in your field and help train you into the conversation that is ongoing in the scholarship both on your topic and how that topic might speak to bigger conversations. Good dissertation committees have to be plugged in, because they need to be helping the grad student enter into a complex discursive space. But often the advice you are getting, beyond guidelines for developing your big “so what?” questions, is in the form of books and research your mentors know that you haven’t read yet. “This sounds like the work so-and-so has been doing, have you read their monograph?” “I think here you need to engage more with the y theoretical framework.”

While a lot of this is aimed at developing a way into the field as it already exists for your project, it is also about preparing you to get through peer review. Plenty of people have written about how the peer-review system is broken and I don’t need to reiterate here. I can simply say that the vast majority of negative peer-review feedback I have gotten on articles I have submitted has also taken the form of “you need to engage more with so-and-so’s work,” “I don’t understand how this advances what x,y, and z have already said about this genre.”

The result is that as a writer, the audience you begin to imagine in your head is a hostile, critical voice: someone who has read everything you have read and much more, already thought about it from every angle, and looking to block recognition that you have said anything new at all. None of these key readers I’ve mentioned as individuals are that person; most are genuinely interested in helping you improve your work and find success, including grumpy-sounding anonymous peer reviewers. But academic writing practice becomes a defensive operation. “Have I proven I’ve done the primary and secondary research? Have I signified I know so-and-so’s arguments but I’m departing from them? Do I have enough paragraphs dealing with the moral or ethical implications of this moment in the text that I know are of concern to readers of y theorist?” You are always signaling the extent of your reading, knowledge, and consideration of counterarguments so that you can get through the narrow keyhole that is peer review and get a shot at a career.

Now, contextualy I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. Being disciplined in rigor is the cornerstone of any academic training. Without the rigor of thought and dialectical engagement with the work of others, we don’t have humanities academic practice. It’s hard to get there. Ph.D. programs are hard to complete, and getting through tenure review is hard. There’s nothing wrong with it being hard if that makes us better scholars engaging in meaningful debate and advancement of our understanding of human cultures. In addition, the defensive posture of the first few phases of an academic career is not permanent. Many scholars, as they advance through publication, dissertation writing, first monograph, and tenure review can hone writing skills for wider and wider audiences, not least of all through the practice of teaching. After tenure, many scholars achieve confidence in their writing and teaching that lets them rethink audience and writing practice and find opportunities for communicating that perhaps don’t count towards tenure in the same way as peer-reviewed publications but are rewarding and help disseminate knowledge. However, that only is available if, once tenured, they don’t get buried in service work— which is all too common these days, as most academic departments are increasingly understaffed.

Experts learn to write for experts, advance expert-level knowledge through debate and dialectic, and grow our ways of understanding of literary texts and periods. Then, having made significant scholarly contributions and achieving tenure, work at translating that knowledge of the experts in academic journals and monographs into classroom pedagogy, public speaking, and books and publications aimed at different audiences. That does not seem to me like a terrible system for advancing and distributing knowledge, and there’s nothing wrong with a lot of scholarly journal writing not being very accessible to non-expert audiences.

The problem is that no-one (practically) is getting tenure. Academic training in the humanities is for enabling people to work through a specific career path, and most of us never even get in the front door. If you spend five years on a tenure-track job market, submitting writing samples, and are still stuck in VAPS, adjunct gigs, and contingent postings, you are not able to build the confidence in your expertise and career progress that provides a foundation for transitioning to other types of writing and other audiences. My academic job market experience (and the final vindictive administration tanking of my career) completely ruptured what confidence I had built through the dissertation process and occasional conference presentations. Whatever peer-review articles I got published never seemed to matter, I never got any feedback once publication happened, and they never got me a job. With the collapse of the tenure-track job market, so too had collapsed a meaningful audience of experts for academic work. Unlike tenure-track colleagues at R1s who have low teaching loads, I have a heavy one and don’t have time to keep up with the journals (or much of an interest anymore) and that’s the case for most of us who are too busy grading and fighting union battles and hustling to get enough income to live.

I no longer have an interest in writing for modes of academic publication. There are so few people left to read it, the pedagogical dissemination of humanities ideas does not have much of a future in this country, it has not gotten me a sustainable academic career and it will not in the future. I have some impulse to finish what I started with my book, but I think I’m deep in a sunk-costs fallacy on that one. A huge part of why I started this Substack was because I knew I needed to rehearse and train myself to write for other audiences if I wanted to be a writer at all. I had to get past how shaken my confidence was by my decade of experience as a contingent professor shut out of advancement, applying for hundreds of jobs with only a small handful of first-round interviews and three whole campus visits to show for it.

One area where I do have some confidence is as a teacher. I think I know how to translate complex ideas in a classroom and work with students through material. So far, writing for this Substack, I have found ways to adapt my pedagogical voice to writing. That has worked well for most things I’ve written I think, like this post, that have been purely occasional—usually drafted, revised, and published within a few hours on one of my days off teaching, with no needed research. That is distant enough from academic writing that I can focus on other audiences in my head as I write.

But as I started to draft an essay about French Film culture in the 1950s as scene-setting for the emergence of the French New Wave at the end of that decade, I found myself contending with how that academic training has disciplined me as a writer, without offering me the support, progress, and feedback that allow me to overcome the insecurities it had instilled.

Once again, I was writing as if my audience was a hostile expert, a peer reviewer, who would be able to tell how much research I had not done. Of course, I’m no expert on French history and culture, I’m not even fluent in French. I just love French film and want to explore it and write about it. I did read a single-volume history of the French New Wave, and a couple of the most famous essays written by key New Wave directors in the 1950s when they worked as film critics at Cahiers du Cinema. I’ve got some more books in my to-read pile by the major cultural writers of the period Andre Bazin and Roland Barthes, and I’ve watched close to 100 features and shorts in the last two months. This is plenty of background to write about some films I appreciate or want to articulate my responses to. This is plenty of understanding to bring a reader along in my journey of exploring this period and these movies. I have no intention to ever publish scholarly material here. It’s either going to be interesting to a reader or not.

But here I am pointing out all the movies I haven’t been able to find on streaming, or that I know I’m overlying on a single source, or that yes, I really should say more about Italian Neorealism here, or more woman directors there (whose work other than that of Agnes Varda is largely inaccessible in the U.S.). Or dropping the name of Andre Bazin just to say, yup I know he was important, I did my homework. But a general audience is not remotely going to care, it comes off as pretentious or simply leaves them behind. It’s not explanatory, it’s for experts only.

If I want to write beyond academia, I have to silence this voice. It was drilled into me for a context and readership that is completely inaccessible to me and most people, not because it’s “elite” but because it’s a dying profession. But I’d also love to share how I proceed with these types of self-teaching research and writing projects. It’s a valuable skill that we failed academics should share with more people in ways that communicate outside of expert audiences and training programs that are collapsing because otherwise, it really will be lost.

So, I’m working on it. This newsletter is a work in progress. I know that writing projects still compel me and that research still compels me. I need to transition that energy into a new form and find new audiences. But for now, there’s that academically learned insecurity I have to overcome, which leads to me to be always on the defense, trying to prove that I know what I’m talking about for some imagined peer reviewer. Again, I truly believe there are benefits to learning this discipline, but only if you can progress through a career that lets you build confidence as an expert rather than continually shattering it. Far too many talented writers are stuck in this limbo, I hope I’m finding a way out, and I hope this post helps people understand better the process of transitioning out of academia.

I promise actual French New Wave content will be coming soon!