The coach, the cataloguer and the chaos muppet: authors are many-headed hydra
On warring headspaces during copy edits, and some books and music I'm enjoying this summer.
Hallo readers and welcome, new subscribers!
It’s been a brain-frying few weeks, but the copy edits to Humans: A Monstrous History are done! There’s nothing like an amazing copy editor and production team to sharpen up a book: catching confusing phrases, noticing typos in the sections you read too fast for fear of starting to hate them, and suggesting stuff worth adding to make a story clearer. Working with the University of California Press has been phenomenal.
Less phenomenal of late was working with my own brain. I think I’ve figured out why.
Writing and finishing a book isn’t one job but many. An author must play a bunch of roles, moving between headspaces to focus on different tasks. For a history author, the most distinctive roles are what I call the coach, the cataloguer, and the chaos muppet.
The coach is the strategic thinker and planner. In this headspace, authors reflect panoramically on a book or a chapter as a whole, figuring out the scope of the work and planning when and how to do it. This is the decision-making headspace.
The cataloguer does the bread-and-butter work that the coach has laid out: reading, note-taking, analyzing evidence, and generally climbing up and down each of the peaks in the mountain range of the story landscape without constantly asking WHY?!?!?!?
The chaos muppet is the creative one. Equipped with an imagination that could power an Olympic opening ceremony, they discover fresh “but what about?” rabbit-holes like it’s a competitive sport.
The trick to getting a book done and out of one’s hair with the minimum of tears is swapping between these headspaces as needed. Each headspace gets multiple turns. The cataloguer will unearth stuff that the coach needs to make decisions about, and that the chaos muppet needs to run with to make connections and interpret. Everything always takes ten times longer than the chaos muppet predicts. The coach has to triage the to-do lists that the chaos muppet keeps scribbling like they can stop time to get through them.
But towards the end of a project, both the coach and the chaos muppet have to get out of the way, and let the cataloguer check each page in the most unimaginative way possible and decide that it’s as done as it’s going to get. They must rename all outstanding to-do lists as optional future ideas lists. The rabbit-holes get filled in.
Something about Humans: A Monstrous History made it impossible to turn off the chaos muppet. The closer it got to the end, the more engaged the muppet began, throwing more and more possibilities onto the to-do list. Add this example! Read this book! What about this folder full of downloaded pdfs! Now re-read everything! What about these great tips for improving my writing style!
It was awful. My apartment was bursting with (digital) books, images, documents, and stories I’d been gathering for years but weren’t in the book. It was as if I’d charmed a thousand extras to come to a casting call, picked a few, and left the rest out in the rain.
To be sure, they had come hoping for a part as an unpaid extra, not for a career-making starring role. They weren’t going to go hungry because I didn’t choose them. These hopefuls were patient, eager, and loyal, like Minions, and wouldn’t hold rejection against me. And between sending the manuscript in for copy editing and answering my magnificent copy editor’s queries, I’d managed to add thousands of extra words, making the manuscript longer than my maximum word length, so there really wasn’t room for adding more.
But I spent the day after pressing SEND on the copy edits bursting into tears every time I remembered a thing for which there wasn’t room in the book. I felt like I had betrayed the material that I had invited in, and betrayed my former self who had climbed down all those rabbit-holes dodging slugs and snails and grazing knees and elbows looking for treasure.
And then I realized that the chaos muppet - so good at the curiosity, enthusiasm and drive that blots out doubt and worry - had taken over the world, and the coach and the cataloger were marooned on the moon.
I finally got the chaos muppet to grudgingly concede that time, space and word counts are real, that they don’t have a time machine or a word machine to give me another six months and ten thousand more words, and that being an author meant looking at the unfinished wish-lists and saying suck it up, buttercup!
With any luck, the chaos muppet will play nicely in the folder of spinoff essay and newsletter (newsletter!) ideas, and will become so enthusiastic about pitching and writing them that they won’t want to meddle with the page proofs next month.
Takes and recs
I’m reading an advance copy of Pamela D. Toler’s THE DRAGON FROM CHICAGO: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AN AMERICAN REPORTER IN NAZI GERMANY (pre-order links are here). The book tells the story of Sigrid Schulz, the Chicago Tribune’s bureau chief in Berlin from 1925 to 1941. A few chapters in, I’ve been on the edge of my seat since page 1! Pub date is August 6. If you’re planning on buying it, pre-ordering is super-helpful for authors: it encourages retailers to stock copies and online sellers to recommend it.
The right soundtrack can make scary, stressful, or boring tasks almost pleasant or even inspiring. During copy edits I was constantly streaming a Philadelphia Jazz Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, which has free concerts every day and puts recording them online. What a great orchestra - and what a wonderful music venue!
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