I have a very distinctive way of writing books, even though every time I write one, I think it’s the only sensible way to do it.  For years I’ve encouraged my students to do it this way when they write their dissertations, and I’ve talked to friends and colleagues about it, subtly (well, sometimes not so subtly) suggesting they do it.  And so far, after writing books for over thirty years, I’ve not convinced a single person to do it this way! I’m sure that’s because everyone has to do it their own way.  You really have to be in your own comfort zone when writing a book, you have to feel it’s the best way for you.  And that’s because no matter how you do it, it’s really hard.  My wife is now working fervently on her next book, a study of Shakespeare’s late tragedies in light of a philosophical tradition (which comes out of a certain reading of Wittgenstein) called Ordinary Language Philosophy, and just about every day she exclaims, “It’s HARD to [...]

On and off I have been talking about the process I take for writing a book, and will continue that conversation here in this post, to explain where I am just now – a very good place indeed – on my book on the origins of the Christian understandings of the afterlife. In my previous posts I talked about how I go about doing my reading for a book, and what I said there certainly applies here.  I’ve read hundreds of books and articles on the afterlife, starting with works that I knew would be broad-based and foundational, such as Alan Bernstein, The Invention of Hell; Jan Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife; Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: A history of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West; and, well, lots of others.  From these (and other places) I made lists of primary texts and scholarly works that I needed to master and read all of them, and from them made fuller lists of books and articles to read, and read [...]

Every author has different parts of the research and writing process that they enjoy the most.  Which means there are other parts they enjoy the least.  And it really varies from one author to the next. My wife, a Shakespeare scholar, especially loves the reading she does in preparation for a book.  There are lots of others like her, people who just want to read, read, read, and then read some more. I have to admit, this is not the most enjoyable part of my work, for me personally.  I do enjoy reading – which is a good thing, since I spend so many waking hours doing it; but reading for research can often be very hard, even grueling work. That’s because serious scholarship is itself hard.  It’s not an easy read.  It’s not like reading your favorite novel.  And when you’re reading research for a book you have to read closely and intensely.  The first step, as I’ve said before, is knowing how closely and intensely: is this a book or article that I [...]

Yesterday I mentioned how hard it is for academics to learn how to write for a general audience.   In graduate school we are trained to write for fellow scholars – learning the jargon and mastering the background knowledge that everyone in the field shares.  That’s because scholarly writing is a kind of short hand for insiders.  If you had to explain every term, every concept, every assumption then what you could say in an article for insiders would literally require a book. And so you learn which assumptions, perspectives, ideas, terms, and knowledge are widely shared by those for whom you are writing.   Some of us are fortunate enough to teach in PhD programs, and we can see how a student starts to acquire this kind of information and insight into what can and needs to be assumed by their scholarly audience, and what cannot.  It is very, very easy to read a piece by someone and know whether they are an “insider” or not. In fact, it is very easy to read an article [...]

Once I decide what I want to write the next book on, the fun begins.  Or rather, the work begins.  I’m not sure I’d classify any part of the whole process as “fun.”  There are certainly enjoyable elements, but I think what drives me is wanting to have the very best end product possible.   Having *done* a book is fun; doing the book is less fun.  If I had to label it as anything I guess I’d say it’s intense. The work goes through a number of distinct stages, each of them challenging in different ways and requiring different skills.  I think that’s why it’s so hard to write a good book and why so few authors are able to pull it off.  There are various skill-sets required, not one.  And if you’re deficient in any of them, the book simply isn’t going to be very good. Even before you start you have to decide what is the heart and soul of what you want to accomplish in your book.  That involves knowing what your [...]

I am at a good place in my progress toward writing my book on the afterlife, and thought I could devote a few posts to explaining the whole process.  This is in response to questions I sometimes get from blog members who would like to know what steps I actually take in going from the idea of a book to the final product. First off: how do I decide what books to write?   Different scholars have different ways of making this kind of (very big) decision.   In my case it is a little complicated by the fact that I write three kinds of books.  I write scholarly books for academic colleagues in my fields of research; I write textbooks for college students; and I write trade books for general audiences.   The process is slightly different for each one, so for my purposes here I’ll stick to how I go about writing trade books. Depending on how you count, this will be my fifteenth trade book.  My first was Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, [...]

As I was saying in my previous post, when I decided to write Misquoting Jesus my friends thought I was nuts.  Even specialists in the New Testament are not, as a rule, interested in textual criticism, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the original Greek text of the New Testament given the fact that we have thousands of manuscripts with hundreds of thousands of minor differences among them, and even some rather major differences.  New Testament scholars know *that* much about the manuscripts, but most scholar don’t have a deep knowledge of the situation.  That is for one main reason: they find the topic terribly technical and massively boring! So if scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the New Testament aren’t interested in knowing more about textual criticism, why would lay people who are just lookin’ for something interesting to read on the weekend?  Who in the world would want to buy a book about *that*? But I obviously did find it interesting.  By this point in my life (I was writing [...]