(2.) Thesis-to-Book

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Can you talk us through your experience of finishing your thesis and transforming it into your first book, Selling Shakespeare [Cambridge, 2016]?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

I want to acknowledge the precarious life and emotional circumstances that people find themselves in during this stage of writing their first book. I finished my dissertation in 2009 with three chapters that I felt were locked down, ready to go, and one chapter that was less so. This was back in the day when you could still get an academic job before you had finished your thesis. I cobbled that less-secure chapter together at the last minute and wrote an introduction that I always knew would not be the introduction to the book.

 

This is going to sound self-aggrandising, but the dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference — the only year since I began going that I missed, since my daughter was born during SAA — which was brilliant but somehow made me feel worse! The prize, not the daughter, obviously! I had no idea how to turn this thesis into a book, but then I was told I had a good thesis — so the challenge became, how do I make that into a good book? At the same time, I moved across country to Iowa, had a kid, bought a car, bought a house, and started my job. So there were a lot of personal, intellectual, and pedagogical challenges, and all the while, in the US at least, you have this ticking tenure clock in the background.

 

I knew Peter Stallybrass and his ‘Against Thinking’ piece that he wrote in PMLA. This piece articulates his idea that we should be working, rather than thinking. That’s always been my creed, especially for teaching. And yet, I over-thought the book. I was thinking too much and I wasn’t working enough. Alongside that, I also had to come to terms with my #foliofatigue, because I knew I had to have a chapter in the book on Shakespeare’s First Folio. I knew there was a bunch of work to do: I had to rewrite my loose chapter; I needed to rewrite the introduction. But I wasn’t sure how to do those things, and for a while I felt stuck between two different kinds of projects. One of those projects involved sending the thesis off as it was and publishing it as a skinny book, just a lightly revised version of this thesis which I had been told was good. And the other project involved radically revising the whole thing.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

What helped you decide between those two options?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

The book should have been longer – there are draft chapters — on John Danter, for example, and on Pericles, which was my job talk — which remain exiled on my hard drive. But in the end, I decided – out of necessity, if not desperation – to structure the book as the thesis was structured, with four substantial chapters and a methodological and biographical introduction. It’s still a skinny book (appropriately, since I’m a skinny person!) but I am proud of it; in a way, the pressure to publish allowed me to overcome my own obstructionism, due to external demands of my personal and professional life, and finish the project. It’s a lesson I hope to impart to early-career scholars.

 

I was over-thinking, and I didn’t realise that I should just do what I always wanted to do. For me, it took a reader’s report from Cambridge University Press. The report pointed out in a very formal manner the thing that I had always believed: that the entire methodology of the book was encapsulated in the first and last chapter, this idea I had of writing a bio-bibliography. The report asked me why I didn’t just write that, rather than circling around it. After the report, I felt like I had a license to do what I had on some level always wanted to do. I re-wrote the First Folio chapter at enormous speed, and I wrote from scratch an introduction in about two weeks. It came out in a kind of divine fury and I sent it back off to the press.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Could you talk about how you chose Cambridge University Press, and give any advice you might have about dealing with presses and editors for a first book person?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

Why CUP? Well, on a certain level, I always knew I was writing a Cambridge book. The “competing and comparable books” section of the proposal was almost entirely made up of CUP books. It just made sense. And, while I didn’t personally know the commissioning editor (at the time, Sarah Stanton) I did know people who knew her, which was, in the end, helpful.

 

Do I have any advice for someone writing a first book? On the uplifting side, I would say to get to know the editor, if at all possible — it’s much easier if the editor believes in the project and actively wants it to succeed. This goes for series editors, who are generally scholars, and press editors, who are generally publishers.

 

But, do not expect it to be a smooth process — if it is, fantastic! But it’s not always easy. In my case, Sarah was in the process of retiring, and I was passed around to a multitude of assistant editors and project managers. It was frustrating, and the book got kind of lost for a while. It was published on time, though, and I got tenure because of that, so I’m definitely not complaining. Was it an ideal process? No. Was I naïve and did everything work out anyway? Yes. I will say, however, that I will never, ever again publish a book with a press that charges a hundred dollars for it. This is a basic ethical, accessibility issue. Saying this out loud is my responsibility as a tenured professor, and as a human being invested in an intellectual life.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

How long did it take you from completing your thesis to sending off a manuscript to Cambridge University Press for the first time?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

Longer than it should have! Writing for me is a long and frustrating process and I set really high standards for myself that I’m not willing to compromise. That’s great, but it also extends my writing process. My goal is to set a well-crafted paragraph next to another well-crafted paragraph. Not that I’ve always done that. But that’s the goal to keep in mind and it takes extra work.

 

After I sent the final proofs back to Cambridge I said to a friend: ‘Okay, so now I know how to write a book.’ So then the question becomes, how do you take that knowledge and self-awareness and try to write another one? I think when writing your first book, you don’t understand what it is, or what it could be, or what it should be, until you’re finished with it. I don’t mean that as a cop-out: I believe that our work and our lives are embodied experiments.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

What did you learn from writing your first book that you carry forwards into your current writing projects?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

I’m still trying to articulate and learn from the lessons of writing and publishing a first book. I now understand that the argument must be the centre of the book — not the details, not the case studies, however much I love those stories. There must be a collection of appealing stories, don’t get me wrong — but an ‘academic’ book must clarify and repeat a central argument, whether it’s methodological or theoretical. It must be ‘proof-of-concept’ rather than exhaustive, which is one way to solve the ‘case-study’ problem. But I also learned that I don’t necessarily ever want to write for a strictly ‘academic’ press or audience. It’s the teacher in me, the public-school kid in me, that wants and needs to reach a wider audience, even as I want to address my colleagues around the world.

It’s been interesting to advise PhD students how to write their dissertations and to manage the process of moving the dissertation forwards. With my particular population of graduate students that tends to involve questions like: do you want to turn this into a series of articles? Or do you want to do an online project, or a monograph? Not all of our students want or need to choose the monograph. Producing a first book is hard! It can be frustrating and is stressful. But once I gave myself the green light, I finished off the book very quickly.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

What helped to give you that green light?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

The reader’s report helped. I got two very divergent reader’s reports. One was very helpful and it gave me an external license to do the thing that I was refusing to give myself an internal license to do. The other one was more tricky. It was someone who was not strictly an early modernist but from an adjacent field. It was the classic ‘reader number two’, who had a list of errors or problems that needed to be fixed, with little sympathy for the central argument and goal of the project.

 

That second report actually reawakened the way that I think most theses start, which is with the student acknowledging to themselves: ‘I think someone is wrong, and I am going to fix this problem’. That’s how I started my dissertation: I think x is wrong; now how do I find a compelling project that allows me to do something creative and allows me to make an impact in this conversation? The revising process whereby I rewrote parts of my manuscript and sent it back to the press felt like a more advanced version of how I started my thesis in the first place: I thought someone else was wrong. Of course, that thought itself is always wrong. That’s what Jim Shapiro in one of the more significant elevator rides of my life told me. He was struggling with something, and he said, you’ve got to just think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks. And that will be wrong. Conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason. But putting yourself in the opposite perspective will provide you with questions to ask that will be productive. I don’t believe in the language of originality, but those questions will be productive and will lead you to something of value.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Having finished your book, what advice would you give the version of you who was just starting out on the process of transforming thesis into book?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

Some of this is going to sound like I belong on the Oprah channel. Despite all the external modes of approval, I still felt vulnerable. And I didn’t recognise at the time that vulnerability is the condition of possibility for courage — in fact, it’s what allows one to articulate your critical concerns, because making your work public makes you vulnerable, but it also makes you brave. First books are particularly prone to this — it’s not just a book project, it’s your thesis, which has determined this all-consuming academic identity that you possess. So I would tell myself to be more trusting, to have compassion for my self, to connect my work to other colleagues dealing with similar issues.

 

I also think that derives in part from my graduate training which had me in between these two different worlds. There’s hardcore bibliography and book history, and then, at least at the time, there’s literary criticism or literary interests. I was always told that I had to straddle those worlds; that you can nerd out as much as you want, but it has to have some critical purchase for a wider audience. So I was always forced to think about a wider audience, which was exactly the right thing to do.

 

But I always knew that the danger of that is you never please any one particular crowd. And, being young, I didn’t realise that the only scholar I really had to please was myself. So if I had a bullet point for myself, I would say: be compassionate, to other people and yourself; be willing to be vulnerable, by being willing to take the criticism that you know will come.

 

As an example, let’s take my Andrew Wise and Thomas Playfere chapter in my book. A version of this was also in the Marta Straznicky collection Shakespeare’s Stationers. That chapter has always been emblematic of both my best strength and my greatest weakness, which is that I produced a book history account of ways in which we can use this particular publisher — Andrew Wise — as a locus to understand how literary and commercial values work. But at the same time, I’m trying to write about literary style. Of all the things I’ve written, that’s the piece that I’m most proud of, because I did a hell of a lot of research on Thomas Playfere! But I also understand that it may not work within the disciplinary boundaries in which the chapter was first conceived. It’s the chapter that determines whether a review of my book (or Marta’s) is positive, or negative. It’s an easy target for the bibliography crowd, yet my explicit acknowledgement that I’m telling a story fits within the historicist and critical crowd.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

Could you say more about what you feel didn’t work in that chapter?

 

ADAM G. HOOKS

 

I knew that I needed to be able to produce a literary reading of a Shakespeare play in my thesis, quite simply because of the demands of the genre and the demands of the job market. So I spent a really long time trying to come up with a way to approach this material that would be both true to the book historical methodology, but also would show that Richard II is my favourite Shakespeare play! That’s sometimes the knock that bibliographers get, isn’t it: that they don’t care about the text. But in fact I care about both.

So I went through a lot of iterations of that chapter in graduate school. Those alternative approaches began with: here are some ways that ideas about mourning and tears are characterised in Thomas Playfere’s sermons and in Richard II. And the work eventually veered towards arguing that Andrew Wise enables us to explore possible connections between Playfere and Shakespeare, treating the publisher as a locus of interpretation. I wanted to ground something in some kind of historicism but at the same time challenge and question the positivist aspects of that historicism.

 

What does that mean? It means that I don’t claim that Andrew Wise thought the same thing about Shakespeare and Playfere that I do — I tried to make the case that this view was plausible, but not demonstrable. It’s probably true to say that I know more about Andrew Wise than most people on the planet at this point, but that’s still pretty slim knowledge. I don’t know why or how he decided to publish Shakespeare and Thomas Playfere together, but I can tell a good story about how that might have taken place and what its consequences might have been and I can tell that story in a way that is intellectually, theoretically, and philosophically responsible.

 

There’s an abundance of proper historicist research in that chapter — but I’m not positing any causal effect here. I like to say that book historians interpret things as well, it’s just that we have to do more homework first. I did my homework. I made an argument. It may not be right, whatever that means, but if you disagree, please do me the courtesy of disagreeing within the terms of the argument. That’s what generous readers do.

 

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