Longtime subscribers know that I typically have at least two book projects going at any given time. Right now I have three, although I am largely done with the work on my textbook on Christian history since the Reformation (due out, Lord willing, in September).
Another one is a co-authored book with my friend and Baylor colleague Byron Johnson, titled The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Renaissance of Faith.
Right now my main focus is a book on the Second Great Awakening, which I am writing for Yale University Press. A draft of the book is due this Spring. I am doing a full editing pass through the whole manuscript, and then I will finalize a draft of the introduction.
This is my typical pattern. I normally write the introduction last, simply because I find it easiest to introduce something I have actually written, not something I am preparing to write.
Once I have drafted the whole manuscript, I go through and see what the book actually amounts to. Obviously I have some sense going in of what I am going to write and argue. But inevitably the shape of the book changes as I actually write it. Thus I find that writing the introduction last minimizes friction over getting prematurely committed to theses and themes that I don’t actually present.
I also use this editing pass to streamline the book. It amazes me how many extraneous words, sentences, and paragraphs end up in a draft. I am no Hemingway, but I do try to write prose that is direct and sparse.
I do not typically have problems with being significantly over the contracted word count. When I started this round of edits it was slightly over the contracted length of 120,000 words (about 300 pages in print). ANY manuscript would profit by having a few thousand words taken out of it, so I am looking for ways to simplify and take out unnecessary words. Adverbs are a prime target. I also look out for passive voice sentences. (“It was decided…”) Sometimes passive voice is useful, but mostly it tends to be lazy writing.
One of the most common mistakes that doctoral students and early career writers make is that they focus almost exclusively on content, and not style. They often pay too much attention to what they can write, rather than what they should write. This can result in sprawling dissertations and book drafts that are way longer than a publisher (or reader) wants.
Publishers typically have some flexibility about total word count. If you have a strong manuscript that happens to be 5000 or even 10,000 words over your allotted limit, that’s likely no problem. If you’re contracted to write 100,000 words and you deliver 200,000, your editor will be disgusted with your authorial flatulence.
If you deliver a manuscript that is close on word count, and has already been closely edited for style, your editor will love you. In fact, he/she may keep wanting to work with you even if you are not exactly a bestselling author!
The content of your manuscript doesn’t present itself, no matter how brilliant. All good writers edit for style, clarity, and persuasiveness.
I was installed this week as the Yeats Chair of Baptist Studies at Midwestern Seminary.
In case you missed it, I wrote about the media’s obsession with so-called “evangelicals” in the presidential primaries, at the Wall Street Journal.