The Scariest Question for Non-Fiction Writers
How to justify your project when someone asks "so what?"
The scariest question anyone can ask a non-fiction writer is “so what?” In other words, why should we care about what you’re writing? What’s new about it?
The great Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn was famous for asking doctoral students the “so what?” question, but all good doctoral advisers will ask the same thing, if in slightly different words.
You may not have a rock-solid answer to that question when you start a project (like a dissertation or a book), but you’d better have one by the end of it. If you don’t, you are likely to run into trouble with your dissertation committee, or an editor at a journal or at a university press.
Graduate students typically struggle to develop clear answers to the “so what?” question. They’re just getting to know the literature on their subject, and they’re reading books that they love - how can they offer anything new to the discussion?
Many doctoral students already suffer from “impostor syndrome” anyway, fearing that they don’t really have what it takes to write a defensible (or publishable) dissertation.
I’ve seen doctoral students who are so unnerved by the “so what?” question that they ultimately go into a different line of work. Coming up with something new to say can seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
So how do you develop a satisfactory answer to “so what?” From the perspective of history, the two most obvious ways are new evidence or a new interpretation. Although many historical topics are pretty “raked over,” there’s almost always new evidence waiting in neglected or understudied publications or manuscripts.
For example, when I was researching the First Great Awakening, I discovered the story of a miraculous healing of a woman named Mercy Wheeler in 1742 in Connecticut. With her pastor she published an account of this healing. Despite all the attention to women’s history and women authors in the past half century, almost no scholar had ever mentioned this narrative, much less commented upon it. This opened the door for me to publish an article [subscription] about the episode in The William and Mary Quarterly. It was also one of the new parts of my 2007 book on the First Great Awakening.
“New interpretation” means that you take a different approach from one or more major scholars who has worked on your topic. For example, in my forthcoming Second Great Awakening book (also with Yale Press), I address and modify the extremely influential argument of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity [affiliate link], probably the most important book on the Second Great Awakening (2GA). You simply have to deal with Hatch in a book on the 2GA, and if I just repeated what he said, it would raise problems in the “so what?” vein.
Without going into all the details, I argue (very politely - I love Hatch’s book) that Hatch overstates the unity of American evangelicals during the 2GA. I argue that instead of being unified around the democratic impulse, evangelicals were badly divided between “formalists” and “populists.”
Also, some of the most “democratic” forms of evangelicalism were found in still-British domains such as Nova Scotia and Jamaica. So did you really need the American democratic ethos to have “democratized” Christianity? In other words, I offer a different view than the dominant interpretation of the 2GA.
Your new interpretation may be fairly modest, maybe just addressing an issue that raises new questions about the dominant approach. But if your dissertation/book simply restates what others have argued, or repeats evidence that others have presented, then why do we need your project?
Some Christian critics have noted that the quest for novelty has created a persistent problem in biblical studies and theology, namely that this quest incentivizes departures from orthodoxy. This is not as pressing of a problem in the history discipline, but it is a real issue.
However, there are always new intellectual or cultural trends that great orthodox thinkers have confronted in defense of traditional belief. “So what?” shouldn’t be a problem that dissuades conservative Christian scholars.
I think of Princeton theologian Charles Hodge, who bragged that “no new idea ever originated at Princeton Theological Seminary” during his tenure there in the 1800s. Yet Hodge was constantly challenging new ideas, such as Darwinian evolution, to defend the biblical tradition. He had plenty of opportunities to parry new assaults on biblical authority. Doing so answered the “so what?” question for him.
So if you’re writing a dissertation, article, or book, you’re eventually going to have to confront the scary “so what?” issue. You may not have a reply to it yet - but research in primary sources has an uncanny way of supplying one. The answer typically emerges from discovering new evidence, advancing a new interpretation of old evidence, or both.
“The Dueling Christian Nationalisms of the Civil War” - my review of Richard Carwardine’s Righteous Strife at The Gospel Coalition.