many eyes

I start teaching a dozen of our new PhD students tomorrow — they’re coming from dance, design, games, creative coding, architecture. It’s a research seminar designed to help them revise and submit a publishable paper in a semester. We’ll be using Wendy Belcher’s very practical book as a turn-the-crank mechanics process, and we’ll use seminar time to zoom out together, asking: How does this one instantiation of scholarship become part of my larger body of work, my emerging point of view? These students are maker-thinkers, like me, and part of their PhD output will be in artifacts and experiences. So the goal for the class is to help them see how to commit to getting one excellent piece of scholarly work done without it getting hung up by what I call Magnum Opus Syndrome.

One small but important thing to tell people who’ve never published before is that you have a lot of eyes on your work before it goes to the world! I suspect that many would-be writers get hamstrung by the idea that once you send it to an editor, they make a few suggestions, maybe, but then turn it around and publish it for the world to see, exposing all the things you’re missing. But in reality there are many sets of eyes on even cash-strapped small journals. You have lots of moments to revise, refine, correct mistakes. If I had known how many smart people would be looking at the draft of my book before it went out, I probably would have saved myself a lot of stalling hours built on worry. I plan to show students tomorrow the galleys of a paper I have coming out to demonstrate this.