What I ought to have said on that Fourth Street panel

[pameladean]

This year Fourth Street left room to drag people onto panels at the last moment. I had an hour and a half's warning of the first one, but missed completely the moment when I was put on the Sunday afternoon panel about how you know when to stop revising. skzb reasonably felt that, given the situation my book and I are in, I should be on this panel. I

Comments

[lollardfish]

Interesting stuff. I'm busy turning 130,000 words into 100,000 words (of which at least a third will be new), i.e. my dissertation into a monograph, so have had this kind of question on my mind the last month or so.

[pameladean]

Ouch. How's that going? As I remarked below to Oursin, I'd think this kind of revision would be much, much worse for non-fiction, where you have an argument to make and where there are actual facts available.

P.

[lollardfish]

Well, I lost my argument mid-way and have had to regroup a little.

[pameladean]

I hate it when that happens. (Seriously, I know what you mean.)

P.

[lollardfish]

I believe you! It's the transition from a dissertation that involves surveying everything knowable about my topic while also making an argument about significance, to producing a publishable book making a direct argument about my topic.

[oursin]

In my experience, turning a dissertation/thesis into a monograph is less arduous because you just have to cut out vast swathes of thesis-ese from the prose style, and also there are huge chunks of stuff you have to put in the thesis to show you have done the reading and engaged with the arguments of the authorities, which can be reduced relatively painlessly to two sentences and a footnote (although it's sometimes quite a long footnote). Or whole sections that you can publish separately as articles, and refer to...