Introductory chapter and the second book as a genre

I belong to the group of academics writing texts from start to finish. I then typically work on the introduction to ensure that it better corresponds with the text as a whole. However, I’m unable to start anywhere than from the beginning. I need to write a provisional introduction to find my bearings and the right tone. Working on the introduction is an important part of my writing process – even though the actual text itself doesn’t always survive into print.

A few weeks ago, I finished the first version of the introductory chapter for my second book. It ended up being a short text, only nine pages long. I will certainly need to revise it. Perhaps it needs to be expanded. But none of this is possible at this stage. In fact, I don’t yet know exactly what the introductory chapter is an introduction to.

Sure, the structure of my book is there in broad terms. I have crafted a synopsis consisting of eight chapters. I know what these are going to be about and which points I want to make in them. I also know which greater points I want to present in the book as a whole. But exactly how to communicate and underpin everything remains to be seen. To a large extent, this is also a question of in which genre I choose to write and which readers I address. I thus need to make some decisions. 

Second books in the field of history in Sweden can, but don’t have to, be written more or less like a thesis. They may include long sections on theory and methodology, in-depth discussions on sources and extensive reviews of existing research in the field. They may, similar to a German habilitationschrift, be 500 pages long, bursting at the seams with footnotes. The empirical investigation may be thorough, almost total. 

But second books can also be written in a more laid-back fashion. They may focus on the author and a few key arguments. The relationship with previous research and scientific choices can be implicit. This writing style is the ideal in the Anglo-Saxon world. Swedish historians adopting this approach often seek to reach a wider audience. They want to address more people than just their colleagues in the scholarly community. Sometimes, they succeed in doing so. 

I had this kind of ambition already in my PhD thesis. I had been taught an ideal that good scholarship should be able to speak both to the scholarly community and the educated public at the same time. This is an ideal I still support, at least intuitively and emotionally. What else would be the purpose of the discipline of history for society? 

However, my experience from the afterlife of my thesis is that it’s quite hard addressing different audiences at the same time. There is a great risk of misunderstandings, both inside and outside academia. This is why I have also been more careful during my postdoc years in terms of what, and for whom, I have written. I’ve been very careful to first and foremost position myself in the academic contexts to which I want to belong. Through essays, popular history articles and public lectures, I have sometimes sought to reach broader audiences. This, however, has not been a primary goal of mine. 

But now that I have once more started to write a monograph, my old ideals are once again the brightest and offer me the most motivation. I think – once again – that I have something important and interesting to say. Something that more people than just historians may benefit from hearing. For those wanting to read me in the full trappings of an academic, there are now many peer-reviewed journal articles available in both Swedish and English. It doesn’t make sense to compile these into a whole that might be published, but which would be impenetrable and uninspired. No, I need to make a new attempt to address several audiences at the same time.

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Published texts and prewriting

Academic writing is not what it appears to be. This is because we typically encounter it in the form of a published text. We read books and journal articles academics have spent years on writing. These texts have in various stages been commented on by colleagues. They have been criticized by anonymous reviewers and tightened up by editors. Furthermore, these texts have quite commonly been restructured at a late stage. Sometimes, the smart killer point was the very last thing to be added, perhaps based on the advice of an insightful reader. 

In our published texts, this slow and collective process is virtually invisible. Sure, we thank each other in prefaces and acknowledgements. But these short sentences hardly do justice to the actual writing process. Only the author him- or herself fully knows the winding road from research idea to published text. If he or she remembers, that is. Sometimes, you just want to forget and move on. 

Nevertheless, the fact that we are familiar with academic writing through published texts presents a risk for our own writing. It’s a breeding ground for destructive comparisons, not least with ourselves. Our imperfect Word documents are compared to our printed works. Our first project application in a new field is compared to end products from a recently completed project. These types of comparisons represent an effective means of paralyzing a writing process. They offer us good arguments to refrain from even trying. Or to postpone writing to another day, week, semester or year. 

But there are countermeasures. Several of these are presented in Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What (2017), which I discussed last week. A technique that has served me well is so-called “prewriting.” For me, this is a way of separating writing into two phases: planning and execution. The former is about finding structure and content, while the latter is about finding words and effective ways of communicating. 

The first page of the introductory chapter of my second book may here serve as an example. The purpose of this page is to identify the problem in focus in the book – how environmental issues had their great breakthrough in Sweden. In a best-case scenario, this page should arouse interest and clearly demonstrate why my research is important. So, how to make this happen? Well, this is a difficult question with many possible answers. One good way of making it completely impossible to answer is to, at the same time, force myself to write elegant sentences ready to be published. I’m not capable of doing that. 

What I can do, however, is to spend a few 40-minute sessions on prewriting and testing different structures. What I finally ended up with was the following four paragraphs: 

1. Start with the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. The photograph of Earth from space. The planet and humanity under threat. 

2. Emphasize that this was obvious to many people in 1972. The European Conservation Year in 1970, the term “Gröna vågen” (“the Green Wave”) was coined in the magazine Land in 1971. Knowledge regarding a global environmental crisis was circulating in society 

3. Five years earlier, things looked quite different. In the summer of 1967, the vast majority of people did not think along these lines. Nor did politicians and scientists. Knowledge was found in individuals and small groups, but it didn’t circulate. 

4. Battery of questions: How did the change transpire? When? What made it happen? Who played a role in the change occurring? This book focuses on these issues. I will… 

These four prewritten paragraphs are a far cry from a publishable text. However, I would argue that most of the writing, or at least the most difficult part, is done. This is a structure that may be converted into a logically coherent text about one page long. In addition, there is a natural bridge to the next page. 

Is it the best introduction ever written? No. Am I certain that it will stay the same all the way to the printed book? No. But is it sufficiently good for me to move along in the writing process? Yes. 

And that is all you can ask of yourself at this stage.

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