Jo VanEvery 0:00
It was my great pleasure to talk to Laura Portwood-Stacer recently about her new book: Make Your Manuscript Work.

I’ve been subscribed to Laura’s newsletter for years and often recommend her earlier book The Book Proposal Book, as well as the Book Proposal Accelerator, a facilitated workshop based on those principles. Several of my clients have found them very effective.

I have also been thinking and writing about the writing process for a long time, especially in relation to making effective use of the time you have for writing, and addressing the emotional factors that affect your ability to get writing done and let your writing go.

In March 2025, I wrote about the difficulty of writing a “shitty first draft” in a post called: ‘Is it perfectionism? Or impatience?’, and concluded that,

If you *accept* that multiple rounds of revision will be required, and even have a process for moving through them, it’s easier to allow yourself to be messy when drafting.

Make Your Manuscript Work was one of several books and workshops I suggested to help you figure out that process. I hope this interview helps you understand something about developing your manuscript from draft to publishable version, and you’ll try out the method Laura teaches in her book.

On to the interview!

Jo VanEvery 2:02
I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and I had a look, and I’ve looked at the structure, and I’ve read some of the sections and things. I’m really glad that you’ve written this book. I am not an editor, but I do support a lot of book writers, and my focus is often on like making time for writing and helping them keep a project moving and all that. But I’ve also listened to a podcast by a fiction writer I know, and one of the things that she said many years ago is that what made a big difference to her whole kind of approach to writing was learning to love revision, and that her view is that you want to get the first draft, and she’s writing very different work than the kind of work you and I are supporting, but you want to get that first draft down. And her first draft, she often doesn’t know how the story is going to end, and sometimes she panics about that, and then her wife reminds her that she never knows how the story is going to draft, and it’ll all be fine, but that you want to get that down fast, and then you want a system for kind of going through your manuscript. And so the other thing she has often said is you absolutely don’t want to start with that kind of detailed making the words pretty, because if there’s a section you’re going to get rid of, it’s a lot easier to get rid of if it isn’t already beautiful. And when I was looking at what you’ve written, it’s very much the same sort of sort of approach, right? And that what you are really doing, I think, in this book, is providing a road map for that bit between: “I got the first draft down and kind of have an idea what I want to do”, and the, “It’s now a really good book, but I need to polish the words and make sure that everything’s all right.” But you’re kind of what I have called revision, but you also make an argument in there that even the term revision… I often call it revision because I think people think of editing as that itty bitty stuff. But you’ve said, you’ve come across people that think revision as that itty bitty polishing stuff. So you propose ‘development’. So I think maybe the first place to start is, just for the benefit – and you say all this in the book, but for the benefit of readers and listeners: Why do you talk about this as a development process, and what, what do you think is helpful about thinking of this phase as developing your book?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 4:33
Yeah, yeah. So there’s kind of two reasons why I really like that word. And the first is that, you know, I come from the position of an editor, and, you know, using industry terminology, the publishing industry and developmental editing is a thing, there. And is… It refers specifically to that stage before you’re getting to line editing or copy editing, or what we could call wordsmithing, or, you know, what you’re looking at [is], really the sentence level, and like, how things are flowing. Developmental editing is looking at the ideas and how the ideas are presented, including how the book is or the, any text is organised. The concept is in place, but how are you conveying that concept to the reader in a big picture way? So that’s what a developmental editor would deal with. So I’m sort of borrowing that term for writers to think about, “Well, how can I be developing my work at that stage?” And then the other reason I like the word development versus revision, which, I don’t have a problem with revision, but I like development because if you think of, like, the development of an organism or a person, it’s it’s journey, right? It’s like a process where you’re expecting things to evolve, and you would never expect something at the beginning of that journey to be finished. So you shouldn’t expect your draft to be finished. Once you’ve quote unquote “finished a draft”. It’s not finished. It still needs to develop. It needs…Or cook, or whatever, like, whatever kind of metaphor you want to use. And so I like that idea of development because it just allows for the idea of growth through the editing process, and every writer should expect that as part of the process. And it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer if you have a draft that needs a lot of work, everyone’s draft needs a lot of work, right?

Jo VanEvery 6:18
Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s what… So the other writer, her name is Rachel Heron, and her podcast is now called “Ink In Your Veins”. I think that’s what she meant by ‘learning to love revision’. It’s like, like, this is where the work really is, right? It is in, in develop[ment]. And I like what you say about that, like developing, you’re developing the work. So like, and you’re doing it in phases, and YOU have then developed in this book, a cycle. So you even talk about how you’re going to go through some of these kind of things multiple times. And I look at your development cycle, and what, it seems to me that the stages of the cycle that you propose are defined by the decisions and commitments that people need to make. And as somebody who works as a coach, I think this is sometimes where a lot of people like you actually do have to make some decisions. And I could see some resonances in various parts of your book with some of this stuff. I’ve talked to people about around saying no, you’re almost saying no to yourself about this or this, right? You’ve got three pieces to your cycle, so maybe summarise what those are for people to really understand, like in each phase, which decisions and commitments are you kind of making, in order to develop your manuscript?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 7:45
Yeah, I really like that way of thinking about it. Okay, so the cycle of manuscript development has three phases. The first is clarifying your mission. The second is assessing your text, and the third is planning and executing edits to the text. So when you’re clarifying your mission, you’re deciding, what do I want this text to do when it is published, or why am I trying to publish this? And so you are making those, like, really big picture decisions about yourself and your career and, or your your personal goals. They’re not even about the text, what’s in the text. It’s about, like, what do I want this text to do? Because I’m writing it for a reason, right? Most academic writers are not writing their academic texts for the pure enjoyment of writing. They may enjoy the writing of it, but it has a purpose, a greater purpose that they want for it. So in that first phase, you’re deciding what that purpose is, because that’s going to inform your later decisions in the next phases, and you may make different decisions depending on whether this is a book or any kind of text. But, you know, in the book, I kind of focus on books, a book for tenure, is it a book to try and get a wider public platform? You know, is it a book to speak to a specific community? And so making those decisions about what you want the book to do, and who you want it to speak to, will then affect how you edit it, and what you decide to keep in it, and put in it, or change. So, yeah, so that’s the first set of decisions you’re making. And you’re also deciding at that point, how much time do I want to spend on this? How much time do I have to spend on it, what other things are also important to me? And you know, am I going to prioritise the book over them, or am I going to prioritise those over the things? And therefore, I might need to scale back on my work on the book. You know, you’re kind of making all those big, big decisions for yourself. Then Phase Two, where you’re assessing the text, that’s where you sort of, well, you’re looking at what is in the text, in the draft, you have yourself, and you’re sort of deciding, is this something that could use improvement? Is it possible to change this? If I want to keep with, like, the conventions of my field, would I, would I need to make some edits here and there? So there you’re really looking at the content of the draft.

Jo VanEvery 10:02
And presumably also you’re making decisions about, does this, how does this draft match up to those bigger goals I’ve just identified, right? Especially around, like, if I’m speaking to these people, right, if you made a big decision about who the audience is, then presumably at the assessment phase, you’re like, “Is this something that audience really cares about? Am I missing something that helps that audience engage with this? Like, what..?” Yeah, that kind of thing too.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 10:30
Yeah, yeah. So you’re starting to think about that, but you might not be making any final decisions about, you know, what you ultimately want the text to look like. You’re just sort of, look- deciding if what is there is what your- matches your vision. Then in the third phase, where you’re planning and executing edits, that’s where you’re really integrating phase one and phase two and saying, “Okay, I’ve assessed the text. I’ve seen all of these opportunities to make revisions to it. Which ones am I actually going to accept into my editing practice now?” Because I call them opportunities for development versus problems in the text, because a problem implies it needs to be fixed, whereas some issues with your text may not be problems, depending on the goals you have. [For example] Really specific vocabulary, or what some people call jargon, depending on your audience, that might be perfectly fine in your text, if you’re trying to reach an expert audience of research monographs. If you are writing for a more you know, a student audience, or a pub[lic], a more broader public audience, then that’s going to be an opportunity you will want to develop as you edit the text to make the writing more accessible. So yeah, when you get to that phase three of planning and executing edits, that’s where you take everything you found in your assessment and you make a plan. You say: “These are the things I actually want to do when I revise this. These are the things that might be nice to do if I can get to it, depending on my time and capacity.” And then there might be things you say, “Ah, that actually doesn’t matter based on my goals.” One of the things the book also talks about is the publishing timeline and how certain things might be more important pre peer review, whereas others might be really only important when you’re in the final stages of revision, you know before the text goes into production and goes to the copy editor. So you’re also making your editorial plan with an understanding of that timeline, so that you’re not putting so much pressure on yourself at a stage where it doesn’t need to be on yourself yet.

Jo VanEvery 12:33
Yes. I know one of the things that I’ve often talked about and also that people in the Academic Writing Studio community have raised in group sessions, you know, like more senior people who have published more, is like, it’s really that thing about like, if you’re at that early stage where it still needs to go to peer review, you need it to be good enough that you’re not insulting these people by asking them to read it. But you also don’t want it to be at a stage where you are going to resent getting their feedback, like there is a kind of sweet spot where you’ve done the revisions that need to be done so that they can understand what it is you’re trying to do, and that they can see the resources, the evidence and whatever that you’re bringing to that. But you’re actually… You know, academic peer review is itself an editorial process, and you kind of need to be open to receiving those editorial comments and adjusting your plan, and like, and knowing that you’re going to further develop, like you want to be able to further develop the book after you’ve had that part of the process, right? Like that’s that’s kind of can be useful, or should be useful input into the process. And as I understand it, the biggest difference between peer review for book manuscripts or, and for articles is that in the book publishing process, your editor with the press is often willing to help you figure out how to incorporate or respond to those peer review comments. You’re not kind of left on your own to be like, “Do I have to do this to get published? Or whatever.” That they will actually help you work through that is, is that true?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 14:23
Yeah, I think they will offer perspective on it. They are often happy to say, well, you know, if they know who the peer reviewers are, whereas you may not, so they may be able to get a little bit of context, and also to let you know how serious the concerns are. Like, are these things that you have to do in order for our editorial board to sign off, or is there some leeway? Could you come up with an alternate solution? So I think editors are, are pretty willing to talk to authors about that. They often don’t have time to actually read your manuscript and offer you like a developmental edit.

Jo VanEvery 14:54
They aren’t, yeah, because that’s… The system is set up as as we’re having volunteer peer reviewers do that, right? Not professional editors. So I like, that’s the other thing I really liked about your book, is that clearly you kind of bring together the sort of, “How do I manage this project?” aspects. Because the big picture, like, I think a lot of the reason people are coming to your book is “I need to know what the process could look like for me, so I can manage the project”, but you actually bring in the kind of how to manage your TIME with it, which I don’t see as often as I’d like to, because I end up focusing a lot on “How to, how do you manage your time?” And one of the things is, well, if you’ve only got limited time, it’s like, how long does it take you to write a book? Well, it kind of really depends! It depends on a lot of things, and only some of those things are about what’s involved. How long does it take to do all these tasks you need to do? It’s also about how much time in any given like, if you’re thinking in terms of months and weeks, it’s like, I don’t know how much time, like, it depends how much time you have to work on your book each week, right? And that varies so much. Like one of the members of my Academic Writing Studio, she comes to Meeting With Your Writing once a week. She works in a small institution where she’s got a four/four teaching load, and she can, she can protect once a week for two hours to come and write with us in this virtual co working thing I organised, but that’s not very much time, but it did mean that she was able to finish, like, some articles and things, and she has a book idea, and it means that she feels like, “Okay, I do want to work on this book. It’s going to take me a while because I only have this [time], but I know that I can keep it moving because with this kind of support, but it means she’s not got, like, she’s not at all thinking about making any commitments to volunteers yet, because she’s, you know, because she can’t commit to “And I’ll finish it in a timeline that makes sense for anybody”, right? So one of the things that I liked about your book is that, one in that first phase, is you absolutely include: “How much time do you have? What pressures do you have on your time? Like, what are the kind of constraints you’re facing?” And again, later in the planning your edits phase, you’re like, “Okay, when you’re making these decisions, it’s not just like: what would make this a better book? But what do I have time to do?” And you, you quoted somebody else to say something about the Necessary, the Felicitous and the Meticulous, was that the… [phrase]?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 17:34
Yes. Yeah, Maron Waxman, who is an editor, who has an essay in this sort of like landmark book in the publishing industry called Editors On Editing. I think that’s what it’s called, yeah. So it’s the, ah, yes: Necessary, Felicitous and Meticulous, yeah.

Jo VanEvery 17:51
Yeah. And so that’s, that’s really… But like, at the end of the day, I think that’s a really interesting… I think that’s an interesting way, especially for people that tend to be kind of perfection- perfectionist, right? It’s like, it’s a good way to think about that relationship between managing your time and managing the project. I don’t know if you have anything else you wanted to say about how, how you thought about that in relation to this book. Like, like, how does this process help you do both, in a way?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 18:21
Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you picked up on that, because I never, like, I don’t consider myself someone who helps with time management, really. Like, I think coaches are like, more…

Jo VanEvery 18:31
Yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 16:32
…for that. So it’s nice to hear that it sort of came through here in a helpful way. But you know, one of my greatest sort of frustrations as somebody who works with authors is that the available time thing is just, it’s structural, it’s it’s not something I can help someone have more time. And you know, to some extent, you can’t make more time, you know, you have to sacrifice things. Or, you know, you would help your authors make decisions about, and so this is kind of about accepting the reality of that. And in a way, sort of, that, like, takes some of the responsibility off of you as an individual, that, like, you cannot be expected to make an infinite amount of time to write this book. And no, no book can take that, you know, the book will take as much time as you are able to give it and want to give it. And so at some point you just have to say, “I can’t.” Like, there is a limit to what can go into this book. And so if you’re clear on really, what those top one or two goals are [that] you have for the book, that sort of allows you, like, gives you permission to just say, “I can let that go. I can let this work go.” No t to sacrifice my standards, or produce something mediocre, but just to say, like, “I don’t have to do everything with this one book”, because there just, there will never be enough time to do everything.

Jo VanEvery 19:48
No, exactly. And that’s… I think, I think in some ways, I guess, as somebody who does help people a lot with how to manage their time, I think the key thing that I often focus on is that question of priorities and and just making clear decisions about the trade offs, right? You cannot do everything, you’re not going to be able to fit… So you have to decide: “What is a priority for me? What am I going to do? And what is not going to get done, because I’ve made that a priority?” And I think one of the things that you help people with is how to make those decisions in related, relation to their book in a really structured way, right? So you’re kind of doing the “What are your goals for this book?” And you know, “What are the most important ones?” You have a really cool little questionnaire at the end of the first section for people, you know, to help people kind of really systematically kind of figure those things out. And the questions about time and priorities are definitely on there. And then you ask people at the end, when they’re making their plan: you can look back, you can cut and paste things from that questionnaire you filled out at the end of session one, right? Like, you’re just sort of like… Because managing your time really is about making decisions about what’s more important, right? Is it more important? And that’s, that’s kind of helpful. I think one of the things I’ve realised, one of, you know, a couple of my book clients, my coaching clients who are working on books, and for one of them, we have had at least two rounds, like, she’s still working on, like the draft, but there have been two rounds of “Is this one book or two?” Well, no, not quite. The first round was really like, “Is this really one book or two?” And there was a whole section with a couple of chapters that she realised was that, could actually be a separate book. And so that kind of narrowed the focus of what she was working on. But then, as she’s been doing the really meticulous work on the evidence and drafting the chapters, we had another conversation, because it came up as you, because, as you get into it, of course, there’s so much more in there than you expected, even, you know… And so then she was like, “So I just sort of feel like there is this bigger argument that I’m, I kind of haven’t quite got a handle on, and I can’t…” And so I ended up saying to her, “So if we forget about that for a moment and just think about what you already have, what would be the contribution of what you’ve already done?”, right? And she was able to say two things, one about how her approach is very different from the typical approach taken to this sort of topic in her field. And the second was much more substantive about the, the material she was working with. And I just said to her, like, “Well, what if that’s what this book is about?” And that if, and that one of the things, as you work on it, you will have got this idea of, like, it’s helping you see something bigger, but that, that could be the next project – that you could let go of this book, like this, and let other people get to where you are, right, by reading your book, while you start going somewhere else. And I think that’s part of what those big decisions are that you’re saying around ‘mission’, but also about that circle, right? That every once in a while you come back, and then you’re like, “Oh, is that really…?” And then you refine it, and you refine it, right? I mean, I have another colleague who’s been thinking about writing a book on this topic for over 20 years, and has finally been like, “Okay, now I’m writing it.” She had a very clear idea, and she’s written around the topic and articles and things, but then as she’s writing it, she’s now, like, just really honing in on the nuance of the argument, when you really get into the evidence, and then kind of building from there. So I guess one of the things I like is that you warn people against getting ahead of themselves, and looking at the little kind of keyword-smithing and just sticking with the development part for now. But I wonder if you have anything to say about the other part? Like, sometimes people are trying to make, I think, make the first draft better than it needs to be. And like, so what would you say are the essential things that they really need to do to be ready to start on this? If they trusted that the process you teach them in this book was really going to help them develop it into something they could share with others, what’s the part they need to do for themselves to be ready to dive into your development process?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 24:28
That’s a great question, and I don’t know if I have an answer, because that’s why this book starts with “You’ve got a draft.” because I don’t know how to get people to a draft. Maybe someday I’ll write that book. But I guess I come at this from the perspective of, like, often people don’t know what they’re doing when, when they’re starting to write, and that’s okay, kind of.

Jo VanEvery 24:49
Yeah!

Laura Portwood-Stacer 24:50
Like this, this is meant to help you just pick up the pieces you have, whatever you’ve been able to produce, and now, really, you know, think about giving it an argument, because a lot of times people don’t know what the argument is starting out.

Jo VanEvery 25:05
No, absolutely.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 25:06
They have to write a full draft, and then they have to do this process to actually go and deeply read that first draft to figure out what it is they’re arguing. So I wouldn’t even say, like, “Oh, you have to start with an argument”, you know, I think you… It t helps to have a concept, I guess, of like, of of just, you know, a topic, obviously, but a little bit more than just a topic. You don’t want to say everything that could ever be said about, whatever topic you want to write about. It’s, you know, “How am I approaching this? What am I trying to, what effect am I trying to have on the reader? Am I trying to change how they think about something? Am I trying to alter a certain kind of conventional wisdom in my field, by showing that this thing actually works differently than people think?” So, you know, one of the things I say in the at the very beginning, like the first question for writers in the first chapter, I think, is, you know, “What’s your topic? What scope of the topic are you writing about? What’s your approach? You know, what methods are you using? What’s what’s the evidence? What kind of evidence have you gathered? You don’t even need to have a clear idea of all the evidence, but what kind of evidence, what theoretical frameworks, very loosely, are you working within? And then again, you know what effect you want to have on the reader?” As long as you’ve got that, then I think you’re pretty much ready to go into this sort of development process. If you don’t even know that, then you might have to kind of refine your concept, and maybe, doing more writing to get there.

Jo VanEvery 26:35
So one of the things I do with getting people to get the draft down is I often say to them, like, as long… Like you say, I agree with you about that kind of rough idea, like the broad idea of the concept and the kind of evidence and the… But then what I say is, the first draft, you really need to just kind of figure out, from the evidence you’re interested in what it is you could say. Like, the goal of your first draft is really for you. It’s to kind of really dive in and be like, “I’ve had this idea, right, that, you know, and I’ve, I’ve made these choices about the evidence for these reasons, and I think this is what’s going on. And now I’m just going to dive in there and really do it.” So one of the the person who’d had the idea for like, 20 years is a literary scholar, and she’d chosen like, like, she has a specific time period, and she mostly focuses on women’s faces. She’d chosen five novels, very common structure for a work of literary scholarship, right? There’s like, five chapters, one with each novel, or maybe it’s four. And she just, basically her first draft was kind of a close reading of each novel around it, right? And then in doing that, she just really, like, felt so much more confident that, yes, this thing really did work to start with, and also a lot more nuance about exactly what was going [on]. Like, so that you move in research from: “I think this is what’s going on”, and then you actually dive into your… Right? And one of the things I often steer people away from is getting too wrapped up in the secondary literature, because I find that tends to decrease people’s confidence, that they just end up feeling like: “I’m never going to be able to convince these guys, or I’m never going to be as good as that”, and that the only way that you can increase your confidence, is really to be able to engage with that with a much more solid understanding of what your own research shows, and that then this development process will allow you to figure out how to kind of weave in, and how to engage that with this broader conversation, which has obviously informed how you did the research, right? It’s because you’re steeped in it already, but you can kind of pay more attention to that. Does that feel like a fair way to approach the process?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 28:57
Yeah, definitely, yeah. I would say this. You know, the development process is meant to… “Now, okay, you’ve got all that stuff” (the close reading or, you know, whatever your stuff is, depending on your field), and now this development process will kind of guide you to going back to the bigger picture of the stuff. “Okay, what is it I want? Like, if I had to sum up the one thing I want to say about the stuff…”, and, you know, a concise thesis statement. You know, the development process can get you there. You don’t necessarily have to know that coming in with your draft, because many people don’t.

Jo VanEvery 29:29
Yeah, yeah. So if you don’t know what the argument is, you’re good, but you do need to know what your evidence says, right? And then you can figure out what the argument is going to be through the development process. And I think that, like, I like to think of it as that first part is for you learning more about this topic, and then this process of developing your manuscript is going from you learning, to you telling other people, and this being accessible to other people, and them being able to learn this stuff. Like you’re making it easier for them, because you’re going to lay it out in a useful structure.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 30:05
Yeah, and you’re making it engaging, because most people are not going to want to engage in the same close reading of those five novels that you did, or they’d all be writing this book, right?

Jo VanEvery 30:15
No, absolutely.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 30:16
So you’re kind of synthesising it and giving them the big takeaway, and then if they want to come along with you into the nitty gritty, great, but yeah, your job is to sort of present that big picture up front, so that you’re engaging people and caring about the little picture too.

Jo VanEvery 30:29
Yeah. And so that might be a good place to to get you to just summarise this, these four pillars, because, like, within this cycle, you’re then saying… Like all parts of the cycle, you’re like… You’ve broken it down into four distinct aspects of the work that need their own focus. So what? And I’m trying to remember what they are…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 30:49
They’re: Argument, Evidence, Structure and Style. Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 30:52
Yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 30:53
So part of my process for writing this book was I took all the editorial reports I had written for my clients as, when I was a developmental editor, and I sort of coded them as I would, you know, my qualitative research in my past academic life, and said, “Okay, what are the things I keep calling out here? Like, what are the things all of these people sort of need help with? And it sort of fell into these four categories of Argument, Evidence, Structure and Style. And those are really kind of the four… So those are four, the four sort of make or break aspects of your text that have to all be pretty solid for a publisher to think it’s ready to be published, or has the potential to be published. Where was I going with this? What was the question?

Jo VanEvery 31:35
We were just sort of talking about that… So like for each of these, at in each of these phases of this cycle, you’re really focusing on each of those, right, and developing those, presumably separately and then together, or in some ways, how do they kind of overlap? Or…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 31:52
Yeah, they’re gonna fit together, you know, in every book, but, but my system, or my method, allows you to compartmentalise because it can be overwhelming to try to figure out everything that a book might need, or that a manuscript might need in order to become a book. And so I’ve broken it down in the assessment phase, in phase two into, you know, a set of checklists dealing with Argument, Evidence, Structure and Style and like, specific things you can look for in your text to see: “Have I done this well? Or is this an opportunity to develop this further?” So you can sort of look at them separately. They will end up informing each other, you know, ultimately, but… And also, you know, one of the things I think I say pretty early on is, you know, as you’re going through the publishing process, you’ll be doing this cycle a few different times. And really, when you’re at the very beginning of the publishing process, you’re just submitting your work to an editor and seeing if they see a fit with their press. You know that argument needs to come across pretty clearly so they can see this book has an argument. It’s something that will engage readers and it will make a contribution to a field. You want the editor to think “I’d feel comfortable asking peer reviewers to evaluate this, because there’s something there”, right?

Jo VanEvery 33:04
Mm.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 33:05
So the argument needs to be really solid at that point. But you know, the style of it that that might fall into place… You know, there’s a little more flexibility there. You know, a peer reviewer might say: “Well, this needs to be more formal in style”. Or: “It’s not, you know, it’s, maybe informality would be better for the audience this author is trying to reach”, or, you know, whatever, the accessibility of the language, that kind of thing. It’s like, well, we know we can get to that later. So that doesn’t necessarily need to be perfectly solidified at the beginning of the process. And structure, you know, structure can help. It helps the reader understand your argument, but a peer reviewer might give you a little more grace on: “Well, the structure of this is not in place yet. I have some suggestions about the structure”. You know, then that’s something, often, that gets really refined in the later stages of development. And same with evidence, you know, you want to have convincing evidence again, so that a peer reviewer and a publisher will see that there is a ‘there’ there. But like you said, you want also there to be room for hearing a peer reviewer say: “Well, I think you could add this evidence”, or maybe: “This additional evidence would be helpful to extend the argument”…

Jo VanEvery 34:21
Or even: “You’ve gone into more detail than I need”.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 34:23
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 34:24
Like the… One of the nice things about the peer reviewers is that they are your peers, so they do technically represent, like, not only is it volunteer editorial labour, but they’re, they also represent the potential readers of the book in a way, especially for a scholarly book, and though, and so they are in a good position to say: “You don’t quite need to go into so much detail for this part, but in this part, you could maybe use some more…”, or whatever. Like, you can get feedback from them on that sort of, like, if you’re feeling unsure about: “How much evidence do I have to provide to make this argument?” But like, you say, like, if you don’t have an argument, then the whole question is… right?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 35:04
“Why are you writing this?” Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 35:06
Yeah, like, that’s the most important thing. And I like the idea that you’ve got checklists. Like, one of the other things about the relationship between project management and time management was, I like the way that you, in your, in your third phase, where you’re saying, like: “Make a plan”. On the one hand, you’re saying: “Please take the time to make the big picture plan where you actually write down for yourself what those big decisions and commitments were”, and especially around the, sort of, ‘must have’, ‘maybe nice’, ‘I’m gonna ignore’, you know, like those decisions, so that you aren’t second guessing yourself all the time. But then you say, “Okay, once you’ve got that, you can then make a more detailed revision plan” that’s going to be. kind of, like, “Okay, these three paragraphs in the middle of Chapter Four need to be in chapter three”, or, you know, like, whatever. And you actually say out loud, “This is going to make it easier to use smaller chunks of time if that’s all you have available”. And I think that is, I think that’s really useful, because one of the things that I find is a lot of people feel like: “I can only write or work on my book if I’ve got a lot of time”, and part of that is because they need enough time to kind of get into it, and sort of organically, kind of do all these things. And so if they only have 15 minutes, they’re like, “I don’t even know what I could do that would be useful”. But if you’ve got this system for making decisions, then if you use some of that big time to make decisions, right, because that does require a lot of cognitive capacity and emotional processing. Right? Then at the times when all you can do is, like, implement something, you actually just have a list of shit you can do.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 36:58
Yes, yeah. And you’re not reinventing it every session.

Jo VanEvery 37:02
Yes. You’re not, you’re not having, you’re only having to be like: “Okay, I need to do this”, and, or you’re only thinking about it at the level of: “Do I need this paragraph?” Or… Right? Like you’re not in the sort of, “What’s the big purpose of this book?” And, “Oh my goodness!”, and doing all the emotional processing about the deleting, or whatever. And I think that’s really good. And one of my clients, I remember, I mean, this was for a later stage of a book, but she was in the very final stages of a book. She was editing, like an edited collection, and she just took some of her time to, what she said she wrote [was, she] made a really granular list. And it was a list she said, some of this stuff, it was so granular. You kind of looked at some of the things on the list and thought: “Why do I even have to have to write this down?” But the benefit of that was that even in little bits of time, you don’t even think of having like, between finishing one thing and some other thing starting in 10 minutes, she could look at her list, and something would jump out at her as being like: “Oh, I could do that right now. I’ll just do that.”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 37:59
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 38:01
Right? And I think breaking the project down into chunks like that is something a lot of people really struggle with, and because they don’t know how to sit down and plan breaking it down, they then feel like: “Well, I can’t make good use of an hour here and there, or two hours, because as soon as I get into like, I’m gonna have to stop again. And I really…” Right? And then, and then they’re not even using all the time that is available. And like you say, in the current context, the time that is available is very constrained in many ways, and so you want to be able to use whatever’s there, effectively.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 38:40
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 38:41
Right? And I think the nice thing about your book is that it sort of helps people with that. It gives them a structure to make the decisions.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 38:53
I like how you, I think you use the term like, cognitive capacity and like, and then there’s also this parallel phenomenon of decision fatigue and like, there’s so many decisions at big and small levels that go into finishing a book or writing it, editing it, and if you’re trying to do that, every time you sit down to work on it, like it’s no wonder you feel exhausted and not very excited to sit down and work on your book, because you’re not really accomplishing anything. You’re just deciding something, and you’re never actually executing, or you’re executing, but then that’s cascading all these other decisions you have to make. So that’s the thing I’m trying to help with, with this third phase of the planning and then executing is like, take some time, make those decisions when you have the cognitive capacity, because you’ll need it. But then once you’ve done that. Stick to it. Try to, I mean, yes, things can evolve as as you’re getting into the editing and if you have to do rewriting and things, but, you know, thank yourself for having done that work. And then just take the to do list and do it. You know?

Jo VanEvery 39:57
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and if we… But I think getting back to that idea of learning to love this process, like the process of developing, revising and just recognising that you’re going to go through this cycle a few times, so it’s okay. You don’t have to second guess yourself while you’re doing this. Implement these decisions, and then go through the cycle again and refine your mission, and refine your assessment, and refine your decisions about what exactly you’re going to do. And you can, kind of… I think I wrote a blog post last year where I actually talked about it in terms of woodworking. I have this lovely carved American Woodcock that my mother gave me at some point, and I just talked about how, like, to get to that, right, like, you’re starting with, you know, a chainsaw, cutting a chunk of wood, and then you’re having to… And so you don’t want to be using, like, the final version obviously needs a whole lot of fine grained sandpaper and stuff. You don’t want to be using that until you get there, right? And that you’re partly, kind of getting a broad kind of form of this thing. And then you’re sort of making more decisions about, you know, and you’re making decisions about how much detail you need in this sculpture and all that kind of thing. And writing a book is very similar in that way. And it’s, it’s okay not have to make them all at once. And I think the other thing that I like about that is that, and that I try to say to people is, it’s like, if you accept that you’re going to go through this manuscript multiple times, both individual chapter level, multiple times, and then the whole thing multiple times, then when you see things as you go along, you can just leave a note. You don’t have to get distracted by other things. You could do… Right? You can, you can be more focused, which uses less cognitive capacity. It’s like: “This time, I’m focusing on just moving the things around and getting all the sections in the right place. And if there’s a thing missing, I’m just going to leave a placeholder saying there’s something missing here, and then it’s a task to write the missing piece.”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 41:59
Mmhmm. Yeah, exactly.

Jo VanEvery 42:01
“I need three paragraphs about X.” Or, you know, whatever. You don’t have to write that when you come across the hole, you just say, “There’s a hole here. This is what it needs. I’m putting that on my to do list, and that’s a separate thing.” And then you’re not being distracted by stuff inside the project. Right? Like people talk about distraction as if it’s coming from outside, but a lot of times it’s coming right off the page. It’s like: “Oh, but those things, like, I need to… What have I done with that? I’ve used this… I’ve noticed…” Like, while you’re going through moving things, you’re like: “God, I use ‘however’ like, so often.” It’s like, put that on your list for the very end, yeah. Like, that’s… You don’t need to do that now. You just, like, write down that, that you notice that, and then one time you can go through and fix all of that, right? Like, that’s what the search and replace function is for. Get the big thing, you know, some of them might disappear just because you’ve got rid of sections, right? Like, you know…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 42:57
Right. And no publisher is rejecting your book because you said the word ‘however’ too many times. Right? That’s something you’ll fix later. Fine. I try to tell people, like, “peer reviewers are allowed to say things, and you don’t have to take it personally, and you can take it as just, like, a tip”. Like, “Okay, I’ll fix that at the end”. It doesn’t, you don’t have to, like, protect yourself against any possible critical comment someone could make, you know?

Jo VanEvery 43:19
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just need to be like, like, is the the big thing… Like, is it clear that they can see the big picture? And that you’re what you’re trying to do, and whether you have the sort of scholarly chops to do it?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 43:32
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 43:33
So I did ask my Studio people, like my clients, if they had any questions they wanted me to ask you, and only one of them replied, but she had an awesome, an awesome question. So obviously, I am frequently referring people to other [people], because I’m not an editor. I’m like, “Oh, hey, you could use these people or read these books”. Several of my clients have used your Book Proposal books. Some of them have even done your Accelerator or other programmes. Found it really super helpful, the one with the 20 year idea and the four novels. Part of her process, her process was she did that with the first thing. Then she went back and revised the proposal for ages, because she just was really careful about all the word, like she had done a draft in your Accelerator. And then she kind of went back to that, and was like, “Okay, now that I have a much clearer idea what’s going on in all this post-reading, I’m going to revise all that synopsis. I’m going to get it really tight”. And then she’s used that, she’s using that to kind of guide the revision, right? But then she was like, “Okay, now I need to write the introduction”. And she’s been writing the introduction after she tidied up the proposal to be like, what needs to be in here? And she’s kind of going with the: “Obviously, I need to have everything necessary, but how little can I say?” So she’s really…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 44:53
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 44:54
Like that has taken a really long time, but it’s been really helpful for her, using that almost as a guide to some of the revision decisions. And I’ve certainly recommended a lot of people. Like, there is a point where, yeah, writing a book proposal can be really helpful, even if you’re never going to, not going to submit it yet as a way for yourself, right? So there’s your Book Proposal book, which has a really detailed guide about how to do that. I’ve also had a lot of people read or do workshops with Allison Van Deventer and Katelyn Knox, who have the Dissertation To Book workbook, which is a sort of which is really aiming at the same kind of thing you are. It’s kind of like: “You have a draft, how do you…?”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 45:38
Yeah, although…

Jo VanEvery 45:39
So, like, so, how would people…? Where does this book fit in relation to those two things? And like, that would be helpful to know.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 45:5o
Yeah. So I love the Dissertation To Book workbook as well, and I think it actually is a perfect complement to this book, right before this book.

Jo VanEvery 45:58
Oh!

Laura Portwood-Stacer 45:59
So, that book I consider to be a book helping you, or a workbook to help you conceptualise your book. I think that book is about the concept, and this book is about developing the manuscript. And so I really see that one is like: Do that one first! That one’s gonna get you to a solid: “Here’s what I want this book to do. Here are the ideas that are important to include in it.” And then, then pick up… You know, then once you’ve got a draft, and you can do their book with a draft in hand, or even before you have a draft, I mean, I think they say you should have a partial draft, but…

Jo VanEvery 46:31
A draft in hand, yeah. So I think if you think of the draft the way I do, which is you should have done… So, part of it is, you and I both come from the social sciences, right? And so we think, there’s research, and *then* we’re drafting the book. And I work with a lot of humanities people, and I think Katelyn and Allison also come out of the humanities. When you talk to humanities people and you ask them the question: “What are you researching?” They often answer you by saying: “I’m writing a book about…”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 47:01
Right. Social scientists do..

Jo VanEvery 47:03
So . So, like, so for like, a lot of people in the more humanities, and for them, writing that first draft really *is* the research. Like that one client of mine, who’s a literary scholar, writing the first draft was doing all the close reading, which, you know, maybe in our terms, feels like, “Well, that’s doing the research, and then you’re deciding what the book is”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 47:20
Sure.

Jo VanEvery 47:21
But there’s so much more of an overlap. So I think in that sense, you need a draft that is at least: “I have done some. Like, I haven’t just decided, ‘I know there’s evidence out there.’ I have actually bloody well looked at it. And I might have to go back to it.” And if that, for you, looks like a thing that is organised as a book, then that’s great, if it looks for you like “I have done a bunch of research, and now I need to look at all my evidence and decide what book I might write out of this, and then draft the book”. But I think you have to have that. You have to have actually done some substantial intellectual research work with whatever your primary source material is, or your data, or whatever, before you can use either your book or the other one, right? Like it’s not a sort of, “I think I might have an idea”, sort of concept. You’re like, No, you really know. You, you know what evidence there is. You’ve like maybe hung out in an archive for a while, or whatever. So… But, yeah… So you’re saying that, that your first step, that their book might help you with some of what you talk about in the first part of your cycle,

Laura Portwood-Stacer 48:32
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would absolutely… And I think I in the footnotes to my book, I say, like: “If you’re still coming up with a concept for your book, [if] you’re not quite sure, you know, what this book is supposed to do on the page, The Dissertation To Book workbook, whether you’re writing a dissertation book or not, I think is a great workbook, either way. Yeah, but then once you’ve got it on the page, now you can use Make Your Manuscript Work to really get it to a publishable state of a manuscript. Or one that is ready to show to publishers, even if it is not, you know, at the final stage of publication.

Jo VanEvery 49:10
And I know they do some structural stuff around, like, what does each chapter need to? Like? They talk about, like, the big argument, and then what each chapter is doing, and they do all that kind of stuff. So that’s apparently also working with that idea of argument structure, maybe a little bit style, but it’s kind of like early phases, they provide much more detail. And then, as you’ve kind of really solidified: “This is what my book’s about. This is who it’s for.” – that kind of thing. And in the same… So what… How would you relate it to, say, The Book Proposal Book, and what that’s helping you conceptualise and think about?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 49:45
So The Book Proposal Book, you know, much like my book proposal programmes, where I work with people, I feel like there’s sort of two productive times you could come to it. One is when you’re like, deciding whether you want to write a book even, or whether there is a book there. The book proposal book lays out, you know, all the things you would need all the questions you’d need to answer to convince another person, one who works at a publisher, that this should be a book. But those are really important answers to get for yourself as well. And I’ve advised people, especially people working on second books, and I’ve done it myself, if you just like, have a book idea, okay, try to draft a proposal. If you get, you know, five pages into this proposal and you’re like: “I don’t want to spend two to three or five more years working on this.” Great. You can now throw it away. You don’t have to pursue that book, right? So I think the book proposal can be a really useful tool, in that way, for just testing a concept for yourself, or, like you mentioned your client to just sort of like, map it out, kind of, you know, and then then you go back and actually you could write the manuscript. And then that second point, when the book proposal book is useful, and also when my programmes are useful, is when people are actually, like, on the cusp of going to talk to a publisher. Now you can really make sure you’ve got an airtight document that is going to impress them with your idea. And your… Not just the scholarly idea, but the concept of the book as a thing that readers will want, you know, because that’s what the publisher really cares about. I mean, of course, they care about the intellectual merit of the book, but they need to see that it will work as a book that they can sell.

Jo VanEvery 51:25
Yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 51:26
So that’s the other sort of stage where The Book Proposal Book can really help you, yeah.

Jo VanEvery 51:30
And what I understand from her is that you actually, in that sense, like, if you’re using it at that stage, you actually provide, like, here are some really good ways to phrase things. Here are some like, like, she paid a lot of attention to that kind of wordsmithing bit with the synopsis. I mean, the synopses are relatively short, so…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 51:46
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 51:47
And from my perspective, as somebody that’s going to be that’s being coaching her and is going to coach her through the rest of the revision process, is that make those decisions, and getting those really tight synopses at that stage is not only going to convince the publisher, so it can be sitting there with them, but it’s also going to be a point of reference for you about those decisions you made, right? Like in this book you’re talking about, make these big decisions, assess where you are, make some revisions. But this, like those, like really tight synopses in your book proposal, are like a summary of some of the sort of intellectual decisions that you’ve made about what’s going in each chapter and what this book is doing and whatever. And so then when you’re approaching the text that you have, you can look back at that and be like: “Is this text doing what I think it- what I want it to be doing? And what do I need to fix here? What do I need to…? What are the opportunities to make it do that better? Or, what have I kind of gone off? Where have I gone off on a tangent, or whatever?” I have a lot of neurodivergent clients, so, you know, part of it is that sometimes you end up on a side quest. It’s like, is that…? And I guess that would be a good place, because you’ve said, and I think I agree with you, that you really focused on books, because that’s your experience, that’s who, what you’ve helped people with. But in terms of this process of developing a manuscript, you can apply that at the level of a chapter, but if you can apply it at the level of a chapter, you can apply it to an article.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 53:15
Absolutely, yeah.

Jo VanEvery 53:17
Right? And and again, you need these things. You need, you need an Argument, you need Evidence, you need Structure, and you need the appropriate Style, right? And one of the things that in terms of the kind of professional demands on scholars, the scholars that both of us help, is that even if they are in a book discipline, they are often now under pressure to also publish articles. And so a question I get asked a lot is, “How much of this can I publish without, sort of, um, harming my opportunity, my chances of getting the book published?” And my most common answer is that: “Actually, you’re not really necessarily going to publish a version of Chapter Three as an article and then it’s still going to be in the book. But that one of the sources of the articles you could publish, are the side quests. [And] The things that you end up deciding, when you decide on the mission of the book are kind of interesting, but not crucial to that mission. And that, that’s actually a way of being able to feel better about leaving certain things out of the book.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 54:25
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 54:26
Do you kind of agree with that? Does that feel like a…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 54:30
Yeah. Well, I get that question a lot too, like: “How much can I double dip, kind of, to publish as articles, and then also in my book?” And I will say there are absolutely many books, and many authors that do publish journal articles, and then just sort of lightly revise them into a chapter of the book. I did that with my first book, my monograph, for two of the chapters. And so if you’re doing that, then the sort of general guideline is like no more than 25% of the material in the book should have appeared elsewhere. But often, you know, an article is shorter than a chapter ends up being. So you’re really padding out. So it’s really not like: “Oh, the full Chapter Three is has appeared elsewhere.” It’s 8000 words of Chapter Three. So that 25% is, it’s pretty easy to deal with, I think, for most people. But yes, if you use my other book Make Your Manuscript Work, you will inevitably, probably end up with lots of material that, like you said, you can feel pretty good about not putting in the book because it doesn’t fit the argument, or it’s too much evidence, or it’s just going on a side quest. And then, yes, definitely you can turn that into articles. Reach that article threshold you need for tenure, or whatever it is, and then there’s no, no threat to the book at all in that case.

Jo VanEvery 55:51
Yeah, yeah. And you’re not going to need permissions from the journal, right to reproduce, you know, whatever, whatever. And it, yeah… Because I think that’s, like, and I think for humanities people in particular, where they do often think of their research in terms of: “I’m writing this book.” It feels very hard for them to imagine, right?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 56:11
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 56:12
But if you start thinking of it as: “I’m doing this research, and there will be a book, but there may also be some other things, or there may be more than one book”, right? So one of my people actually wrote, she thought of it as writing a book, and wrote this absolutely massive manuscript, and then realised: “I actually have a draft for two books here, and I just…” And it was actually relatively easy for her to see, okay, this is where they split, and this is Book One, and this is Book Two, and then what am I doing first? And whatever. But initially she was just like, “Oh my gosh, this book is really getting out of hand.” But once you let go of the idea that everything that you’ve done in that research needs to be in the book, right? The book is never… And this process that you’re teaching, and Make Your Manuscript Work, is really how you get from: “I know all this stuff, and I’m so excited about it, and I think loads of it is important for other people” to: “What’s this book as one output from this research? And what are the questions that working on this raised, that will be a future project?” Right? Like, “I don’t have to, every time I up-level my own knowledge about this, I don’t have to up-level the book to go with it. I can write the book and then do the other stuff.” But also, like, yeah, that was a really interesting side quest, but you don’t want to distract your reader and confuse them. So can you take that out? And not throw it away, but do something else with it. Right?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 57:40
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 57:41
And so you’re kind of giving a framework for making all those decisions, even though you don’t necessarily really talk about what else you might do with the stuff you leave out.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 57:51
Yeah, it’s more like: “You can do something with it.”

Jo VanEvery 57:53
You can do something with it. Come back to that later.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 57:57
In the, in the Structure chapter, where I’m sort of helping people assess their structure, you know, one of the big issues people end up having is length. “What I’ve got here is too long for what is what my publisher will accept.” And I’m a big advocate of, you know, if you have to reduce length, find the largest viable chunk you can cut out, instead of going in and trying to chisel away. Now we’re going back to sort of the woodworking [metaphor].

Jo VanEvery 58:22
Yeah, yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 58:23
If you can find a whole chapter that you could maybe just cut, now you’ve got an article that’s essentially already written, right? You’re not now having to, like, piece things together. So that was just one thing that came to mind, is that, you know, if you use this system, that will actually help you be more productive with the material you have.

Jo VanEvery 58:41
Yeah. Well, and part of it is, like, when you’re deciding on that, if it’s too long, it’s like, okay, so instead of like, saying, “Well, this is the focus of the book, and how do I do all of that, in fewer words?” – you can just say, “Can I have a tighter focus for the book?”

Laura Portwood-Stacer 58:59
Right. Yes. Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 59:00
Right? And that’s where: “Well, this whole chapter could go somewhere else, because if I…” And that’s what’s happened with this other client, right, where it’s like: the things you were imagining is chapter seven and eight, what if that doesn’t need to be in this book? It could be a later thing, right? And part of that was really about the time period, right? Like, so her original conception of the book was much longer, and she’s kind of tightened it up to be a much tighter, more or less eight year time period with one contextual chapter of what happened before. And then she’s really saying during this particular eight years, there were some really significant shifts that happened in the political discourse around this topic. And then the other thing that we took out earlier was really about, well, what then happened, kind of six years after that? But it’s like, no, if you just, what if we just focus on what happened around these kind of two connected kind of events that then led to a whole lot of political things happening? And what’s the bigger picture you’re trying to say? And it’s just, it’s meant that she’s got more space to focus on the evidence around that, in that period, but also a much, just a much more tightly focused argument. And that other stuff is still interesting and important, but it can happen later, but it also means that some of what you’re trying to put into the broader disciplinary conversation about this topic is going to be out there sooner. You don’t have to solve it all.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:00:36
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 1:00:37
Right? And, and, and that’s, that’s kind of helpful, but, and so I think that’s, you know, like, yeah, like, say we’ve just, like, chopped off. I mean, before we even got to knowing how long this was going to be, she’s already chopped off a couple of chapters, and turned what she thought of as being two contextual chapters into one, so that there’s more space, because part of that other part expanded from three to four. But, yeah, I think, and then I think that’s the term refinement. Like, as you go through that cycle, you’re just refining and refining your decisions based on what you have to do work in between. Like you can’t… I think that’s the biggest thing: Like, you can’t get to the end without doing this.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:01:21
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 1:01:22
And I think, you know, having a process you can trust is really important, so I’m really glad. Thank you very much for writing and, like, with everybody, right? Like, the process, like, I’d say, try it your way the first time, and then you can, because it’ll work, and then you can tweak it right? Like…

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:01:41
Yes.

Jo VanEvery 1:01:42
Like, the first time you make a recipe, you do it exactly the way it’s written. But I don’t know about you, but I don’t make any of those things exactly the way they’re written after that.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:01:51
Yeah, yeah. This is meant to be a flexible… Yes.

Jo VanEvery 1:01:52
Once I’ve done it once and and I know how it works. Then I’m like, oh, okay, well, I’m out of this. I can definitely substitute that, because I know what that thing is, that ingredient is doing in this recipe. And but also, I think no matter how many books you write, you always have, you’re never not going to have to do this. Like, the only thing that changes the more experience you get is that you recognise that this is the process you have to go through, and have a way to go through it. And so you go through it a little bit more efficiently. But, and part of that is about letting yourself trust that you will get to certain things later and that you don’t have to worry about them in the current draft.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:02:32
Yeah, yeah.

Jo VanEvery 1:02:35
Thank you so much for writing this. Is there anything else you wanted to say, or are there any other…? Like you’ve already said You really like the Dissertation To Book workbook, we’ve talked a bit about your Book Proposal Book. For people that are looking for this kind of thing, that all three of those books are, which are kind of provide a sort of structure for making decisions about how to break the project down into chunks so that you can manage it better. I think that would broadly be what you’re all trying to do. Are there any other books that you sometimes recommend to people [that] complement what you’re doing?

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:03:08
Yeah, so, so I treat the bibliography of this book as a reading list, a recommended reading list.

Jo VanEvery 1:03:14
Oh! Fantastic, yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:03:15
Because most of what I’m citing is other, you know, writing, craft, publishing books that complement what I’m trying to do here, without overlapping too much. I don’t [think] there’s a book that really exists like this, which is why I felt like I had to write it. Yeah. I mean, I would say, if you’re writing a journal article, I’m sure all your readers are aware of write your- Writing Your Journal Article In 12 Weeks.

Jo VanEvery 1:03:36
Yes. Love her.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:03:37
I would say, spiritually, this book is trying to be that book for book writers. It’s presented much differently, you know. That book is very broken down into granular steps. This one has steps. They’re slightly less. You know, it’s not a day by day workbook, the way that one is, but it is trying to do something similar, just like bring a clear structure to the process of writing and revising. So, yeah, but that’s obviously for journal articles and not for books. But yeah, I would say, you know, if you get your hands on Make Your Manuscript Work, and turn to the back, to the bibliography, you’ll see recommendations of books on making time to write, writing process, finding pleasure in writing, dealing with your trauma around writing, like all of that kind of had to happen before you could get to this. And then I have lots of recommendations of books to help line edit. You know, once you’ve gotten this big picture stuff done, then, you know… I really think Rachael Cayley’s: Thriving As A Graduate Writer is a great book. That is the book I used for, sort of, my, my, you know, to structure my line edits of this book, and I used a couple others as well, but… Yeah, so I really see this book as sort of fitting in that timeline that’s got to start with process, then concepts, you know, with the Dissertation To Book Workbook, then developmental editing, then line editing.

Jo VanEvery 1:05:01
Yeah.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:05:o2
You know, there’s even copy editing and stuff.

Jo VanEvery 1:05:o4
Yeah. No, that sounds really good. That sounds really good. And there are other things out there, and they are in the bibliography of this. So if you’re worried about the fact that Laura keeps telling you not to focus on that yet, that that she’s got something in the bibliography that will help you focus on that when you’re ready.

Laura Portwood-Stacer 1:05:19
Yes, exactly.

Jo VanEvery 1:05:21
Okay, well, thank you very much for doing this and talking to me about it.

[end of transcript.]

Related Posts:

Motivating yourself to finish the damned book!

How do I know when my book is ready to submit?

How to find a book structure that works

Why are you writing this book?

How to plan your academic writing (special episode with guest Jo VanEvery) – An episode of Vikki Wright’s podcast I appeared on to talk about the difference between planning your projects and planning your time.

This post includes an audio interview conducted 29 July 2025. It was auto-transcribed by Otter.ai, then edited to ensure accuracy and easier reading. It has been published here with an extended introduction. It was also sent to the newsletter 12 September 2025.