JoVE Note: I think I first came across Emily Doucet on LinkedIn, when I saw a post in which she shared an exercise she’d created for book writers around organizing your evidence. I started following her and set up a get to know you meeting, as you do. My clients often need editors, so I connect with editors. 

When we first spoke, we discovered that we both had an interest in the process of producing early drafts. Emily was even developing a course to lead scholars through a process. I figured a conversation about drafting might be very helpful for you. 

This episode is an edited version of a conversation between me and Emily Doucet in late November 2025. We refer to her services and mine, but our goal was to chat about the process of producing drafts, and helping scholars produce drafts. I hope you find something helpful in it.

Jo VanEvery
Welcome. Can you maybe just introduce yourself a little bit before we get started, and then I will kind of reintroduce myself, and then we can start chatting about what we wanted to chat about today.

Emily Doucet
Yeah. So thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be having this conversation. So my name is Emily Doucet. I work as a developmental editor for academic authors, both on journal articles, book proposals, book manuscripts, but I really do specialise in helping people develop book projects, really, at every stage of the journey as we’ll be talking about, I’m sure, from kind of really developing that first draft to finessing final drafts in response to peer review and getting things ready for submission to presses. I run a business called Framing Devices, just my home for all these supports and resources for academic authors. And my background is as an academic myself. So I have a PhD in Art History, and I wrote an academic monograph myself, so I kind of know firsthand all the challenges of developing a project, and specifically also developing a project that has its origin as a dissertation, as well as a lot of my clients do.

Jo VanEvery
Okay. Thank you. One of the reasons that it’s interesting to talk to you, like, is because you, you work as an editor, you work with texts, that kind of thing. I do not, but I work with academics. I mostly work with helping people find time for their writing, and, and I also coach people, and I have an increasing number of coaching clients that I’m helping work on book projects. But even within the Academic Writing Studio, which is the group programme I write where I have A Meeting With Your Writing – a virtual co working group that meets four times a week, 50 weeks a year. But even within that context that a lot of people, you know, like, we offer sort of micro coaching with the virtual writing group, because people get stuck with their project, and so I do a lot of coaching around helping people keep their projects moving forward, not get stuck, that kind of thing. And so the coaching has kind of grown out of that. And in the past year, I’ve started doing small groups for book writers that are mainly focused just around intention setting, and accountability, and then helping people keep it moving, right, which means that we do talk a lot about… Some of those people are in revisions. Some people are producing a first draft. Some are doing, you know, different things.

Jo VanEvery
When I first came across you, I think one of the first things I saw was something another editor had shared on LinkedIn, where you were saying this thing about how to get the first draft down, which I don’t see a lot of editors talking about. Most of them are talking about how to develop your draft into something else. And then we had a conversation, and you told me about this class that you were producing, you were creating to help people with the first draft. And I just thought it would be really interesting to have a conversation about your view of writing first drafts, my view of writing first drafts, because I think a lot of people really struggle with it and their projects. They get stuck and they get frustrated, especially for something long, like a book draft, with kind of just figuring out how to get that down. And also there’s a lot of opportunity at that stage to get stuck in kind of perfectionism loops and be doing, trying to do things that are kind of not appropriate to that, to that stage, but people have trouble kind of getting out of that and knowing what they need to do. So that was kind of the impetus for inviting you here.

Jo VanEvery
So in your work as a developmental editor, what prompted you to develop these kind of resources for writing the draft, like the first draft? Like, what, presumably that came out of something you were seeing with your clients, frustrations they were having? So what was, what were the key things that prompted you to kind of start developing these resources?

Emily Doucet
Yeah, so I think it really at heart came from my deep interest in process, as a, as a, as a writer myself, and then certainly, as someone who works, you know, with writers every day. So I think, I often like to think and kind of get down to first principles, so the kind of very like basic components of something. And I often find that when I work with writers at a later stage in a draft, so maybe they’re getting, you know, gearing up to submit something to a publisher, or they’re responding to peer review, trying to meet a deadline, etc, when we kind of delve into the revision process, we’re often trying to align the, kind of, manuscript with their sort of stated goals, for, you know, speaking to a particular audience, for answering a particular set of questions, for speaking to a specific body of materials, and we’re kind of evaluating how the manuscript does or does not meet those goals, or those kind of, you know, milestones for the project.

Emily Doucet
But what often happens is people don’t actually have a clear sense of those kind of core components, or core kind of details about their own draft, sometimes really late in the process. So what I was finding, more and more, was if I asked them, so who are you speaking to with this draft, or who, you know, who is your kind of imagined audience, or what kind of were some of the motivating research questions that really prompted this research? It was actually quite a difficult set of questions for people to answer. And, you know, admittedly, these aren’t simple, these aren’t simple questions. So I was thinking with creating this course, I thought, you know, what would be a set of processes or kind of techniques, tools that can really get people thinking about these sort of first principles of an academic manuscript really early on in the process? So it gave them a sense of purpose when developing that first draft, and then also a set of ideas that they could then, when they get to the revision stage, which, as we’ll talk about, is a different stage than drafting, they could have something to kind of evaluate what they’ve created against, and actually have a sort of a framework that they’ve developed, whether that be, you know, research questions, a kind of body of evidence that they’re specifically invested in evaluating, or analysing, describing, etc. The goal, or the kind of motivation, was really to give writers a kind of framework to work within, rather than kind of write a draft, which is a kind of monumental task, but drafting research questions, evaluating your evidence, these are kind of more tangible tasks that can then be broken down into even more kind of specific jobs that give people a kind of sense of purpose or way in to the writing process that’s much more strategic and also a much more kind of creative, analytical, intellectual task, rather than just, kind of, like, again: ‘write’, which is hard to do.

Jo VanEvery
I’m wondering how much, like, one of the things I’ve noticed over many, many years of working with academics is that especially academics in book disciplines, like the humanities, when you ask them, like: “What…? What are you researching? Or what’s your research about?” They tend to answer in the form: “I’m writing a book about X.” and so there’s this, like, elision of the book, which is really one output of the research, with the research. So… And I wonder if that’s part of the issue that you’re seeing, is because they just think of their research as writing a book, and they’ve got this, kind of, big, sort of, topic for the book, like a research topic, that the whole idea of, like research questions and a very specific focus for the book is part of what kind of gets lost in there. Because in, in some of those disciplines, it feels, certainly to me, like there isn’t a very clear distinction in the way people in those disciplines talk between research and writing, like as opposed to, for example, I think maybe in the sciences, I don’t work with scientists as much, but I think maybe in the sciences, there’s much more of a sense of we’re doing the research over here. And then there’s a kind of writing up, right? Like, “What are we going to publish?” Like, “What are the findings?” And like, “Where are we going to publish the findings?” And then it’s like, “Okay, now we need to write an article that’s, you know, presenting these findings to this journal”. I think for a lot of humanities people, it’s just a much… It’s not separated that way as much in their head, and that the writing and the research are kind of intertwined in terms of process as much as much as anything else.

Jo VanEvery
So I guess, one of the things… I… So for me, one of the places that I started, in terms of really thinking about drafts was, was one, this, like, partly about when people get stuck, right? But also… And they stop writing, or they don’t know how to get started, or they don’t… Right? Like that kind of thing. But also… Well, I guess one of the things I noticed around that is that sometimes it’s about confidence, and so sometimes people are working with this very strong sense of, “Oh, I need to, kind of, know the the literature that I, that is influencing…” – you know, whatever. And they, they’re, they get they get stuck, because they’re like, “Well, I don’t have any… I don’t know if people are going to like what I say. I don’t know if I can make…” right? Because they’re dealing with what everybody else has said, too early in the process. But one of the things I’ve encouraged people to do, and have been noticing it gets really good results for getting stuff down, is really saying to them, you know, “You probably know enough about [their topic]…” right? Like when you start a PhD, obviously you need to start with like, understanding the field, but you’re new to the field, right? So later in your career, whether it’s even turning your PhD into a book, or writing another book, or whatever – you do have a pretty broad knowledge of what’s going on in your field, and what the key debates are, and things, and yes, before the final version of the book, you are going to need to revisit those things and make sure that you’re engaging with them in a nuanced and proper way. But if you start with what everybody else is saying, there’s like, a couple of things that can go wrong. One of which is, you end up being led by what other people are saying, rather than by your own voice and approach to the material. And secondly, you just kind of feel like, I think it really triggers a lot of imposter syndrome, and feeling like you can’t do this, because you’re at a different stage in your project than the stuff you’re reading. And so it feels like, well, obviously where you are now isn’t as good as what they’re doing because you haven’t worked on it yet. And so, you know, so I’ve often said to people, in order, like… What I think of as the main goal of the first draft is to help the author, he is for the author, right? That it’s not so much, the first draft isn’t so much for everybody else. The first draft is for the author to really figure out what it is they *want* to say, and what they *can* say based on whatever evidence it is that they’re using, and to feel more confident about that, and they’re doing that in a context where they are aware of what’s going on, and that there are people who will be interested in it. But once you’re confident about that, then the process of revision is about turning that into something that other people, that communicates to other people, and that other people will want to read. Does that land for you in terms of the…?

Emily Doucet
Yeah. I think I would, again, I would break it, I break it down, even, even into more stages than that. I think, like, I don’t think it’s just drafting and revision. I think, I mean, as I think I’m sure you would agree, writing is far from a linear process, right?

Jo VanEvery
No, absolutely.

Emily Doucet
So part of, I think, what, what is maybe almost kind of triggering for people about the idea of research questions, research questions is the idea that it’s something that you kind of set down at the beginning of the process and then you’re stuck with. You know, something that you just, “Well, that’s what I said I was gonna do. Now I have to do it.” But my version of questions is more something that’s, you know, recursive, and that’s is actually like an analytic tool for the author themselves to continually, or maybe not continually, but regularly reassess what it is they are, in fact, investigating, and moving from that idea of the topic, (“This is what I’m researching”), to a book level, kind of, set of, like, an inquiry that’s actually trying to respond to something, answer a problem, kind of figure out a puzzle. And that’s where that usually that kernel of that contribution is, in that, either identifying a gap, solving a new problem, contesting a kind of known understanding of something, and that kind of thing. So I think in kind of set setting up these questions, not only as a, kind of, way of moving from a sort of topic, or kind of descriptive mode of like your subject matter that you’re investigating, to something that’s actually analytical and argument-driven is like a very specific part of the drafting process, and one that sometimes takes place in actual writing, and sometimes takes place more in planning, thinking, decision making. And so a big part of this class was actually to get writers to think about, I mean, the sort of motto of the class is, “writing is a decision making process”.

Jo VanEvery
Yes.

Emily Doucet
…and how to kind of surface these decisions to yourself, and give yourself the space and opportunity to actually answer them. Whether that be sometimes that takes a form of free writing, or kind of writing to kind of get to the place where you know, but sometimes it’s in giving yourself space to actually answer a set of questions. So you might have been answering, [or] trying to inquire into something specific a couple months ago, but now, you might be, those questions might be more precise. And giving yourself these moments to kind of say, “Okay, what questions am I asking right now? What is this helping me understand?” – gives you these moments to both evaluate the evidence that’s on hand, whether that be secondary scholarship that’s helping you answer these questions, or your primary, you know, materials, and it gives you these moments of kind of self assessment that lend a sense of purpose to writing too. Because I think there’s this kind of, you know, language around shitty first drafts, which I never really like the language, because I think it’s not very motivating to try to write a shitty first draft. I understand the kind of, like, impetus behind it of loosening perfectionism and that, but [it] doesn’t feel very fun to me to write a bad draft. What if the idea is to kind of explore your own thinking? And…

Jo VanEvery
Yeah.

Emily Doucet
Like, have a sense of, kind of, like, an inquiry-led investigation into your own research process. That, to me, feels much more kind of purposeful, and like, exciting, and like, experimental, rather than, “I’m gonna make something bad”, usually the result is obviously not of the quality that we want to publish.

Jo VanEvery
It’s like, the nature of, what do we mean by like, ‘shitty’, right? Like, or, what do we mean by it being bad? Because that draft is not going to, is often not going to look much like what the reader of the final published book needs to see, right? So if what you’re judging it against is: “Does this look like what I imagine the final product looks like?” – then it is a bad thing. But it’s not… But in terms, in its own terms, what you’re producing… I really like what you’re saying, and I think that’s where I feel like we’re saying, kind of, it’s kind of two ways into the same thing. It’s about developing your own confidence in what it is you’re trying to say, and how the evidence you have supports what you’re trying to say, and also getting more nuanced about exactly what that argument might be.

Jo VanEvery
So, you know, even when you start with a really strong idea, like one of my clients, you know, she had been thinking about writing this book for 20 years, and has written some articles and chapters around the same topic on the way, and she had a pretty clear idea of the structure that she wanted. She’s a literary scholar, and it’s a fairly standard literary book structure in that, you know, she’s identified a corpus of a small corpus of authors and works defined by a time period in geographical place, you know, whatever. And each, there’s a chapter that, each chapter focuses on one work by one author and does very close reading of that work in relation to this particular theme that she’s exploring. And she had sort of four of those. And how… What I had said was, “Well, why don’t you start with that?” Like, “Don’t worry so much.” Like, “You, you know a lot. You’ve been thinking about this book, right, for a long time. You know why you’re interested”, like, “Look at those things, do the close readings and get…” Right? And then she, and so she had a bit of a kind of draft of what she thought her through-line was going to be, and what the key questions were, and these, and she knew why she’d picked these texts, and then she just spent a month on each text, right, drafting a chapter, kind of a very drafty chapter, but it was the close reading of that novel with this theme, right, really making… And then she rewrote her book proposal, and really, really focused on, “Okay. What am I…? Now that I know the material really well, what am I really saying here?” Gave herself some synopses that could guide kind of revision. But having done that, she was then able to write an introduction, which took a really long time, because she used a very different process, but really, kind of, with a focus on: “This is the overall argument. I know what the argument is. But not only that, I know we have a much more nuanced understanding of what this argument is, and of what each of these books brings to that argument. And what I need to do to set it up…” and all that kind of thing. And I think when you haven’t done that detailed work with your evidence, it’s hard to have that level of thinking.

Jo VanEvery
And so sometimes I’ve had other clients who’ve, you know, they have come from my small book group coaching. I’ve had a couple who were kind of stuck in a phase of, they had the idea for the book, and they were trying to write a sort of proposal outline as a way to get started, and they were just getting really kind of stuck, and they were going in circles and didn’t quite know how to… Because it is, I agree with you, it is writing is about making decisions, and whenever you get stuck, it’s because there’s a decision you need to make, and you don’t know how to make it, and you have to ask yourself, “What could I do to help me make this decision?” Right? And so for a couple of them, I said, “Well, why don’t you stop thinking about the whole, you know, and start just looking at your evidence, and trying to write about that and see where that takes you in terms of understanding what it is you want to say.” And both of them have got a lot of that analytical work done relatively quickly, and now have this kind of sense of, “Okay, I’m ready to move on to…” Like, you know… And as they’re going through they come to points where they’re like, you know, they get like, two thirds of the way through it or something, and they’re like, “Okay, I now am really building up a really good sense of what the kind of key interesting things here are. And I I kind of feel like I kind of need to finish some of this primary analysis, but I also am…” So they start kind of going back and forth, like you say, a recursive process, with, kind of, trying to outline some key ideas and where things might go. But also, you know, so one of them ended up, she was doing some media analysis, and so she started to kind of find herself being concerned about, like, is the breadth of text that I’m using, you know, like, “Is it diverse enough? Is it, you know, covering all…” Right? And I said, “Well, why don’t you just kind of do a bit of an inventory?” So she created a spreadsheet where she just like, and like, had all these things, but it meant when she had that panic, right? “Am I doing the right work, or am I just kind of going around in circles?” She could then go to her spreadsheet and be like, “Oh, okay, no, I have got better coverage than I thought of certain elements. I’m missing other things, so I’m going to prioritise that for the next bit of analysis.” And [she] got to a point where she could give herself a deadline for finishing up, like watching media and writing analyses, and start shifting to the next phase, and kind of really… You know, so there was that kind of thing about now she felt like she had some stuff, and like a more deep knowledge of the topic, instead of trying to decide in advance. I think sometimes people are trying to decide, like you say, that idea of a research question is something you’re going to be stuck with, and they don’t feel confident that they can be stuck with that, because they don’t know they can say it. But they sort of feel like they get stuck in this loop of, “Well, I have to decide that before I can do the work, or it’s not going to be efficient.” It’s like, no, you sometimes you have to do the work in order to figure what the question is, or how the question should change, or whatever. And, you know, you just, it just is kind of, you know, like trusting yourself that you can work on it, and even if it doesn’t quite look like what the final version [does], right? So, like, even if it doesn’t have the, you know, some of the theoretical framework all worked out right away, and you’re going to put that in later. So, like, revision feels to me like a multi stage process, but at some point you need to do some of whatever the work, the research work is that helps you work out the that key question of, like: What is it you want to say? Who needs to hear this? Like those questions. Because initially, it’s just a, kind of, “Well, I just find this really interesting.” is often the motivation, right? Like, “I’m fascinated by this, but I don’t think anybody else [is]”. How many people don’t think anybody else is going to be interested about their research? And I think writing yourself into that… So yeah, that sort of feels a little bit like, yeah, like, we’re sort of saying the same thing from different angles that, yeah, you need to kind of start with some big questions, and do the work, and refine the questions as you go along, in order to be able to come up with what is the contribution here. And so it’s a process of narrowing, really, writing the book. It’s making decisions and narrowing it. Like a book project and a research project are two different things.

Emily Doucet
Yeah, well, ultimately, writing a book is a kind of analytical, you know, project, whereas a research project – I mean, there is analysis in that, but there, it’s often more in the gathering, in the discovering, in the unearthing. You know, piles of archival fonts that you know only an archivist has touched in in many years, or you know, these different processes where you’re bringing new material into your own kind of process of intellectual inquiry. And then also, you know, hopefully presenting it to other people with some measure of excitement.

Emily Doucet
But I liked what you said about, yeah, this kind of like this, this process of, sort of, you know, generating material in order to to understand what it is you’re trying to say, I think part, partially, because a lot of my background is in studying art, and also I’ve worked also with artists and arts writers and that kind of thing. But I also see this in in terms of the creative process. So if we think of like a metaphor of an artist creating a painting or something. They’re often doing, like studies in different media from different directions, like analysing how the light falls on the shoulder of a model, and all these different kinds of micro processes where they’re examining a sense of perspective in order to see the whole. Right? They’re doing these kind of studies, often in in pencil or in ink that might then later we translated into a huge oil painting. But they’ve studied how, like a sheet falls on a shoulder, kind of with great detail, for many days, over many pieces of paper.

Emily Doucet
And I think, of course, when we read a book, or we read a journal article, we don’t see, like the studies below the final product, right? But there’s this sense that you need to kind of reorient yourself and do this process of experimentation in order to arrive at what it is you think about a particular topic. So part of all these kind of moments of decision making that we’ve been talking about, and that people, I think often as you, as you rightly said, get stuck at, is because these these processes aren’t always surfaced, like, people don’t always think of them as decisions. They think, “I’ve got writer’s block.” “I’m stuck.” “I can’t write.” – but but in identifying these different processes of decision making, I think it can free people a little to be like, “Oh, actually, no, it’s that I need to do some thinking. Maybe it’s not a day for getting right words on the page, but it’s a day for doing free writing outside of the draft that helps me think about what questions I’m asking right now, or what decisions need to be made.”

Emily Doucet
So one… Another part of the course was doing a lot of free writing that was not in their drafts. So as I’m answering prompts about different decisions that needed to be made, how they felt about their draft, like, a lot of writing that happened about the process of writing in a very kind of meta way, and and kind of, like, getting people to also think, “Okay, like, I am struggling not with just, like, because I have a lack of knowledge on this topic, but because I don’t know what this next section should be about”, or “Because I don’t know what the purpose of this section really is, and I have a sense that maybe it’s actually not needed, but I’m not willing to admit that quite yet.” Or, you know, whatever the case, may be, a lot of different things. So seeing writing as a process of decision making can feel overwhelming, because it’s like, “Oh, another thing I need to do. I don’t even… I need to write, then I need to plan, and I need to…” – you know, all these different stages. But if you have kind of a sense of what that roadmap looks like, it actually can give a lot more like creative spark to the writing process, because you have, like, a path you can follow, even if it’s a, you know, admittedly winding one, you have a sense of like, “Oh, this is what I could do next if something isn’t working.” “This is an experiment I could try.” “I could try this other angle.” “Oh, this section isn’t working.”” Well, you know what? I had already identified that I’m going to need these other three sections in this chapter, so maybe I turn to one of those, see how that’s working today”, and [it] kind of gives you these options, so you’re not, like, “I’ve got to bang my head against the laptop to finish this section”. But maybe – and you will have to return to it – but like, maybe there’s some other options for you today? Get that, like, you know, that nice spark back, and then locate that kind of energy in the text. So I think it, it… Everything we were doing, this class was kind of leading through people, leading people through these kind of recursive decision making processes that could be both kind of forward looking and backward looking. So it could be something that you’re using when you’re writing your first version of the draft, but could also be something that you’re using when you’re going back to say, “Am I really still asking those same questions in this draft, or have they gotten even more precise?” “Do I still need all this evidence, or is it actually a more limited body that’s maybe necessary to answer these questions?” “Now, is this structure or outline still serving this draft, or do I need to maybe refine things for this latest version?” So it gives you this option to kind of return to those decisions. They’re never final. You know, until it’s in print, it’s not final. There’s all these kind of situations…

Jo VanEvery
We’re talking about earlier stages, right? So, you know, there is going to be… I think one of the things… There’s a fiction writer who has a long standing podcast. Used to be called, “How Do You Write?” And is now called “Ink In Your Veins”. And I’ve been following her for ages, partly because she’s also a knitter, so I kind of knew her as a [knitter], and then started listening to the podcast, and I read some of her books. She writes mostly fiction, memoir, but, and interviews a lot of different authors about process, like she is also really fascinated by process. Her name is Rachel Herron, and one of the things she said is that what really made a difference to her and her own writing practice was learning to love revision, right? So that you can get the draft down pretty quickly. And I think this is maybe what Anne Lamott is trying to get out with the idea of a shitty first draft, is that the idea is that the draft doesn’t have to look like the final thing. And Rachel often talks about how her first draft of a novel, she often doesn’t know how it ends, and she’ll panic about that, and then her wife will remind her that she never knows how it ends, and she should just carry on. And then she goes and carries on, and, of course, figures out how it ends later in the revision process.

Jo VanEvery
So it’s like, you know, your draft doesn’t… If, to take that to an academic thing, I think your your first draft doesn’t, you don’t necessarily have to have a conclusion to be able to say, I now have a draft, and I know where I’m going, and I can, I can start revision and get the structure and kind of start thinking about audience, and and, you know, start revising it into something that would, will eventually [be published]… But you have to kind of trust yourself that you will eventually be able to come up with that. But, I think the idea of, you know, just the idea of learning to love revision, is to sort of say, well, the purpose of this draft is really to have something that I can revise. And so it is to, sort of, ask myself these questions, and make some of these decisions that are going to enable me to turn this into something that I’m happy for other people to read. And so one of the things that a first draft might not have that might make you think it’s a bad draft, is it may not have good transitions between sections, right? Like you don’t have to… It may not have much of an introduction, or a conclusion. It may look like a bunch of chunks of things that are related, but you haven’t done all that kind of connecting it together part yet. And and so that thing where you’re saying, “Oh, I don’t know what the next section needs to be.” It’s like, “But I do know I need these other sections.” You don’t necessarily… There needs to be something in between, and you haven’t figured that out yet. But that doesn’t mean, like, you don’t have to, doesn’t mean, like… You don’t have to write it in the order somebody’s going to read it. And you don’t have to… You know, it’s good… It’s okay to start with the stuff that you are really excited about, and get some of that down, and make some decisions and gradually, kind of…

Jo VanEvery
The other place a lot of people get stuck is they’re like, “Well, I don’t know whether this needs to be in this chapter or this other chapter”, right? And it’s kind of like, well, you can write it without knowing that. If you think you’re going to need this section, but you don’t know where it needs to go yet, but you can [still] write it. But also, if you’re kind of in the middle and have most of a draft of chapter one, but you haven’t even started chapter four, and your question is, does this belong in chapter one or chapter four? You don’t have the basis to make the answer, because you don’t know what chapter four looks like yet, so you’re going to have to draft Chapter Four before you can properly make that decision, right? Like, sometimes there’s stuff you need, there’s work you need to do, before you can make that [decision]. And I think what happens is a lot of times people get caught up in “But that’s going to be inefficient. Wouldn’t it be better to just write it in the right place the first time and not have to go back and do all the revisions?” But I think efficiency is not necessarily what we’re after, but effectiveness. Because it, at the end of the day, it’s not very efficient to get stuck and to stop writing, right? And so if your drive for, like, [is] “But this, there should be a more efficient process, and that’s the one I want to use. I don’t want to do this thing where I might have to revise it six times.” It’s kind of like, well, if you’re not writing anything, when you do that, it’s not efficient. So you might as well do this other one. Maybe that is the efficient process to write, in this way that feels like it’s not efficient, and then make these decisions as you go along, and rewrite things and have things that don’t [fit], kind of, you know… You’ve written things that don’t fit.

Jo VanEvery
Which I think brings me to another thing that a lot of book writers worry about, but once you’re into writing a book, you realise it’s not really a worry, which is this thing about the pressure to also publish other things, and the fear that if you write an article, or a chapter for this edited collection, or whatever, that you are going to somehow make it impossible to get the book published, because too much of it has already been published. And I think people are asking the wrong question. What we’ve been saying about, you know, the process is the process of making decisions and narrowing it down from this big idea into a book length, like a book sized question, right? In the process of doing that, you realise there are a bunch… It’s not that everything else isn’t interesting and worth publishing. It’s that it doesn’t belong in *this* book, right? So sometimes you’re going along, and there’s, like, something that you need to, kind of, figure out, in order to work out what goes in the book. But what you realise is, that’s a distraction from the main point of my book. And sometimes you don’t realise it until you have made, done more of the recursive process and decided, “Oh no, the book is really about this.” And then you realise, “Oh, there’s this whole chunk I wrote on the way to getting to that decision that now no longer fits.” And it can, that can be another cause of being stuck, right? “I don’t wanna, I don’t want to get rid of that because I spent so long on it, and it is really interesting and important.” And so I think thinking of those things as they don’t belong in this book, but they could still be published in another way. They could be an article. They could be [something else]… You know, they’re, they’re related… It’s, you know… And, and, so one of the things I’ve started to try and talk about a bit more is the idea of: you’re producing a body of work, like, the book isn’t the thing that defines who you are as a scholar. It’s one thing amongst many, right? And that, over time, you’re producing a body of work, and, and so the the he articles, or the chapters aren’t necessarily redoing things that are also in the book. They’re kind of…

Emily Doucet
Totally, yeah. I mean, again, you can think of the, kind of, like the – I go back to the artist studio as my metaphor – but like, in terms of the creative experiment, right? Like a journal article might be a way to try out a novel, kind of methodological framework on a set of novels. And maybe you’re, you’re, you’re broadening that framework in the book, but maybe you want to, sort of, see how it works in practice, and kind of do a bit of an experiment. And then, that said, also, lots of, most books have some journal article content in them. You know, that’s also, I mean, it’s a subject- publisher-specific decision on what is permissible. But most people have tried out an idea, tried out an approach, developed, you know, done a kind of first stab at developing a new theory, or concept in a journal article. Because that’s part of how academic careers work. You know, you need that journal article to get a grant application in. Or the articles also work as kind of proof of concept for publishers too. “Oh, it’s actually been reviewed in this really great journal.” So, “Oh, other scholars must already think this is great work.” It’s a, it’s social proof of the project that you’re developing in the book. So it’s, as you say, it’s all part of a body of work and a long career, right? So it’s, kind of, they’re in conversation with. And there’s a reason why many scholars write different kinds in different genres, because they have different purposes in our thinking, in how they work, in publishing, and also in, you know, the professionalisation of academics more broadly. But, yeah, I think, I mean, the experiment is a nice way to think about it, like, “What if I saw how this worked? What if I saw what other people thought of it?”

Jo VanEvery
So that’s one of the things. The other one is kind of what you might call a side quest, right? You get into it and you’re just like, “Oh, there’s this other kind of related thing that’s really interesting”, and, like, you don’t want to take, you know, like, your book has to have a coherent narrative. It, you know… And sometimes there’s a bit where you go off, and it is really interesting, and it is kind of related, but it it’s taking your reader away from your main point, and, and, and sometimes you can make that point, like, sometimes it’s a whole ‘nother book, but a lot of times it might just be like a journal article, or or whatever, right? And, and, and it might even be something that you know is related to the main thing going on in your book. It might be something you, that you don’t need to talk about in detail in the book, but that if the order of publication works out that you would cite in your book to say: “For more on this, I’ve talked about that somewhere else” or whatever, but certainly, I think trying to think of the book as, like, ‘everything I know about this topic’, which, when you put it that way, pretty much everybody would be like, “Oh, well, of course, it’s not that.” But that’s kind of how some people are starting out approaching it. And then they’re really scared about carving parts off, but also worried about making, you know, some of the decisions they’re making, as if what they’re saying is “This isn’t important” or, “It isn’t interesting”. And it’s like, no, no, no, no. You’re just refining the focus of the book and the argument that you’re trying to make. And that doesn’t mean there aren’t other interesting arguments to make with this material. And and it might be that you end up writing, you know, multiple things that are related to that same like body of evidence. Like, if it’s a archival body of archival evidence, or something, or, you know… But, you know, people have, yeah, they… It’s just part [of]… You’re just writing [a] part for the book, and the decision making. I love the way that you call out writing as a process of decision making, because then in revision, the decisions just get to be different kinds of decisions, right?

Emily Doucet
Yeah, we’re evaluating the decisions you’ve made, seeing if they’re still the decisions you think are best, and then also asking a different set of questions. Because I think, as you said, an early draft can often be, sort of, for the author, in a sense, in terms of determining the nature and kind of direction of thought. But then, of course, at a certain point, we need to turn to the audience and say, “Okay, this is actually a draft for a reader.” So now, how is it…? How is it actually doing that job of dialogue, of communication of these ideas that I have firmed up in this first draft? And turn towards that audience related question and then ask a different set of questions [in] the revision process of like, “Okay, is this going to be presented in an order where a reader can grasp the direction of my thinking?” “Is there enough..?”

Jo VanEvery
Yeah.

Emily Doucet
“…source sign-posting for the, you know, the reader to grasp the kind of significance of my choice of including all this material?” or, that kind of thing. So there is a, kind of, yeah, these different kinds of decision making moments in the many different revision processes that happen. And then, certainly, at that early stage that we’ve been talking about as well.

Jo VanEvery
Yeah. And often your process of like, your reader… The key thing there is your reader doesn’t have to go through the same process you did. Like, once you’ve made all these decisions, and come to this, like, it’s, it’s almost like, you know, you’re trying to find out how to get from here to there, and and you’re, sort of, bushwhacking a bit, right? And going on all these side things to finally get there. But then once you get there, you look back and realise, “Oh, actually, there is a straighter road. We could make a straighter path.” And that’s kind of what the process of revision is about, is about saying, “Okay, now that I know where I’m going…” – because we, sort of, have, like, you say often, you sort of adjust where that is as you go, you can kind of be like, “Okay, for the reader, we want to make it easier. They don’t have to struggle as much with this as I do.” And then the introduction, also. That’s also why it then becomes easier to write the introduction, because you know who the reader is, and you, kind of, know where they’re starting from, and so you can introduce it in a way that’s kind of saying, “Here’s why this might be interesting to you.” And, you know, “Given what, what you’re probably already interested in, here’s why. Here’s how you get to the questions that I’m interested in” – and get them interested in, in reading what you have to say, so that, you know, so that they, they understand why this might be interesting enough to read a whole book.

Jo VanEvery
So I kind of came up with two questions that might sort of lead this back into, like, thinking about this drafting part in relation to the longer process, right? Because we’re not really talking about revision. I did a different episode where I interviewed Laura Portwood-Stacer about her new book about revision, and that kind of thing where we were talking about that. So I’m thinking my version of what a first draft needs is: the first draft needs to do the work that makes you feel more confident about what what you want to say, and that you can say that with the evidence you have, and that enables you to kind of figure out who you’re going to say it for, and then go into the phase of, how do I turn this into something other people can read. For you as a developmental editor, if somebody’s coming to you with a draft and then seeking editorial help to maybe shape it, or whatever – what would you say would be – but they sort of feel like, “I’ve kind of got a full [draft]…”, like, what would you say are the key elements of I now have a draft and I’m shifting into revision. Like, what would be the main things you want to see in a draft that people really need to kind of make sure they have?

Emily Doucet
Yeah, that’s a, you know, it’s a challenging question to answer, because writers are so different. And, and people really come some developmental editors really prefer to work with full and complete drafts. I am someone who works with very early material. Sometimes people come to me with basically research, and then we shape it into a book together. And I love that process. Sometimes people come with a more complete manuscript, and it’s more that sort of traditional developmental editing. With that said, I think… Sorry, what’s that?

Jo VanEvery
But that’s that’s useful to know, that you actually really specialise in helping people that are at this messier, earlier stage. And I did have a variation on this question that was, that was about that. So maybe that’s a better way to end, which is… Because, because I know a lot of people don’t even understand, like, “Well, when would I use, what are different kinds of editors, and when would I use them?”

Emily Doucet
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery
And my feeling about developmental editing has always been, well, when you’ve got a, kind of, first draft (and that might be your dissertation, or it might be, you know, you’ve done this work of, kind of working through and doing some analysis these texts, and you’ve asked some of these questions, and you’ve got yourself a kind of sense of, “I think the contribution is this, and here’s the evidence. And I know I can say ‘this’, and whatever, but I need a better structure.”) – that’s a good place to go to a developmental editor. But you’re saying that you also help with that, helping to figure that out. So, what…? How might people who are struggling and getting stuck at that stage, what could they seek? What would a developmental editor, like yourself, who who works with people at those early stages, what would you be…? What are the kinds of things you help authors with, and how might they communicate about, like, what’s a helpful way for them to communicate about what it is that they need, like, where they are and what they need to get unstuck?

Emily Doucet
Right, yeah. So I think I often kind of talk about at least three stages where people come to me asking for support. The first one is probably kind of what you’re describing. And so this is kind of, “I’ve got this a mass of research, I’ve been doing…” – I work with a lot of historical disciplines, so – “I’ve been doing archival research for years, and I’ve got all this amazing, fascinating material on this topic. No one’s written a book on this, but I don’t know, like, what the analytical through line is. I know I have tonnes of material on this topic, but I don’t really know what the, like, line of, yeah, line of inquiry really is. I don’t know what chapters would look like. Is it going to be chronological? Is it going to be thematic? What, like…? What will that shape actually look like?” So in that case, I might work with an author to really sort through that evidence, and, kind of, query the sort of possible frameworks that might help a book emerge from that material. So it’s really, kind of, seeing what would be the kind of most interesting, or most like analytically promising shape to, kind of – or boxes – to sort of, put around this material, that we could then, kind of, pull out its historical significance. So again, sometimes this is creating a sense of a chronology of a particular phenomenon. Sometimes it’s pulling out a set of themes about an industry, or something, you know, like this, different stages, or something. So there’s different kind of thematic period- periodizations, or different kind of frameworks that we can develop. And it can be really helpful to do that in dialogue with someone. Because sometimes you’re just, kind of, you know, metaphorically, and sometimes literally, moving papers around on your desk saying: “What is the shape of this?”

Jo VanEvery
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Emily Doucet
Right? And that’s part of why my business is called framing devices. It’s, you know, this process of of working to find shapes, for ideas, for knowledge, for ways to present that to an audience. So I work with people at that really early stage to, kind of, find the form. “Eventually this, you know, can look like…” Then potentially developing a book prospectus, or book proposal, to, kind of, create chapter synopses and give yourself a framework for writing. But in that early, early stage, it’s really about sorting through material and really finding what are those questions that are animating this material at that stage, and what in working through all this material, have you actually learned, and what would you like to communicate to an audience about that material? So that’s a really intense and challenging process, but it’s ultimately where you, kind of, find the shape of things, or at least ‘a’ shape of things to experiment with in creating.

Jo VanEvery
Yeah, absolutely.

Emily Doucet
Right. So then that would lead us to kind of another stage, where people have had this kind of, maybe a messy first draft. They’ve kind of developed things, but they’re saying, you know, “I did try a shape. I’m not sure if it’s working. I kind of need to get an outside opinion about what’s actually kind of being communicated through this draft.” So it might be a little rough around the edges. You know, there aren’t those nice kind of transitions, as you said, or things are a bit rough and ready, but it’s enough for an editor like myself to read through and say, you know, “Okay, actually, I think that this chapter shape is really working, but what we’re kind of missing is, you know, a clear roadmap in the introduction of chapters for people to find their way through this material. I’m finding that there’s maybe perhaps a little bit too much description in some of these chapters, and I’d love to see a little bit more analysis that really kind of helps us understand the significance of this material.” It’s really giving insight on to, kind of, “Okay, what’s the next stage?” And kind of honing this draft into a really, you know, a scholarly, intellectual manuscript which really has a strong point of view and a strong argument.

Emily Doucet
And then the kind of, like – I’m really generalising, but – the kind of next stage where people sometimes come to me is they’ve actually gone through a submission process. So people, have, you know, submitted a finished draft to a publisher. They’ve gotten some peer review reports back, and they say, “Okay, now I know that these peer reviewers are probably mostly right”, or, like, “They’ve made some really good points”, or, “I really disagree with reviewer two on this, but I know reviewer one is kind of right about that. What do I do?” Like, “How do I actually operationalize that feedback and actually turn that into, like, a revision plan, or a revision framework for how to get this back to the publisher? Either go out, back out for peer review, or move forward in the publication process?” So at that stage, I find it’s often helpful to kind of revisit some of these earlier stages with the author and say, “Okay, what decisions did you make then?” “Are reviewers, kind of, responding to one of those moments?” “Are they saying, you know, maybe you cut something out that would be helpful to bring back in?” “Or maybe reviewers are, kind of, getting a little lost in things, so we need to, sort of, streamline things a little bit, maybe trim, turn some of the edges down, kind of find a clearer shape?”

Emily Doucet
So I find, I tend to work with people at one of these three stages, where it’s about this kind of like finding a new shape, finding the shape for that stage of the manuscript, and giving that kind of outside feedback, like an educated, expert reader, but also someone who’s unfamiliar with the specific subject matter, right? I might be familiar with the conventions of the field, but I’m not an expert on whatever they’re an expert on, and so I’m learning something new, but I’m a kind of model reader in that sense. And then, of course, because I read manuscripts every day, I also have a sense of the kind of recurring structural issues that that many manuscript writers face. So, so, yeah, those are kind of the moments, and the kind of like… I think when people tell me the story of where they’re at in their research project, or their publication journey, it often gives me a clue to what kind of support I could offer. So, “Oh, I don’t know what this book is going to look like, but I know there’s a book in this pile of stuff.” “Okay, that means we probably need to do some mapping. We need to do some…” Like, yeah… I love Miro to, kind of, like, lay out post-it notes and figure out themes, directions, all sorts of things. Or, “Oh, I’m, I’m ready to submit, but I really need it to kind of be polished, and we need to make sure things are working really well for the reader.” Okay, that’s a different kind of read. Or, “Oh, I’ve got a goal of responding to these peer review reports in the next six months.” That’s another kind of read. You know, like, there’s, there’s really strategic… You can put your developmental editor to work in a very specific way. It doesn’t have to be the kind of general editorial feedback. It can be really purposeful, and really aligned with the author’s specific goals, and the specific stage that they’re at in their publication process, right?

Jo VanEvery
And so in terms of that first like that drafting process. So one of the things you’re saying is, even when people come later on, sometimes they struggle with answering these questions about… Right? So maybe one of the things to come out of this whole conversation is that while you’re drafting, it is worth struggling a bit with some of those questions and asking yourself, right, like, “What are the research questions that I’m interested [in]? What am I finding interesting about this? What are the sort of…?” And to kind of think about the analytical, and not just the descriptive. And there is that kind of sense sometimes, when a lot of us start with the descriptive, it is a good way into analysis, but to kind of be like, so: “What…? What kind of implicit analytical decisions am I making in choosing what I’m finding interesting to describe in detail? Why am I focusing on these things? What, what, what seems to be connecting things?” Like, just asking yourself questions about, about some of those things, and maybe also doing that kind of recursive process between immersing yourself and some of that material you’ve got, whatever it is.

Jo VanEvery
And then, you know, you know, trusting that you do know some of the frameworks, but like bringing yourself out of it sometimes, and being like, “Okay, what do I know about the broader kind of questions going on in the field?” “Is there anything about what I’ve just done with this primary source material that makes me see those questions differently?” Because I think that’s often where… I think people can be very resistant to the idea of argument, because it sounds very adversarial. And I often like to talk about conversations. And, you know, just like… If you are thinking of this as a sort of intellectual conversation – so it’s not that you have to convince anybody that you’re right, or have the kind of definitive interpretation – it’s more what do you have to add to our collective understanding of this set of phenomena? Or whatever.

Jo VanEvery
Like… And maybe it’s that you have new source material and data that’s helping you understand a kind of theoretical, conceptual debate differently, or maybe you are bringing… You know, like, what is it that you’re bringing to this that adds something to the conversation? Even if it feels a little bit nebulous. Having… Like, pausing to think about that, and then being like, “What kind of work do I need to do to make that less nebulous? And is this still where I’m going?” – and just allowing yourself to do that.

Jo VanEvery
I do worry that one of the issues is that writing can sometimes feel like, you know, we don’t want to think of it as a process of transcription, like, you’ve already made all the decisions, and you’re just getting them down in words on the page. That it is… Like… The the thing I really want people to take away, is that it is a process of decision making and that you should be making decisions. And sometimes you have to do a bunch of work that you’re not convinced that – either that you know from the outset isn’t going to go in the book, and you’re doing it separately as these kind of studies or experiments, or you’re doing some work you think goes in the book, and by doing it, you realise some things about the book, where you realise, “No actually, this now needs to come out” – and that’s part of the process. That that’s that’s just part of the way it goes. That it is about… That’s what we mean when we say “Writing is thinking”, that it’s part of how… And sometimes we need to do our thinking in other ways, but that the whole process really is about making decisions to shape a product, which is the book, like, that will have some sort of coherent, bounded set of questions and evidence. And it’s not going to be everything you know about this. It’s going to be part of a bigger body of work, hopefully. And I, in the current climate, it’s very hard sometimes to think about that, because a lot of people feel like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be in a context where I’m able to do the other work”, right?

Emily Doucet
Totally, yeah.

Jo VanEvery
Yeah. Like, I think that’s, that’s part of the, you know, there is a whole set of emotional things that go with that. But really, writing is decision making, and how is this process of drafting helping you make the decisions you need to make? Is a good way to think about what drafting is about, really. I like that.

Emily Doucet
Yeah. And each of this, this is all, as you say, kind of a process of inquiry as well. Like we’re setting, we’re creating containers so that we can inquire deeply about things, right? But when we’re just saying, “I’m writing a book”, it’s such a block to people, because that’s like: “A book is a big thing.” But when we’re saying: “I’m actually thinking deeply about these two letters that I found in this archive to see how they answer this question I thought about.” – that’s like something that you can really, like, put body, mind and soul to an answer. But when it’s like these big picture, these big categories, I think it can be, yeah, just so emotionally, logistically, and practically challenging to actually dive into.

Jo VanEvery
Those small things do come together into books all the time.

Emily Doucet
Exactly, yeah. I see it every day. And I just wanted, I know we’re wrapping up, but I wanted to mention, I think one of the things that actually connected us originally was that I shared a resource that I have called The Evidence Inventory, which is about asking yourself these questions about your evidence, and as a, is kind of one of those writing exercises that are sort of writing about your writing, that I kind of use to help people think about what role these sources are playing in their their intellectual process. So I’m sure we can share this with, with listeners. But getting to, kind of, those moments where you’re allowing yourself to do that, thinking outside of the pressure of, like, “I’m meeting my daily word count”, and like, all these kind of really disciplinarian things, are all part of the process that allows you to have a maybe more creative relationship with your writing, and one that’s less punitive and stressful.

Jo VanEvery
I’m not really into the punitive. I don’t know. Self flagellation is not… You know, I’m not sure that that’s actually effective. But, yeah, no, I like, I like that. I think there’s a place for the ‘setting a word count and getting words down’. You know, when you have a lot of ideas and it, you know, you can, like, have specific sessions where you’re like, I just need to, like, write a lot of words and then, and then figure things and then ask questions later. But you’re right, like that can’t be every session. It’s not just about producing words. Sometimes it’s about evaluating the words. Sometimes it’s about thinking about these bigger things, and then making decisions about where you want to go next, and that, and that kind of thing. And and there’s a place for separating some of those things, right? Like, so sometimes when people find it hard and they’re getting stuck, they’re, you know… If you’re trying to do three things at once, maybe stop and just determine what the three things are, and just pick one of them, and do that one, and then do the next. Like, do them consecutively, instead of all at the same time. It’s like in in revision, you know, like having a goal for a particular revision pass, right? You’re going to see other things that might need to change, but don’t keep switching your focus, like, make little notes or something. But like, focus on one thing, and go through, [then] focus on another thing. Like, it might actually be more effective to go through the document multiple times with a different focus, than to try and do six things at once and then feel like you’re not getting anywhere. And… You know? Like…

Emily Doucet
I was gonna say, I need to, I need to hear that every day, when I’m toggling between email and an invoice, and, you know, all the things, right?

Jo VanEvery
I know, right. Why are we trying to do…[everything at once]? Yeah. It’s… But, you know… And then people… You know… Or, like, it’s really easy to get stuck on, “Oh, like, I have these, like verbal tics, right, that I start too many sentences with.” [Such as] ‘However’. Whatever. It’s like, that is a really late stage process [thing], right? Like you can just… If you know what they are, make a list of them. Just make a list of them. And then one of the things you do right near the end… Because you don’t want to, you don’t want to make…

Jo VanEvery
One of the other things I learned from Rachel Herron is: you absolutely don’t want to make your paragraphs pretty if you are not sure they’re staying in. One of the things that makes it hard to delete stuff is that you spent so much time on the, you know, the language, and making it elegant and everything else. It’s like, you don’t want to make anything elegant until you’re further down the line. You need to, like, get the big picture stuff in place first.

Jo VanEvery
And that, like, back to the artist thing. One of my friends is an artist, and she shows a lot about her process. And one of the interesting things is, you know, like, artists will do a stage that is colour blocking, and it’s on the, it’s on the canvas, but it’s these big, blocky, like, she is not at all any kind of abstract artist. She’s a figurative artist in a very old tradition. She does very realistic painting, but her first stages look very almost cubist, right? And they’re really just about vague colour blocks. And then she refines and refines. And I think that’s one of the things, is you need to… Like, don’t start refining stuff early. Like, you can leave that till the end. That’s only a problem at the end. At the beginning, it’s these questions like, “What am I interested in? What, what…? What do I want to say about it? What contribution is this making? How does this engage with what other people are saying. What’s…? Why would other people find it interesting?” That. That’s what you’re trying to figure out writing this draft. And if… There’s people that can help you, right? People like you, as a developmental editor. People like me, as a coach. I’m not going to read pages, absolutely not. But I will let you talk through stuff with me that can really work, right?

Emily Doucet
Well, and understanding where you are in the process, so you can understand what kind of supports you need are huge. Because, like, there’s been, I think, over the last decade or so, a kind of explosion of academic writing advice and really amazing tools, like you mentioned: Laura Portwood-Stacers amazing book, like all these things. But sometimes people are encountering these tools not at the right stage. And it’s actually… Like, if you’re doing that, if you’re reading Laura’s book right at the beginning, you might think, “Oh, my God, it’s… I’m not at the stage where I have an argument. How do I know?” And so knowing that you need that book in six months, and that will be an amazing resource for you then, is key, right?

Jo VanEvery
Yeah.

Emily Doucet
Because, like, so that’s part of the work too. I think that I’m trying to talk about is like, “How do you know what you need, [and] when?” Because otherwise you can really, like, people are reading a book about, you know, amazing resources, like Helen Sword’s: Stylish Academic Writing or something, and then being like, “Oh, my sentences aren’t stylish yet.” But it’s like, “Well, you haven’t written any, so we don’t need to worry about them being stylish right now.” But, but so knowing *when* these amazing resources can be of use to you, and deploying them then, strategically, but not reading them [now] – I mean, there’s no problem with reading them in advance, but just knowing that they may not be appropriate to the stage you’re currently at, and not having them overwhelm you with unrealistic expectations for that particular stage. Yeah.

Jo VanEvery
And that’s where, like, the kind of, “How do I get the first draft down?” is sort of, you know [a big struggle]… Because there are just a lot more resources about what to do with it once you have it, but the, the getting it down [is still difficult], you know?

Jo VanEvery
So anyway… So you’ve created this course, which presumably there will still be information about that when it runs again. Or if it’s a kind of, is it a sort of asynchronous thing that people can do anytime, or is it a…?

Emily Doucet
Yeah, it’s going to be. It’s just kind of in the process of switching from, we just ran the first live cohort from October to mid November, and it’s going to be transformed into a self paced cohort. And I can’t say right now if there’s going to be future iterations. There might be, but I’m certainly going to be also developing more resources based on this kind of process, and sharing those. Yeah on my website, newsletter, etc. So yeah.

Jo VanEvery
Which we’ll have in there [the links]. So, cool. Well, thank you so much for talking to me. Just to remind everybody, Emily Doucet is a developmental editor, and her company is called Framing Devices, and we’ll have all the links and everything in the description in the show notes. So thank you very much, Emily for talking to me today, and I hope we get to talk again sometime. I’m really glad we got to have this conversation.

Emily Doucet
Yeah, thanks, Jo. This is really fun. I love, like, really getting super nerdy about this, with someone who’s as excited about it as I am, that’s such a treat.

Jo VanEvery
So I mean, one of the things about people like us is that we do the work we do because we look at all the… Like, there’s so many academics who are like, “Oh, I’m really interested in this, like, deeply nerdy thing”, right? “And I know hardly anybody else is”, like, especially when you’re working with people, humanities people, right? Like somebody, I had somebody very early in my career, say, you know, in my freelance career, say to me, “Well, I’m just, like, interested in this, and I know nobody else cares about it, but I would really like a grant to be able to work on it.” And I’m like, “You are not the only person that cares about this.” And I think you and I do the work we do because we see that, we know that there are other people that care about whatever nerdy thing it is that you’re into, and, and we want to help you actually do the work, and get it out there where other people can read it, and where you can connect with the people who do want to have those intellectual conversations with you, through this very bizarre process of publishing and reading. And you know, it’s, it’s a kind of a weird way to talk to people, but that’s how we do it. And, and I think it is, like, it is kind of exciting to do the work we do, because we just get to see all the very cool things people are working on, and help them, bring them into the world. And that’s so fun. It just really is.

Jo VanEvery
So thanks again. And I’m going to say goodbye. I’m really bad at saying goodbye, and I’m going to say goodbye. Okay.

Emily Doucet
Okay, thanks, Jo. Bye.