Episode 704: Why Write a Book?
Transcript!
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes
(because citations are political)
This is the last of our three episode miniseries on why and how we wrote Religion Is Not Done With You, since you nerds won’t stop asking us about it!
This third episode is about how we did the actual writing. Because, as it turns out, writing is hard. Writing with someone else? Really hard.
Shocking no one who has been a listener for a while, we had different approaches to and experiences of writing Religion Is Not Done With You. Here’s what we talked about:
Technical Stuff: we used Google docs to write, even though it bugs Ilyse a bit, because co-authoring in real time? Priceless. We also relied on video chats and painstaking line reads.
Structure Was Hard: Turns out, writing a book is hard, which we both know having written books previously, but writing as if this was a podcast episode wasn’t cutting it. At all. Megan had an “aha moment” when we figured out how the book was going to look; Ilyse had it when the trickiest chapter to pin down felt like it was neither’s own voice, but a collective one.
Voice. Talking on the podcast is easy, because each person quite literally says everything in their own voice. With their own words. Often in real time. Writing, though? When it isn’t a script that tells the audience who is talking? Trickier. Ilyse’s academic voice is often very formal; Megan’s is not nearly as formal, or riddled with citation. Finding the balance—of Ilyse’s training and Megan’s training, subfield norms, and being more weighty than the podcast but less heavy than an article bound to be read by that one guy Ilyse knows at Cambridge? Well, that took us months.
But what can we say? It took a while to figure out. But when we did? Magic!
Religion Is Not Done With You
Our book is available anywhere you get books! And if you know anything about contemporary book publishing, preorders really, really matter. So do reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. (We don’t have to like it. It’s still true.)
We love a local indie store, so pick up a copy there, if you can!
If you want to have us visit your local bookstore or campus, please reach out to us and Caitlin Meyer, one piece of the rockstar publicity team at Beacon Press.
