This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives.
Today we're speaking with Ellie Stern, Yale University Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History. And we're talking about writing the second or third or maybe even fourth book that an academic writes. It's kind of the book after tenure is our idea here. And you, Ellie, are at the kind of university that requires two books for tenure, which seems like a lot of pressure. And I think you did this in about seven years, the writing of these two books. So I wonder if you can tell us about how you did that. And while many of our listeners are not at that kind of institution with that requirement, there's probably something that the rest of us can learn from your strategies and experience with that kind of writing of the tenure books.
Yeah. So first of all, thanks a lot, Rachel. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I've I've actually learned, I've been inspired a lot by your writing. Well, maybe we'll get up to that. Just it's elegance and ease. And so I remember reading earlier drafts of your own work and be like, wow, that's a great way to write. So I'm glad to be here to be able to talk about the subject.
So, yes, I was at an institution. I remember when I graduated college, from Berkeley, one of my mentors said, look, Ellie, I'm really happy for you that you got this job at Yale, but to be honest with you, I really don't envy you. It's gonna be hard the next few years. And so while it's terrific that you got that job, this isn't gonna be easy. And at that time, Yale required unofficially, required two books for tenure. It subsequently has, I think, changed that rule or it's become less because the tenure clock itself is different. But that was somewhat the expectation. Although there are some cases that are somewhat different, but that's the basic expectation, at least at a place like Yale.
And for me to be able to do that, it really required that time in my life. I'm not sure how I would have done it had I been married, I'm not sure how I would have done it had I had children. And that is, you know, that speaks to the problems of the tenure system itself. But let me be clear, I'm really not sure I could have pulled it off. And to the point that, you know, at one point I had some colleagues who, you know, had moved to New York City. I was living in New Haven and I had just calculated the amount of time it would take for me to write. And I didn't think I could pull that off. And so I lived there. really on campus and pretty close to the library and a lot of my time was spent in those years writing and the pressure of the second book loomed large but I was able to do it and I was able to do it because I baked in a lot of time and I baked in a lot of I say focus on my research and tried to avoid taking on assignments that would have sidetracked me at that point but most importantly this is what I I want to get to that I think is a general idea for everybody trying to write a second book.
The hardest thing for me about writing a second book is simply realizing all of the support system that you had for the first book doesn't exist anymore. Most of us who write first books, most of the time it's based on our dissertations, which were the product oftentimes of seminars, of years of revisions from advisors and professors and teachers, sometimes even starting with college papers. And you've had over 10 years, sometimes 15 years, of people giving you feedback, mentors, professors, other writers who've done this before trying to show you what to do. The second book, there's nobody being paid. to help you in that process. And so what I soon realized is something you actually have to realize while you're writing your first book, and that is you need a team.
And your team, and this is not to be overlooked at any point, you need friends. You need friends. They don't have to be even academics, but they have to be friends who are willing to read and give you feedback on how does this sound? Do I understand this? Does this grip me? Does this move me? And if you have that kind of support system and being able to develop that kind of support system is critical. It's absolutely critical, first of all, to your own emotional and social well-being all those years. But it's actually professionally the biggest asset you can have because on that second book, you're going to need people who are already invested in you who aren't getting paid to do that kind of critical feedback.
I really appreciate your saying that, Ellie. You and I have talked about this before, but it did make me realize how I hadn't heard a senior professor put that into words like that, but how it's one of these unspoken truths. You need to have people who are willing to read chapters and maybe even a whole book manuscript. And that is a huge ask. And it depends on really good friends, as you say. I'm curious, was there a turning point or something that that made that truth kind of click for you? How did you realize that?
I'm a constant redrafter. Some people, you know, they're blessed. Some people are really trained well from the start to just write great paragraphs or to be able to get it all mapped out in their mind and somehow it appears. There are a few of us who are blessed that way. I'm not one of them. And so I've always relied on great critical feedback and being able to get that, think there was one really big turning point in my life as a writer. It was a very, very humbling experience, but that made me realize that not on a social level, but just in terms of feedback from whoever, you know, from whoever you could get it from.
I remember I was at Yeshiva College as an undergrad, and I wasn't entering into college, I wasn't a strong student, and I was a poor writer. And I would take advantage going to the writing workshop, where they would have this writing center at Yeshiva. And I would sit there, and I'd bring my papers and get feedback. And I remember one time being in there, and the person who was reading my paper was a senior. And he was a Russian immigrant. And he was speaking to me in English with a Russian accent. And he was giving me this fantastic feedback, just really terrific, correcting this, adding that, asking me to explain here, just giving me incredible tips and showing me how to write.
And I said to myself, my God, you know, like you got to be open to everyone. Here this person is coming from that place. He's got something to teach me on this. Wow. You know, like my writing can be improved by anybody who is is smart and intelligent. And you have to be open to letting that process happen with people and not being scared of where we go. Now, over time, I came to also learn that you don't want to just give out your writing to anybody because that can also be dangerous, right? You give it to somebody who's looking to just hurt you or to destroy your work and not asking the question, OK, how can I build this back better? you could put yourself in a very vulnerable situation and an unproductive one.
So figuring out who's going to be critical and helpful at the same time, looking out for your best interest, identifying that socially and knowing that even in your life and in your work life, that's, you know, to me, understanding that balance was really critical in terms of being able to get a better sense of what my team was and how do I go about writing a book or writing an article or writing something that I feel great about.
Yeah, I had those kind of experiences too. In grad school, I remember I would often send chapters actually to my dad, who is not an academic. I mean, he taught in med school for a while, but as just a physician, he was someone who was interested in reading interesting things. And he I guess I realized how I started to feel better, more excited about my own writing, that there was someone who was always eager to read it and had feedback and could tell me what was clear and what parts were really fun and interesting to read and where it got kind of dry or confusing. I felt that internally, that this was kind of pushing me to move along instead of feeling like no one cares about what I'm writing.
Right. And it's a great, you know, professors will tell you, your mentors will tell you, to always ask your parents. And that's a great piece of advice. But I would take it even further, you know. And that's a very good test for the legibility of what it is you're working on. So I know those moments, too. I did them with my parents. I did it with mine as well.
I wonder what form you are sharing with your team took in these, you know, in writing the first two books. Did you guys meet? I mean, this was before we all used to meet on Zoom or did you exchange pieces of writing over email and sometimes talk about them on the phone or just email notes? How did it look?
It's a whole, I got a whole system in my mind. No, the team is just in my mind. It doesn't actually, they never actually get together except for maybe a dinner or a party I'll have at my house, but they exist in my mind. And there's about three or four different tiers that I work up for. So I have a certain tier of academic friends that don't get to read until my just smart, regular friends do read. And I build up from my smart, regular friends up to my academic colleagues that I trust.
And so the first readers will be those who are most distant from the material, but that I know have a good eye and that can understand, try to figure out narrative and flow, make sure my thesis is coming through, that are invested in being able to hear my voice. People who are really just invested in you as a person and knowing that they believe in that you have something to say. And those people are usually my first readers, and I move my way on from there to people with more specialized knowledge, that by the time I get into their hands, I'm not wasting their time.
So I don't need another professor, you know, of modern Jewish history to tell me, you know, this paragraph should be flipped to that, or, you know, this stuff is lame, or it's... It doesn't carry through. I got other people do that. I want them to be able to say, okay, Ellie, you can make your argument bigger this way. Let's, you know, did you think about being in dialogue with this field or that field to push the argument forward? So by the time I go through a fourth or fifth redrafting, I'll finally get it into their hands. But the first two or three redrafts rarely do I, do I have academics read? On occasion I do, but rarely.
Yeah, that order makes a lot of sense to me too. And in terms of how you did it during these kind of first seven years, I mean, it sounds like you organized your life so that there was a real minimum of distractions. You even lived close to the library. You weren't sort of married with children at that point. And then how did things change after tenure, since that's sort of our focus here in terms of the writing?
I think for me, some of it was a natural extension. First of all, you have to ask yourself, do you want to write anymore? First thing anybody should say, like, maybe that's not what I want to do. I have a degree of security. I have health care. You know, I have an office. If I have to, I can sleep in, you know, like, You're safe. So the first question is you have to ask yourself, do you want to write?
And there's a lot of other things to do. We don't get tenure because of anything we will do. We get tenure because of what we've done. And it's important to remember that. It's very hard, I find, but that's why we get tenure. So you might want to become a great teacher. You might want to express yourself in different ways. You might want to go off and do administration work. All those things are a very important part of academic life and should not be foo-fooed at all. So the first question is, do you want to write books?
And if you do, I think the next question to ask yourself or the next most simple or logical question that one asks themselves, and certainly for me, I was asking myself, is, okay, how far can I push my theses? Ones that I've worked on, how far can I push them? How broad do they apply? And what would it mean to flatten them out? Those theses that I've spent all that time and work on through archives, whatever it is that you're using as your data set, to flatten that thesis out and see how far I could push it.
So a lot of people have a real misconception about the second and third book that might become more popular. A lot of people think, oh, this person is like selling out. Or like popular means like now they write something like, you know, light. And that's a total misunderstanding of what most academics do. You don't start from scratch. You're not like, okay, now I'm going to go write about Taylor Swift. I don't know Taylor Swift. Maybe you can, Rachel. You're an American. I don't know. But like I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that. It doesn't mean like, okay, now I'm just going to go write about what's popular in the news because I have a PhD. No, I don't have the ability to do that.
What it means is I have a thesis. I have a set of theses that I developed in my earlier work based on a ton of archival research. Now, if I flatten that out and pick an idiom that allows those theses to be communicated in broader settings to see it, How far does that thesis applies? And how far can it penetrate in a certain market of readers? That's what a good academic third book is about, or can be about, right? Can be.
Another great academic book is, you know what? I don't need a market. I'm already bought by the university. Let me go deeper into my subfield and do a lot of dirty work for future scholars. I think both are very valuable routes. I decided to probably go a more popular route now with my third book because I wanted to figure out a way, how can I communicate some of the ideas that I've had in my earlier works through an idiom that is most accessible? Because my first books, the idiom was much harder for people to be able to access for some of the ideas that I was expressing.
Here I was talking about modernity, And oftentimes telling readers that they have to read rabbinic texts, which just, you know, at face value is just a big ask and a big leap for people who are modernists. And what I realized was as far as I could push it, I did, but I felt, okay, maybe there were other parts of that thesis and I flattened it out, which was certain political profile of Jews in the modern period, certain political trends, Jews in the modern period, that perhaps I could flatten out that thesis and then go with a topic or a subject matter that was more accessible to people, which is why I'm now writing a book on Jews and the global right from 1977 to the press.
So, you know, what does that have to do with the Vilna Gaon? Or what does that have to do with Jewish materialism? But to me, it was a natural extension of those works and thinking through them.
Yeah, one of the things you just said that was so interesting is that academic might actually go back to earlier work. I don't know if all of our listeners realize that that is a way of thinking about the second or third book that you'd kind of dig into or get material from your earlier work. We're sort of used to the idea sometimes you have to keep on moving on to some new topic, but you're talking to us about actually Looking back at the archive of our own work for ideas, inspiration, actually material and data to use for these future books.
I go further, Rachel. It's like you can use all the data and now you could just put it in your own words. You don't have to show anything anymore. You could just stick a footnote, see this. So you can make whatever statements you can offer those books. then just cite your foot and cite it in the footnote if somebody wants an explanation for how you came to that position. All the dirty work is done, and now you can just communicate with people. You don't have to do that deep exegetical work, whether it's counting all those numbers of people or whether it's a hard read of a difficult text. All that's already done, and you can just take that thesis, and allow it to be aerodynamic, you know, allow it to move.
About that process of just writing it, that is something that is difficult for a lot of academics, or it sounds like it's not writing the way we write for journal articles. Or maybe it was easy for you, but how did you figure out this other way that you were going to write for a more popular book?
I don't know. I mean, how did I figure out that way? I figure it out every day. I kind of... I write and think at the same time. So I'm not a writer that... You know, I have a soft... I start with a soft thesis to be able to get something on paper, which is a topic and a position on the topic. And I allow my research and my writing to sharpen that thesis and to make it more specific. If I didn't start with some... kind of soft thesis, I would never get going.
And so, you know, I started with a soft thesis for this book. Hey, I'll give you an example. I wrote a book called Jewish Materials about the rise of Jews and socialism, communism, capitalism. And I realized, you know, at some point was that broke down. You know, that stopped. It was the same way I came to the Jewish materialism book. I was writing about the Vilna Goan. I thought I was going to write about traditionalism. I hit my research in the 1870s. And just literally the floor fell out. And no one was talking about text. No one was talking about studying. No one was talking about learning. No one was talking about prayer. They were talking about land, labor, bodies. And I realized, whoa, okay, we're in a different space.
And so I start with a soft thesis. Same thing happened in 1977 for me when Menachem Begin was elected. Wow, that whole age of Jews in the left, something has happened. That's changed. And so let's start. Let's start writing about that trajectory about Jews turn or begin to embrace more right-wing parties. Now, the further I go in my research, as I research and as I write, that I begin to learn things as I'm doing. But the most important thing for me is getting stuff down on paper. For me, it's really just getting stuff down on paper and then letting my mind and letting the process just develop and eventually something happens. something good will come out of it. And that's where the feedback, it's important to have a good feedback loop going on so that it's dialectic and your work gets pushed, pushed forward over time. So, I mean, that's for me, at least do you do i mean what do you start yeah you're thinking?
Right, no, I, I, similar in terms of writing. And when you say soft thesis, is this a thesis that can be molded as you write? Is that you mean that it it will yeah uh-huh yeah that's Like, okay, Jews in 1977 begin to shift towards the right. Okay, what does that mean? Why? What happened to the right? What happened to the left? What happened to Jews? I don't really know. Like that I'm going to figure out. But I have enough indicators and markers that something happened. I look at the voting patterns in England. I look at the voting patterns in Australia. I look at the voting patterns in Israel. I'm saying to myself, whoa, something happened here. You know, something's changed from the 70s on. All right. Now, where do we go? And so that's my soft thesis.
I mean, maybe that's a big thesis, but to me, it's not chiseled. It's not. It doesn't have. OK, it doesn't explain that that much yet. It's just kind of positive. I think the Jews moved to the right from 1977 on. OK, well, what about American Jewry? Do they go to the right? What happened? So all those kinds of things begin to unfold as I continue to research the subject. But getting it down first, that's what I want to work on, for me is very helpful. Otherwise, it becomes debilitating just the collecting of materials and the collecting of data. I don't know where to put it.
Yeah, no, that's a process I relate to that. For you, I remember there was, I think, a pretty popular popular op-ed or an op-ed you wrote in a more popular site about orthodoxy in the age of Trump. Was this a piece that came before or during the book, or how did it help you in the writing of this popular book process?
Yeah, you know, I've always written op-eds. I mean, for me, before I get up to that, and maybe it even has something to do with that, when I would tell people, I tell my students this all the time. bother writing their dissertation. When I was working on my dissertation, I was reading The New Yorker all the time. And I also enjoyed reading Harold Bloom. And those were inspiring ways. Those forms helped inspire me to write in certain kinds of ways. And I always tell my students, read The New Yorker. Read The New Yorker. And what I loved about Bloom was just how Bold, he was as a writer. Just so bold. And you make these statements like, oh my God, I can't believe you just said that. You're an academic. But he would make them, and they'd be very very like very powerful and you'd be able to take them in you'd remember things from them and me that was really impressive.
I also, you know same same the same time I came from a background, I originally was a rabbi. Because I was a rabbi, What that did to me was I was acutely aware about communication. You know, if you're giving a sermon and there's nothing else going on in the synagogue and people's eyes are not on you, it's like, what are you doing wrong? So you know a lot of times when you're not being an effective communicator. At least you try to pay attention to it. And so I was acutely aware of it.
So those things... Writing op-eds, I was doing that while I was a rabbi also. Before I was an academic, I was writing op-eds all the time, and they used to come much more easily. Much more easily. When I walked into my first job, I was able to write op-eds. I got an op-ed published in the New York Times. I could publish an op-ed anywhere. My writing got hurt over the years of op-ed writing for my academic writing. Wow. Yeah. I mean, really. It used to be so easy for me to write one. Now it's a lot harder.
But what that op-ed was, and I'm not convinced that it's my model. That was in between, what I liked about it was it was in between both books, in between my Jewish materialism book and the one I'm working on right now on Jews on the Right. And what it did was it kind of let people know I was switching topics a bit. But if you look at the piece carefully, you'll see, Yes, I'm talking about Trump, but, like, this is my valley. I'm talking about orthodoxy. I'm talking about religion. I'm talking about religious radicalism. These are subjects that I have expertise. And I remember somebody saying to me early on when I was, you know, after I'd written my first book on the Villanueva and I'm trying to write popular again, they're like, Ellie, you don't go back to just writing popular stuff. You should be referencing and using your base of knowledge, your expertise on any given subject. And that's going to be the easiest, most professional and way that you can control the subject matter that you're talking about.
It should reflect what it is that you actually really know and have expertise in. And so that op-ed, yes, it's on a You know, what is 1870s for the villain to go and have to do with Donald Trump? But, you know, a lot of us as academics, that's one thing we forget is our expertise can be deployed and can be put into other contexts if we just take a little bit of time to understand other spaces, intellectual spaces, and begin to think, how would I deploy my knowledge in that space? And to me, that's what that op-ed was, or kind of long form essay article, was realizing that I could deploy my knowledge to spaces that I hadn't fully yet had done and in spaces that more broader audience was interested in.
How did you then know that this topic of Jews and the right was a book or was a book that could sell to trade? What kind of feedback or from whom made you kind of believe in that?
I don't know. By that, I mean, I don't think I ever, I thought to myself, I don't want to say, I thought to myself, how could I communicate to, I never thought about his trade that way. I thought first and foremost, like, how can I communicate this to a broader audience? Like, that's what I was thinking. How do I communicate some of these things to a broader audience on a subject that I want to further explore?
I got lucky. After I wrote that piece, a few different agents contacted me. After I wrote that piece, that tablet piece on orthodoxy and Trump, a few different agents contacted me. There was a couple actually. And one of them just really believed in me and kept talking to me over the years. And was like, I think you got a book in you on this. And I, you know, at that time I was doing, I was getting married, kids, all this. And I just realized at some point, okay, I think I can do this. And I contacted him again and, Andrew Stewart. And Andrew represents a lot of different people. He represents some right-wingers, some left-wingers, some academics, some popular people. He's a big and diverse portfolio. And we hit it off. And he's been a great, thus far, it's been a great experience.
And also, I have, you know, I've been very lucky. Yale Press is not associated with Yale University. But I have an amazing editor at Yale Press who has just believed in me from day one. And I will say as an advantage, it's Jennifer Banks. And her expertise is not Jewish history. And she does not come out of that background in any way, shape, or form. She's just a great editor. And having that person as an editor, having someone like Jennifer as an editor, that forces me from day one. doing inside Baseball.
And when you write, people forget when we write to an editor to pitch a book, the editor is got different questions in their mind than your reviewers are going to have. The editor is a different human being. It's got a different job, different set of interests. And you can't just think, oh, I'm going to sell this to them no Their whole job is to snuff out somebody just selling something that's not true to me. So you have to really respect the position that they are in and be honest and upfront with what it is that you want.
There's certain editors in certain situations. When I went to write my third book, one press said to me that they wanted to send out, because we pitched it broadly to a number of different presses, popular and academic. One editor said, that they wanted to send it to reviewers because they were in academic press and they still need to send it to reviewers at this point. And I said to them, you could send it to whoever you would like to. I will be very honest with you. Right now, in this process, that's probably not going to end up working for me because I'm not interested in an academic review at this point. Right now, my first and foremost question is not do I have the – academic chops to write my third book.
What's on my mind is, should this be a popular book? Should this be an academic book? And that's a call I want an editor to make at that moment. Do they believe in it? Do they think I could sell 10,000 copies? Or is this, you know, a 500 copy book or a 2,000 copy book? That's the question I wanted to know to be able to move forward. And I remember just telling an editor midway through the process, this is not going to work for me. I'm not interested in this feedback right now. Thank you very much. But that's not what I'm looking for.
And so we really focus largely on the trade presses and, of course, on Yale University Press, which internally has its own review system also and makes sure that things are reviewed. But they go about it in a different way with trade books. So they made it very clear to me right off the bat, this is a trade book. That's how we're treating it. And we're going to go through that kind of review process. And for me, that's what I wanted at this point.
So first, I want to let listeners know that they can go back to listen to episode three, which is with editor Jennifer Banks from Yale University Press. And Ellie, I guess, so you worked with Jennifer for the first two books, and then it ended up working out that that was also the best, or sorry, what happened with So we had a few different places that were interested, but the reason why I went with Jennifer was, and why I ended up going with Yale, was I mean, they gave me enormous flexibility in ways that the other presses were not going to be able to.
And by that I mean, hey, you have to here's the thing about trade presses. A trade press, and what makes Yale a little bit different, and I'm sure there's a couple other outfits like that, academic outfits like that as well, but a trade press has to be able to think, okay, whether or not it's going to happen or not, we at least have to be able to sell the board of the press that this book can sell 25,000 copies. It has to be able to be viable at a bookshop at JFK. Now that's very, very challenging. And I realized I couldn't write that book. At the same time, I wanted, I did think there were, you know, there could be 10,000 intellectuals or smart people all over the world that might be interested in buying this book, but this is not going to sell 40, 50,000 copies to stop it. Just to stop it. It's not.
And what I realized with Yale was they wanted And they were prepared and they had the capacities to not just give me a contract and then the book flops because there's no way it's going to get on that bookshelf at JFK. They're thinking, okay, we have our distributors around the world that we can viably say, okay, there could be 10,000 copies here sold. Yes. And so this is a trade press for us. And we have those outlets to be able to hit the audiences. that this book will make sense for. And so I liked that. And I felt that by pressures, I mean, like, you know, do you have to say this book is against this group or for this group? Do you have to have a very catchy, you know, to be able to make something accessible at a book stand in an airport, things have to catch very fast. There's no time for nuance. You know, it's just the thesis has to be fast and hard and bold and eye-catching.
And at that point in my research, I wasn't prepared to commit in that kind of way to write that type of book. And so Yale, even though I had only done the academic side before, working with the trade side appeared to make the most sense. And financially, they came in at a great place as well.
So was it your sense, and I don't know if your agent helped you figure this out, but that a trade division of a great academic press like Yale could kind of service these types of popular books that are still pretty niche in a way better than the big publishing houses?
Yeah, it can if you understand what you want to write. If you understand what you want to write, you know. I just wasn't, I didn't feel I was capable of writing or interested at this point, capable or interested of writing a book on this topic that could sell to 50,000 people. I'm sure if I was writing a book that was about to say, oh, the Jewish alliance with the global right is the best thing since apple pie, I'm sure I could sell a lot more books. And if I was going to write a book saying the minds of Jews and the global right is the end of Judaism and the end of the world, and this is the greatest heresy that's ever happened to Jews, I'm sure I could also get a big audience for that.
But if you want to write a book that is going to deal with the matter in a sophisticated way and that has a thesis that's unexpected, unexpected, you don't end up playing some kind of media role. If you're not... prepared to play a media role because the roles are set, then you're going off the grid and it's going to be harder to sell that book. It's just that simple. If you've got a subject and a position that you could play a media role, go for it. Go for it. There's nothing, I got no problem with that. That's not selling out. That's great. That's what you believe in. All the power to you. I think that that's amazing.
You know, like I look at Tim Snyder's work. I know that a lot of academics, you know, say whatever they want to say. They, you know, play or hate in my mind. But I look at Tim's works and I'm in awe. You know, and I think it's, you know, whether or not that's what an academic does or shouldn't do, like, he's got his tenure, you know. He's done his whatever book. He's made his mark academically. He wants to live this life and he wants to do this kind of work and he wants to intellectually contribute in this way. Like, all the power to him. And I totally commend that.
I wasn't able to get into that situation with this kind of a book. That's also fine. You just have to recognize that and look for the spaces that are going to then support you in that. One of the great things about tenure is you have a base. You can use that and figure out ways then to maneuver without having to sell, quote unquote, sell out. Go to where people will appreciate your work and be able to use those mediums to be able to get your message out will be far more effective and gratifying in trying to like write a book that you are not actually interested in writing or can't write.
I just, you know, I think in that context, of course, I'm always looking for, I don't know, maybe other people are more, more, more confident off the bat. I always want to hear what people think, especially someone like Jennifer. I had a sense that this would... My agent believed in the book. The hardest thing to do is first to get an agent. If the agent believes in your book, that means probably there's something there. It just was Jennifer said all the right things when I was talking to her about it. And they were very different things than what she had said about anything else that I had written. And they were just this was a totally different beast to her.
And she was just, and she also just knew so much about the subject then. Like she had been publishing books on the right and on the global right. And she was just incredibly versed in the subject itself at this point. And so this was the first time she really, you know, my other two books, she didn't know about the Golden Lagoon or Jewish materialism per se, but this subject she really did know. And she had published, been publishing a number of books on it recently. So just being able to secure her control of the subject matter, understanding the market, and knowing me as a writer were very, very persuasive in that whole bidding process and figuring out where we were going to go with it.
Can you tell us a bit about finding your agent?
Well, he found me. So the question is how to find an agent. I did I was in contact at one point with another agent. I was in contact with a couple agents. Some others reached out to me after I wrote that piece. And some of them were really, like, one of them was really honest, a very, very famous agent. She said to me, she's like, Ellie, this is a book. I'm certain that this is going to be a book. It's just not my book. I'm not interested in this subject matter. And I was like, I get it. I totally, totally get it. I get it. It's not your subject. And that's because a lot of her subject matters are over 50,000 person readerships. And this wasn't her thing. And that makes total sense. I was like, okay. And it didn't determine when I heard that. It made me a little bit more aware of just my limitations at this point. Those are, you know... That's okay. That's, that's what I'm doing in this book. That's okay. You know, I'm not going to, it can't be something I'm not. Yeah.
This reminds me, I think it was maybe back in episode two with Pam Nadel spoke about an agent who said, I don't deal with anyone where it's going to be less than a hundred thousand that I earn on the book. And so that was just an easy way for her to decide for the agent to decide this, this isn't the book for me.
Yeah. I think with her, it wasn't even about the money, this other person. She was just like, this subject is not my subject. And it was like, I get it. It's not everybody's subject. But, you know, something about the numbers and the money, they are indicative of something. It's not just numbers and money. For an academic, it's also, getting back to what I was saying before, it also gets back to, okay, like, how far does your thesis push? How broad is your thesis? Of course, if you're going to write on a pop culture topic, that's different. But if you're writing on something that you have expertise in, it's not just the money. It's not just the amount sold. It also tells you on some level, on some level, not every level, but on some level, how important the work is. Because it shows how far can you push this thesis? How far can you expand it?
I'm not talking about an intro to Judaism. I'm saying a book that takes, you know, somebody's, you know, look at like a popular Jewish academic book. And it was, you know, look at various popular Jewish academic books, I don't know them, that sold, you know, that sold well. And, you know, you'll see that it's not just that they were hitting and, you know, trying to get a certain number or trying to sell out. They were trying to take their thesis and apply it more broadly, even, you know, even someone like simon shama you look at his pbs special, this was in a book, and you look at his own writing, it's all based on shama's own strengths. Like, it's about art. It's about visual culture. It's all of his skill sets, his expertise are there. You deploying that in this context to make it accessible. And so that tells you something about shama's own his own mastery of visual culture and of popular culture and of the arts and culture and his ability to then mobilize that into a compelling narrative that has broad appeal. That's not just him selling out. It's him understanding how to take his theses, how to take his expertise and apply them in a way that is able to communicate his message more broadly.
Yeah. You've talked about reading The New Yorker as one way you might be kind of absorbing this how to write well and more broadly. But do you have other ideas or strategies for listeners about how they can think about writing more broadly?
Just feedback. I don't consider myself to – I consider myself to be a good writer. That's not – and that's what I am. I wouldn't say more or less. I wish my vocabulary – I wish I could develop my vocabulary. I wish I could further develop it. I have my own limitations as a writer. The only thing I could suggest that I do is I just keep writing and keep asking for feedback and not being scared of the process of revision. And so being able to trust that process of revision and in yourself, to me, has been my guide.
Some people are really gifted writers. Writers, like just words, the sentence construction is just, you could tell the person's just, it's not that they're born with it. It's just, they've honed that. That's not where my strength as a writer I find comes from. It comes from that process of redrafting and of thinking about my reader. The one thing I do, and I think a lot of it comes out of, again, maybe having been a rabbi, is I read my papers out loud. to hear what they sound like, whether or not I'm getting bored just listening to it, or whether or not the words have some kind of cadence. And to me, that's very effective. When I'm able to read the draft and feel like there's beat and movement and passion there in the prose, I feel like, okay, I've done something right.
But I'm every day growing with this because I wrote two books on subjects that are very, very, like, obscure for all intents and purposes. And had limited readerships. My first book sold very well for an academic book. But my second book, I don't think did. You know? So I continue to be trying to figure this out as I go. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that that, like, more simple. And also, you know, Rachel, I don't know. Like, really got to kill your ego. Yeah, that's right. Like, there's no showing off, look how much I know. Look at all these texts I can cite. Look at, you know, how many languages. No, like, make it look easy. And I've tried that over time, and I've actually gotten punished. Because I've had academic reviewers, my first book, you know, like me trying to make it look easy with the villain of Ghosn, because it was such, he's such a hard subject. to be able to crack um i was literally working on one of the most obscure writers and terse writers that have ever that have ever written um you know jewish commentary really and um and what i tried to do in that book was make it look as easy and as simple as possible so that it could be accessible and yeah there were a lot of academics who were very annoyed by that They're wondering, oh, did you really learn this? Did you really read that? Did you really, you know, show it off to me? Why didn't you have another 10,000 pages of footnotes to show off how much you know? And that's, you know, it's unfortunate. A lot of academics do that.
But the great, really great writers, the trick is to make it look easy and simple and elegant and being able to put down your ego when you're doing that. I think that's what it means when they say you have to kill your babies. It's not just like, oh, this is special to me. It's like, oh, wow, look what I can create. It's saying like, no, it's not about you. It's about your reader. Get into their head. And if you can get into their head, that's the first step of being a great writer.
Yeah, and in a way you might have already answered this, but one question we are asking all guests is, what is something that you wish you had known earlier about writing or publishing in academia or outside of academia?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's about subject matter. When you're starting out as an academic, you think that you can make an argument on any subject. and the argument should stand and be heard as is. And what I learned over time is that the subject you end up choosing makes a great deal of difference in terms of how much that argument or that thesis will carry. In other words, let's say you're talking about authorship in the Babylonian Talmud. You're talking about authorship in Shakespeare, the place of the author. something like this. When you're talking about Shakespeare, you have built in a massive audience of people that know the subject you're talking about. And so whatever it is you're going to now argue, whatever thesis you're going to have on that subject, it's going to naturally... gain readership, and it's an easier fit. It's a very easy fit because what's literature without Shakespeare in the West? What is literature without Shakespeare?
Now, it doesn't mean the Talmud, of course, is literature. Of course it isn't. But if I were to tell you this book is about Judaism and the Talmud, everyone would say, oh, that's a great data set to make that argument on. Naturally, you know, I get it. So you have all the Jews are going to want to read that because, yes, it's The database here is Talmud, and they're going to say, but to make the argument about authorship, even though the question of authorship is so complicated in the Talmud. It is enormous. We have no idea who wrote the text. It spans every single subject matter. It spans, you know, it's been put together over hundreds of years' process. And so, of course, the issue of authorship is a really complicated and important one. But you're not going to get the same amount of readers and the same academic exposure for an argument about literature and authorship as you would get when you were working on Shakespeare.
For me, that happened, you know, as a modernist, writing on someone like the Villeneuve. Whoa, how did those two things cohere? And so it took me a while to realize if I wanted to make arguments about modernity and about the kinds of major... you know, major touchstones of what constitutes modernity, I also had to grow and develop and think about what kinds of base of information, reference points, idioms, and subject matter I was going to use to make some of those arguments. And that I didn't, you know, you don't have to understand that as a graduate student. And as an academic, you don't have to because we're so subdivided in our fields that nobody would ever say authorship isn't a critical question for those who study the Babylonian Talmud. But what you do learn over time is if you do want to communicate your thesis and let it have influence beyond the subfield that you're in, choosing wisely the subject matter that you want to make an argument from, your data source, your database, becomes increasingly important. I found. That's for me.
The other question we've been asking folks is about if there is any writing habit or practice that is working for you. We're asking guests this partly to make the point that there's no one way and to get a sense of the broad ways academics approach writing and, you know, different things work for different people, but it can be helpful to hear other folks' ideas.
Yeah, I think the real... Of course, there is no one way. For me, I would just say, I think I... I didn't actually enjoy as much as I probably would have putting together a book proposal for this third book. And the reason is because I actually think the best way to go about it is start writing a chapter. Don't try to write a proposal, an intro. Start by writing a chapter and building out from there. On this book, I started more with intro, kind of book overview kind of stuff, more bird's eye view things that would, allow the book to get a contract. And I found that the book was going to be much better actually after I started writing my first chapters. And I believed in it a lot more even actually after I started writing those chapters and got into the meat of it. And for me the the best practice was just, just start getting something down on paper and not being scared and just writing.
And again, Subject matter, choosing the right subject matter is important before that. Yeah, that choice you should think long and hard and read up on. But once you got your subject matter and you got some information, get it down on paper, start writing and get into the process because you don't realize how much you know and how much there is to explain until you do that. And I think getting out ahead and just... Just plunging in has been the best way for me to get my juices going.
That's interesting. I've also usually started with a book proposal or kind of like the introduction to the book, which is almost like a form of the book proposal. And I guess for me, part of what that has done is help kind of convince me or cheer me on that this is a book, that there's a whole big thing here. And that is a question I feel like some of us struggle with when we're thinking of what you mentioned, choosing the subject. Is this enough for a book? Like, does this really work as a book or is this just an article? I don't know how you make that distinction. Oh, wait, but quick question on that. Did you end up rewriting?
Oh, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's... You ended up rewriting the intro. Yeah. I mean, as you describe a soft thesis, these are soft introductions and the book proposal too. I mean, ideally, as they say, it's like a roadmap in your writing, but... you know, I'm one of those people that it really evolves as I write. So it does change a bit usually.
Yeah. I think of course that book proposal gives you confidence. So, and if that's what you need, then of course, that's exactly what you should do. I just found, I found, especially with my second book that I just started writing the chapters. And as I was writing the chapters, it just, started to congeal. I mean, I had a space. The 1870s, you know, I had some space that i was working in and the chapters more just started to congeal. And started to be able to come to come together about midway through two and a half chapters that happened um so i i think you know i i know that there's another way that a I feel like I wasted a lot of time. I feel like I shouldn't have second-guessed myself that much at this point. I can do this.
And yes, buying a second, third book, I think you can trust your gut a little bit. You have a sense of what's an article, what's a book, what's a rich site for analysis. And also, you'll know. You'll know after you write that first chapter. Have I exhausted everything? Or are there three or four other you know, ones to be able to write on these themes. You get a sense by the time you're 40 pages in. True. You know, 35 pages in where you're at on that. So maybe, I think there are, of course, there are different ways of doing it. But maybe by second or third book. If it's about confidence, no, trust yourself on that and get to the meat.
If it's about organization, then of course, if that's how you get organized. you know i'm gonna tell you to go make your life messy uh but in terms of, I think, confidence, that was my point. I think that for a second, third book, like, you can do it. Like, you've done this before. Flex that muscle. Just get those juices going. And get stuff on paper and start chiseling and start defining.
Well, thank you very much ellie um really appreciate your sharing your experiences and your story. And there are so many good insights and tips here for listeners. So I know this will be really useful. I hope. I hope I'll be able to write the third book. It's always a challenge.
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