In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian of the presidency, political culture, and the government, and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her first book, which came out in 2020, was The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. She’s also the co-editor of the book Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and she writes regularly for the public and appears on podcasts and news coverage as an expert on presidential history. Her new book is out now. It’s called Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Listen now to learn about Lindsay’s approach to writing and revising narrative history, why she’s an evangelist for writing groups, and how her revision process was inspired by Taylor Swift.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
- Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture
- Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic
- Lindsay's Substack newsletter, Imperfect Union
- Zotero
- Victoria Aveyard
- Tim Alberta
- Drafting the Past episode with Megan Kate Nelson
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Hey there. Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and I'm thrilled in this episode to welcome a historian I have been a fan of for quite some time, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I am a longtime listener, so this is a very exciting.
Kate Carpenter:
Lindsay is a historian of the presidency, political culture and the government, and she's now the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her first book, which came out in 2020 was The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. She's also the co-editor of the book, Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. She writes regularly for the public and appears on podcasts and news coverage as an expert on presidential history. Her new book is out now, it's called Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. I can tell you that it is fantastic and I was delighted to speak with Lindsay about how it came together, her approach to writing and revising narrative history and more. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I really didn't think of myself as a writer until I was actually holding The Cabinet in my hands. I thought of myself as a storyteller or as someone who was much better at sharing history through speaking and presentations and writing was something I had to do on the side. Partly that was because I really wasn't very good at it. The year that you were supposed to learn grammar basics in elementary school, I had a brand new teacher and I learned no grammar, like no grammar, but because I read so much, I was such a voracious reader that I could tell what a good sentence sounded like and what a bad sentence sounded like. So, I was able to fool every teacher until Tyler Anbinder was my honors thesis advisor my senior year in college. And finally, he was trying to describe something to me about grammar, and I had a blank look on my face and he's like, "Do you know what I'm saying to you?" And I was like, "No, not really." And he is like, "Okay, it's time for you to learn some grammar."
So, I had to really learn the hard way. As an adult, it's much harder to learn sentence construction and grad school is not the ideal time to do it, but nonetheless. So, I think that for me, writing always felt like something I had to overcome. There's that adage that if you put 10,000 hours into something, you become an expert. While I definitely still have always room for improvement, I think right around the time I hit the 10,000 mark, it did really feel like it clicked and all of a sudden, I felt like I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it or at least how to get there. And that was right around the time that I was doing probably copy edits for The Cabinet. So, once I had the book in my hand, I was like, "This feeling is remarkable and I can't get enough of it, and I never want to stop."
Kate Carpenter:
I think you'd be shocked by how many Americans do not know anything about sentence construction. New teacher, teacher or not. I think a lot of us skipped that part.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Sometimes they don't teach sentence construction anymore, but I really just didn't… So much of it was I think instinct Like. I understood roughly what was good and what wasn't, but sometimes you actually genuinely to need to know the rules, and it's not that you always have to follow them. I actually think that an intentional disobeying of the rules are occasionally quite powerful, but you have to know why you're doing it in order for it to work.
Kate Carpenter:
Let's talk about the basics. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I should preface this by saying all of what I'm about to say is going to go out the window because I just started a new job as the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. And my writing schedule is going to be non-existent for the next couple of months while I get my feet under me and do a book tour. And then I have no idea what it's going to look like. So, this is all in the past, but hopefully it is helpful. I write anywhere and everywhere. I like to do my most intensive drafting at home when I have my big monitor in front of me and I can have my sort of archival evidence and all of my other evidence on one side of the screen and my document on the other. But then I love to edit. I love to finalize drafting in coffee shops.
I find plain writing sessions to be extremely helpful because you can't get too distracted and you're stuck in a middle tube, and so it's forced productivity. I think that in our day-to-Day existence, we really have to take any moment we can to get stuff done. So, I'm a big fan of, okay, you have 15 minutes to write a sentence, see what you can come up with. And so, I will write anywhere and everywhere. When I'm on deadline like I was when I was finishing this book, I tend to be more productive in the morning, so I'm definitely a morning writer. I was pushing the bounds of how early I could go and still actually be a functional human being. So, those early morning office hours are really helpful.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize yourself? Are there tools that you use?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I'm the worst. I'm just the worst at this. I am trying to be better. I know so many of your guests say this, and it actually is quite comforting to know that they're not all these glorious robots that are so perfectly organized. I have been using Zotero for this book to document my secondary sources, and I find that to be really useful because even if it's just keeping all of the books that you are referencing or looking at in one place, it makes at the end putting together that bibliography much easier. I did not do that with The Cabinet, and I felt like I had to go back a million times because there were things that I had forgotten about. In terms of primary sources, I just really like Word docs. I know that's so not technical, but I would typically open up a new doc for any new collection.
For example, the Theodore Sedgwick papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society are not digitized, and I had a wonderful scholar go and photograph them for me. And then when I was going through the photographs, I went into the document and I basically had a new section for each folder. So, I tried to keep it well documented there. And I typically do my research collection by collection, so I might look at all of Theodore Sedgwick's papers and then I might look at all of Oliver Wolcott's papers, and then I might look at all of Caleb Gibbs's paper, you name it. I try and go person by person. And then when I'm pulling together a chapter, I tend to write chapter by chapter, I will pull up all of the things and highlight and copy over anything that's relevant in that time period for the chapter into one document.
So, I have one document with all of my notes for that time period, whether it's a month or six months, and usually that document is way too long and there's way too much in there, but it's a good starting point for where you want to be, and I'll go from there. It's not as well organized as it could be. I'm sure that I could have someone streamline the process, but that seems to be how my brain works.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you then like to do all the research before you start writing?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
No, I did that with The Cabinet and I found it to be highly unproductive for me because there's so much about the research process that you don't know you need to look at until you're actually writing, things like what was the weather on any given day or what did a room look like that a meeting was happening in or what did a carriage look like that they were happening to climb into? So, I have found with this book, it was much more productive to do an initial round of research, get some of the big document collections together to figure out what I needed to do to access them to take some photographs. But then I really would go, I would research a chapter and write it and research a chapter and write it. And I found that process to be so much more streamlined, both in terms of how I thought about the writing process, but also, I was not duplicating research.
No matter how perfect the notes I took for The Cabinet, I felt like I had to go back and research a lot of things. So, not duplicating that was really helpful. For me, at least, as I was writing this book, I didn't really zero in on what the argument was until I was probably two thirds of the way through the book. So, writing and researching as I went was really helpful because then you didn't have to go back and redo as much and you could formulate as you were thinking.
Kate Carpenter:
Then what does the revision process look like for you?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I think that I probably have two stages of revision. I know we will talk more about writing groups later, but I'm a big fan of getting feedback early and often. I think that they prevent a lot of mistakes, especially big mistakes from happening. They also confirm your own abilities to evaluate your own work. If I had a gut sense that something was good or bad, having the working group check that for me was really useful. So, I typically will share a chapter a writing group and get their feedback and then incorporate some of that or take very detailed notes and set that aside, but think about those corrections as I was going forward and making sure that the future writing was consistent with the plans that I had for future revisions. Then I would say I had about 80% of the book done when I shared it with a big manuscript workshop, brought in a bunch of scholars to the International Center for Jefferson Studies where I had a yearlong fellowship and they hosted all of these scholars to read the book, which is just the most extraordinary gift and so generous.
So, I had them read about 80% of it, and I actually highly recommend that because I wasn't completely done with it. There was still time to formulate or bring in their ideas to how I was wrapping up the book, but I was far enough along that it wasn't just a loose set of idea, and so they could actually really give constructive feedback. Once I had about 80% of the book, I took in their feedback, I went back and I revised the entire thing and then finished the book and sent that off to peer review, got feedback from the readers and my editor and did another full round of the entire manuscript.
And then there's of course, copy editing. My copy editor that was assigned to me, I think, was having a bad week and didn't really do a whole lot. So, following the Taylor Swift model, I decided that I was going to read the entire manuscript aloud while walking on the treadmill. She apparently prepped for her tour while running and singing her songs. So, I read the entire book to myself aloud while walking on the treadmill, and it was the most amazing editing experience because not only was I catching things, but I was thinking about how the language sounded in addition to how it read. That was really useful and something I will definitely do again.
Kate Carpenter:
Love that. You've been to a few ways that your writing process changed between your first and second books, but did it feel really different to you?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Oh, it felt so different. I think the biggest thing is that the second book I was writing for my myself. Obviously, my editor had to approve it and the press had to approve it, but I picked the subject for myself. I wrote it the way I wanted it. It was up to me. I had originally envisioned it being part Adams, part Jefferson, and I started writing it and I was like, oh, I really don't want to write a part about Jefferson and I dropped it off. Obviously, I had to get press approval for these things, but the approach to it was so different. At least for me, once I had already done it, I had faith that I could do it again. Even when you're in tough moments and anytime you're writing a book, there's a tough moment, I just knew that I could get through it.
So, I think that that concept of writing the book that you want to write just to me was so freeing, and I really wrote it in a narrative structure. I was not putting it argument first. I do think there's an argument, but I was trying to weave it in more gently, which you can't really do when you're writing a book that's a little bit more academically driven. I think the last piece of it was because the timeline was a little bit more crunched, I really wanted this book out in no later than the September before the election because it does have such an important argument about the peaceful transfer of power. But I didn't want it to get swallowed in October that I had to meet certain deadlines.
Maybe I blocked it out like people say when you have kids, you block out the pain of childbirth so that you can do it again. Maybe I blocked out how hard it was to edit The Cabinet, but the final rounds in the revision process for making The Presidency felt really hard. They felt harder than The Cabinet did, and I think maybe it was faster. The book sells so much longer. So that was part of it. At the very end, there was like 24 hours where I was like, "Why do we write books? What is writing a book? What is this?" And I just lost it. It felt harder at the end, but it also felt a lot more fun. And I think that's partly because I was writing for myself and partly because John and Abigail Adams are so much fun to spend time with. It was both more fun and also harder.
Kate Carpenter:
Both of your books were written for university presses. They're both peer reviewed, but they're also really wonderfully engaging books. Obviously, you have an audience in mind outside of academia, and for listeners to know, you're not in a tenure track position, so you're not necessarily totally focused in that realm. How have you thought about these books and where to place them, where to find homes for them?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
With the first one, there's so much about the book publishing industry that you don't know until you realize you don't know it. And it's intentionally opaque by design. I didn't have an agent for the first one, and I just was trying to go with a press that had a trade line that would give me the best chance of getting the book into the hands of as many people as I could. And I wanted to sign with an editor who I felt like got my vision and Harvard was that. That worked out really quite well in terms of conceptualizing the book and understanding where I wanted it to be in the broader world of book publishing. I haven't written these books for historians. I mean, I want historians to take something from them, but they're not written for them. They're written for an educated reader who has questions about where we come from and where these institutions originated and why they're there and want to have a better understanding of our current moment by reading through the past.
With that very clear understanding, Kevin Cruz once said that when he was writing his first book, he thought of his mom and he wanted to make sure that she would understand every sentence. And I thought that was really quite genius because my dad is a great example. He's very well-educated, he's a lawyer. He knows next to nothing about history other than what I've told him has stuck in his head. I knew he would read the book, and so I wanted him to be able to understand everything that I was saying and for it to be compelling for that type of person. That was always how I've conceptualized it. To me, when I'm thinking about the contribution I want to make, it's very rarely in academic terms in terms of historiography, it's much more of a contribution of our current moment and helping people understand something about it.
So, it just so happens that in both cases, the right press happened to be an academic press. I wouldn't be surprised if that was not the case in the future. One of the challenges about publishing is it really depends on the moment, and sometimes presses are really interested in a certain type of thing, and if your book doesn't fit that type of thing at the moment, then you can be in a tough spot. Whereas if it was a year later or year before that, it might have a very different reception. This happened to be the best outcome for the moment, and I'm grateful for it. It was really important to me, however, that it be on a trade line with an academic press both times, both so that the book was accessible in terms of price, but also accessible in terms of would be in a lot of places.
Kate Carpenter:
Was it really important to you that it still be at an academic press, that there'd be a peer review process?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
No, it wasn't because I put in a lot of… And frankly, the peer review processes that I put in place for myself were much more robust and much more rigorous than the actual process. I will continue to do that regardless of how I write because I want the product that I'm producing to be upstanding and to be accurate and as good as I possibly can. In fact, I had wanted to go a pure trade route, but the moment I was selling the book… Basically, to be super blunt, they were only buying books about dead white founders if your name was Joe Ellis or Gordon Wood, which mine is not.
At the time when I was going to market, there just wasn't much of a market for it, and they just felt like it wasn't really a trade book, which is fine. I do very well with a chip on my shoulder and I fully intend to prove them wrong that it is a trade book and there is an audience for it. I think that if I had gone to market a year or two later or even a year before, again, I think it would've had a very different reception. So, do not expect future books to be academic presses, but I could be wrong and we'll see where it goes.
Kate Carpenter:
You've just touched on this, but I want to talk a little bit more about all the public facing work that you do. You have a wonderful Substack, it's so smart, called Imperfect Union. You also write many editorials. As we are talking now, you have just had a particularly wild week of appearing on news media. Why is that sort of public facing work important to you?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I think there's both the selfish internal reasons and then there's the more civic minded public facing reasons. Selfishly writing the book takes a really long time and it's a activity of delayed gratification That's fine and that's good. And being patient, good things take time. But it's nice sometimes to write an 800 word piece and for it to come out two days later and you get that immediate gratification. If you are crafting a brand or a social platform and you're not on the tenure track, even if you are, it's helpful to have your name out there with some regularity. It doesn't have to be monthly, but more frequently than every four years. It's good to remind people that you're there and you have things to say. It's good to keep those muscles flexy. I think of that type of writing, it's obviously different because it's much more short form and you have to be much more succinct, but the way in which I write those things is similar to the way in which I write books.
So, I'm trying to be clear. I'm trying to be precise with my prose. I'm trying to be direct with what I'm saying and vivid in the picture that I'm trying to depict. There are stretches depending on how life looks, that maybe you don't get to write a whole lot for your book. So, keeping that fresh for me is really essential. I also think it's a great way to test out some little ideas. You don't want to do an Atlantic article that has your entire big argument scooping yourself two years before the book. I do not recommend that your press will not be happy with you, but you can take little bits and test them out and see how ideas go, see what hits, see what doesn't. And then there's also this selfish part of if you're trying to build an audience, it's really helpful to access that audience before the book actually comes out.
So, the newsletter is a really great way to maintain that community. They're way more responsive than any form of social media. It's a much more intimate relationship because they're inviting you into their inbox media, whether it be radio or television, is a great way to reach new people to get your name out there. And it does often inspire others to look for you and to learn more about what you're doing or what you have to offer. And then I think in terms of the civic minded piece, I firmly believe that a lot of Americans genuinely want to know more about history and they want to consume good history. They just don't always know where to find it. They might know that if they go to Costco or they go to Target, there are going to be a lot of books there, and they have a sense that they're not necessarily good books or good history books, but they don't know. They don't have a way to evaluate that.
If you look at Amazon and you search for history about the Civil War, you're going to get some good stuff, but you're also going to get some things that are written by hacks. So, I think if it's really incumbent upon us if we want to reach those audiences, and not everyone has to, I don't think that all historians should feel like they have to speak to that public audience. But if you want to, I think it's important to try and meet them where they are. Sometimes that's going to be on podcasts or on television or on radio or op-eds, wherever it is, but try and help them find you because they want to. They just don't always know where to go.
Kate Carpenter:
I'm switching gears a little bit here, but you mentioned that for your first book you didn't have an agent, and I knew for this one you did. And in the acknowledgments, you had some really nice credit to your agent about the role she played in fleshing out this book idea. Can you tell me a little bit more about what it was like working with an agent for this book?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Yeah. As part of my comment about the book publishing being opaque, when I was writing up my proposal for the first book, I had no idea what I was doing. They sent me a couple of examples and I sort of pulled something together, but I think that the editor had pretty much already decided that she was going to sign the book, and so it didn't really matter what I said as long as it was somewhat competent English. I just had no idea what a second book proposal looked like. And especially because this book we did take out to a trade presses, it needed to look different, it needed to say different things, it needed to convey different information, and a lot of that I just didn't have yet. I knew roughly that I wanted to write about John Adams and the presidency because I was fascinated by what came after Washington and how did this institution morph and evolve to accommodate people that were not him and what worked and what didn't.
But I didn't really latch onto the argument until after January 6th when the transition piece crystallized for me and I understood what was the contribution both that he made and that I wanted to make. She waded through some really rough drafts with me when I was wading through my own thoughts, trying to figure out what is it that I want to say? She waded through drafts that included the Jefferson piece that I eventually dropped because it wasn't really making sense. She talked me through it and asked questions, and it was really valuable to get her insight. And I also shared those with some of my writing groups as well. But giving someone patience and time to figure some of that out, especially when they've never done it for the trade type of book before, was really an incredible gift. She never rushed me or made me feel like I was ridiculous for not yet knowing what I wanted to say. So, I think that that process, especially for first time trade author was really essential.
Kate Carpenter:
To take a closer look at the book that resulted from this work, I asked Lindsay to read an excerpt from Making the Presidency for us Lindsay Chervinsky reading from the introduction to Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic
Lindsay Chervinsky:
"On March 21st, 1797, John Adams walked two blocks from his lodgings at Francis Hotel to the President's house on the corner of Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. A few minutes later, his carriage in the cart with his possessions pulled into the courtyard beside the large brick mansion. The second President of the United States walk through the door of his new home and into a terrible mess. Adams wandered through the rooms inspecting the state of the house with sinking dismay. The green, floral carpets under his feet were threadbare and fraying at the edges. The paint on the walls was flaking off. The mantles were darkened from smoke and soot and the tables were scratched. Adams felt the draperies on the windows, which were faded from the sun and hanging in tatters. He opened the cabinets in the servant's hall and in the kitchen, only a few pieces of chipped China cracked crystal and dented cookware remained.
He walked up the staircase to the second floor where he found an empty public drawing room, the elegant green upholstered sofas, armchairs and stools that had once filled the reception space had been sold. Red damask upholstered chairs and sofas filled the family drawing room, but not one chair was fit to sit in. Adams continued to the bedrooms where the bolsters were lumpy and the featherbeds required mending. After spending his first night in the house, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, describing the scene, 'Don't expose this picture.' He cautioned. He had taken the oath of office as the second president two weeks earlier, and he knew Americans had enough on their minds. The nation was in disrepair. They didn't need to know the President's house was two."
Kate Carpenter:
Could you just walk me through what goes into creating this passage?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
This is a really great example of how you should never throw away research ever because you never know where it's going to come back. There was a period of time that I thought I was going to do a virtual project of recreating the President's house in Philadelphia. I had toyed around with that towards the end of my dissertation and as part of my postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Presidential History. And we did do some work in recreating it, especially images of the outside and images of the president's study. But for a lot of career reasons, I never really got the entire project off the ground. For a moment I thought, oh, well that's unfortunate that a lot of the research in putting the house together, figuring out what was there had gone to waste. And then it turns out that it came back in a new way because much of the research had been done through trying to figure out what Washington had in the house by looking at the Bills of sale when he was leaving.
And when he was leaving, he described the details and the quality of a lot of the pieces and what was fit for sale and what was not, and what he offered to Adams and what Adams kept and what he did not and what they sold at public auction and what Washington took back to Mount Vernon. This is an example of where man am I so grateful that Washington was such a control freak because the details are really quite exquisite about what was his and what belonged to the public house and what belonged to the government of the United States. Adams can always be counted on for honesty when he's writing to Abigail. So, he described the scene in walking into the house and how it was such a disaster. It's not really clear who was supposed to be doing some of the cleanup in between, but whoever was in charge, the ball was definitely dropped. It was supposed to be repainted, it was supposed to be reupholstered in some places and it was not. So, he was frantic with trying to figure out some of the furniture and how to fix the house.
And he sends her these letters, which are some of my favorite, just pleading with her to come to Philadelphia early because he needs her. He cannot possibly figure this out and be president at the same time. The letters are pathetic and he knows they're pathetic. He says don't laugh at me because he's being so pitiful. At one point he says things like, what about me? What about my feelings? He's just being so absurd. And then at the end he literally writes, don't laugh. This is an example of it was piecing together the Washington side, the Adams side, also looking at the grant of new funds that Congress did pass for him to make some of the changes and make some of the new purchases. But it's also one of my favorite things to do to rebuild a physical space. I think it tells us so much about their lived experience, and it's really impossible to see them as 3D figures if we can't actually see the space they're in. So, it's some of the work that I like doing the most.
Kate Carpenter:
Okay. I debated a lot which passage to have you read here because there are so many good ones, but I ultimately settled on that on this, which are the very first words in the book, because I wanted to know… There are a lot of options, I have to imagine, for where you start a book on Adams's presidency. Do you start with Washington leaving? Do you start with the inauguration? There are lots of things. And you chose this scene, and so I wanted to know what was the thinking behind where you opted to start?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
That's a great question, and it was not a decision that came easily. I did mess around with a lot of those options. I messed around with the farewell address, but that I felt like centered Washington too much. And I didn't want it to just start the book in such a Washington centric way. I thought about the inauguration, but I felt like the inauguration needed some buildup to get to in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the moment or at least how serious they took that moment. I had this scene written, and it was placed later in the book after Adams inauguration when he's actually moving in. In that place, it gets lost because it's just the beginning of any old chapter. And this was a suggestion as I was talking through a lot of the ideas about the big themes in the book at my manuscript workshop. One of the people present said that that would be a really great scene because it is the perfect parallel for what Adams was walking into was this mess.
And he knew he was walking into a mess as the presidency, but he was also walking into a physical mess. I was like, "Oh, that's so genius." I do not deserve any of the credit. It was totally the scholars at the manuscript workshop. And then I fleshed it out to make it a little bit more of a scene because it had been shorter and smaller when it was the beginning of a chapter. But I liked it because it brings his personality into it. It brings Abigail into it right away, which I wanted to have. And it centers a lot of the challenges that he was facing from the very beginning. And I think it's, for me at least, it's very important to start a book in an evocative way. So, you are not coming at the reader right away with the argument, but instead you're giving them a picture of what they're going to be experiencing.
Kate Carpenter:
I have to imagine that one of the hard things about writing about presidents, especially these presidents, is that there is not a dearth of things written about them. You are not in the position of writing the, quote, unquote, untold history of blah, blah, blah. And yet the book feels so fresh and so compelling to read. How do you approach that? How do you make sure it feels fresh and not something we already know?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that very much. There is both the benefit of not only having all the scholarship that's come before you, but also all the sources. I am not one of those scholars who is trying to pull a story out of 10 letters. I'm pulling the story out of a hundred thousand letters, which is pros and cons to both of those challenges. For me, it wasn't so much of finding a new idea because as I said, January 6th was really pivotal in opening this book to me and opening John Adams to me, I realized how much I had been taking the peaceful transfer of power for granted. I hadn't factored in how essential it was for civilian participation to uphold those norms and customs. I started to think about, okay, well where did they come from? I know we always talk about the, quote, unquote, revolution of 1800 is one of Jefferson's all-time greatest hits of propaganda, but where did it actually come from?
What were the practices that went into place? And when I started looking into it, all of a sudden, these very small details popped out at me that I wasn't seeing covered in a lot of the great biographies of John Adams. And on one hand, that's because when you write a biography and if it's a one volume biography, and as a life as well lived as John Adams, you have to make choices, especially if your book is not going to be 3000 words. It's one thing if you're writing a Robert Caro biography, then you don't have to make choices. But if you're trying to do it in one volume, you have to leave things out. So, most scholars, even the very best ones, have chosen to give relatively short shrift to the presidency because they really viewed it as John Adams low moment. I think that that's easy to do unless you're looking for that peaceful transfer of power and you're looking at the presidency and trying to figure out how did he make sure that this institution survived after Washington.
I honestly think that much of history is written based on the questions we ask and what we're looking for. And this is true of whether or not you're trying to read History across the Green to bring out Black women and people who don't leave much of a written record, or you're trying to understand someone from a new angle. I think with John Adams, because all of those great biographies had been written before January 6th, those scholars were not looking for those questions. So, the piece that I felt like was new and important and fresh was relatively easy to come by. The part where I occasionally, it would keep me up at night is trying to write about the same subject as David McCullough or John Furling and have your writing be compared to them is a little bit daunting. There are a lot of Pulitzer prizes involved there.
That was the part that I think occasionally was nerve wracking. And so, what I really tried to do actually was not to dig into their work too much. I actually preferred to lean on Adams's books that were less well known because I didn't want the way I was describing things to be colored or shaped by the language that David McCullough was using. I have not watched the John Adams HBO miniseries since it first came out because I didn't want it to color how I was picturing things, how I was describing things. Hopefully, it will feel fresh and it will feel authentically me, and if it gets close to their level of prose, then I will be very grateful for that.
Kate Carpenter:
I told you this ahead of time, but I felt like this was a page turner while I was reading this, and I also felt like that was downright silly because I was like, how is it that I'm staying up too late wanting to know what happens next in the John Adams presidency? How did you structure the narrative to really keep that feeling of propelling me forward as a reader?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Oh, thank you so much. I'm so glad. I recorded the audiobook of this book as well, which was such a fun and intense experience. When I was working with the producer, we ended sort of on a cliffhanger one day and he's like, "Wait, I need to know if he fires Pickering. It's really important." So, I think that in terms of structure, one of the things that I tried to do was let the dramatic moments breathe. There are a lot of them, and this is where short chapters are your friend, because it allows you to have a dramatic arc in each chapter and not squish too many. If you have a long chapter, you're going to cover a lot of big moments and they're not going to get, I think, the space and the time and the consideration they deserve. So, I am adamant that all historians should embrace shorter chapters. It is your friend, it does a lot of good work for you.
And then also, a recognition that not all days, not all weeks, not all months, deserve the same amount of time. Sometimes there are weeks where not a whole lot happens, and that's okay. You're not writing a diary, you're not writing a TikTok of a presidency, you're trying to let the big moments come through. And that was roughly how I tried to structure it such that there were these crescendos in each, roughly, quarter and there were crescendos within each chapter. When I was ending things, it was clear that there was a reason I was ending it, and then there was a reason I was starting in the next place. I'm really glad that worked though because it's one of the best things about writing narrative history, but it's also really hard to get right.
Kate Carpenter:
It's fantastic though. I want to take notes as you're talking. This is such good advice. Okay. You mentioned earlier how much you love your writing groups. You even call yourself a writing group evangelist, which I love. Tell me, I get a lot of questions from listeners who want to know how do people's writing groups work. Could you tell me that a little bit and why it's important to you?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Yes. I have two writing groups. One are scholars that primarily work in the same time field, so it's what we call an early government writing group where they're roughly writing about the early American period and broadly conceived and roughly writing about government institutions, broadly conceived. That was really useful to me because that is sort of like a peer review of they're going to know if I get some of the facts wrong. They're going to know if I'm missing a critical source. They're going to know if the argument is not as strong as it could be in a really substantive sort of way as opposed to a structural way. They're also a great person to bounce ideas off of in terms of the people and the places and how could I move things around and how could I use different events?
Both of my groups meet once a month. We roughly go in cycles, so every person goes once a month and we cycle through, but if one person has an upcoming deadline and they have a lot of things that they want to share, I haven't shared anything in a little while because with the new job and the book tour, I am not writing and that's totally fine. I know that my time will come back around when I am sharing a lot of things and it just works out in the wash. Typically, we usually share a chapter. We've also done journal articles, we've done book proposals, but the idea is that you're sharing writing that you want feedback on. We submit it ahead of time. This group schedules out our meetings roughly for a semester because people have busy schedules. That's how one group works.
The second group are much more topically and chronologically diverse, although they're all roughly American historians with different subspecialties, but they all write for public audiences. This is more of my prose argument, substantive, structurally your style type of group. They will tell you if it is not reading well and they can be vicious in the very best of way. I want that type of constructive feedback if it's not working. I have shared book projects with them and they've been like, "No, that does not work for me." And I'm like, "All right, we'll try something new." That also meets once a month. Same thing, we roughly cycle through, but as different people have manuscripts that are due, sometimes we even had someone go two months in a row if it makes sense for what we're doing. Usually, we share one chapter there as well, although depending on… Some people like longer chapters, some people like shorter chapters. You've had both of those writers on the podcast.
If it's a shorter chapter writer, we'll do multiple chapters occasionally. Again, they submit it ahead of time. That one we schedule at the end of each meeting, we look forward and find the next date that works for us. There usually about an hour, hour and a half, and we talk through the piece. We usually give updates at the very beginning of how everyone's doing, what they've been working on. It's really nice to have that accountability to just share some of your wins and losses as it may be, to do a little celebration if someone's had big news. I just think that the accountability of it, the deadlines of it are so essential. But also, like I said earlier, they have stopped me before I've made big mistakes so many times where I've gone down weird rabbit holes or my structure is wrong, or I have way too many flashbacks too soon and too fast, and they've made me a much better writer. So, I highly recommend not being precious with your writing, being willing to get feedback. I think it makes a world of difference.
Kate Carpenter:
That's a lot of feedback. Do you ever struggle with what do you incorporate and what do you set aside because it's not your vision?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Yes, absolutely. I think that you have to have a very clear sense of what you want to do. And I think it helps if you also know where people are coming from. I know some of the writers are going to be more academically inclined and some are going to be more trade inclined, and I can find the balance depending on where I want to be. There's also hilariously in the trade group writing group that I have, there's one person who always disagrees with me and one of the other people. So, there is always that very funny dichotomy going on. If everyone agrees, then you know that that's really a winner of an idea because it's rare to get everyone on board.
I really do think that all of the feedback, you have to just think of it as suggestions and not everything is going to be for you, and not everyone's tone or style of writing is going to be for you. So, it does require a certain amount of comfort in yourself and how you like to do things. But just think of it as like they are giving you love. They are giving you their time and their attention. In a world where those things are in short measure, they're giving you some of it. So, you can take it as you will, but you don't have to if it doesn't work for you.
Kate Carpenter:
What is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I have two things. One, my advisor told me early on that there's no such thing as good writing. There's only good editing. And that very much ties into the second piece, which is that I always thought that writing needed to be this great inspiration. And I think this is when I was really bad at writing and I thought, well, oh, if I could just get the inspiration, then it would be fine, and I'd be able to come up with this brilliant sentence, not really realizing the grind that usually goes behind the really good sentences. When I left my postdoctoral fellowship and I was working in history, I started listening to a lot of writing podcasts, like business writing, podcasts, fiction writing, podcasts, and all of these writers talked about the essentialness of word counts and how they think about their projects in terms of word counts and how they think about their day in terms of how many words they write and writing goals in terms of how many words you write.
That sounds overly structured to some people, but to me, it was completely revolutionary and extraordinarily freeing because by merging that with the, there's no such thing as good writing, there's good only good editing advice, what I realized was I didn't have to write great sentences, I just had to get words on the page and I could turn them into great sentences later. That was very freeing for me. I like a plan, I like a structure. And if you look at a contract that says 100,000 words or 150,000 words, that can be a little daunting. But if you say, okay, I'm going to write 1,000 words today, that is very doable and it gives you something to pat yourself on the back about. You can say, oh, I met this achievement box checked. I really like checking off boxes.
So, giving yourself those little bits, especially when it is such a long process, was so useful and so helpful to me thinking about long-term productivity. It just completely changed the way that I write. Another way to think about it is you got to put your butt in the chair. You can't wait for inspiration. I think that some writing, especially fiction writing and more prose based writing is extraordinary art. But I don't think of my work as art. I think of my writing as work, and I love my work. I'm so grateful that I get to call it that, but I have to sit down and I have to do it. For me, that made it much easier to get through the writing process, not expecting myself to be a genius all the time.
People get very upset when you say writing isn't art. I don't mean that it can't be beautiful and extraordinary, but you're not Monet waiting for to be the perfect image to paint. And even then, Monet put in a lot of hours before he created-
Kate Carpenter:
That's a lot of work.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
He did a lot of things until he got to that right image. So, I think that we almost have an inverse expectation of how the writing is supposed to come. You have to set yourself up for success, and sometimes that means a lot of days where that 1,000 words is going to feel absolutely awful and like a slog, but then the next day it might come really fast. I'm a huge fan of word counts. Highly believe in them. I love them. They're your friends. Deadlines are your friends.
Kate Carpenter:
All right. I want to know who you look to as inspiration. Are there other writers or books or forms of media?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I have three sets. The first is when I am not reading for work, I love trash fiction. I don't mean trash like it should not be valued, but I'm not reading award-winning books here. I'm reading really excellent serial novels with female spies in Victorian England, and they're delightful. And they give me such a wonderful escape from our current moment and also from my work. I've learned actually, a great deal about fiction from reading them, not because I think we put stories together in the same way they get to make stuff up that's in some ways more pressure and also a lot of flexibility and freedom. But when I think about pacing, I've learned a lot of it from fiction because good storytelling is often not as much about the character or the events, but rather about pacing.
It even comes down to, I hope I say her name right, Victoria Aveyard, she wrote the Realm Breaker series. She was describing her process and she was talking about how when she thinks about pacing, it's not just pacing over the course of a chapter or a book, but also on the page. You have to look at the page and think about, am I giving the reader's eye enough white space here to move forward? I've just learned so much from fiction writers about that process, and I think we can carry a lot of that into our own work. There are a lot of non-fiction writers that are so talented. Everything from long form Atlantic articles to a lot of the journalists who are writing really excellent books about contemporary events. What I admire about that work is how precise they are with their words. They very rarely use 10 words when three will do, and yet they're amazing at bringing forth these compelling themes. They're also, sometimes extraordinarily fast at doing it. So, I aspire to that level of clarity and precision and productivity.
People like Tim Alberta, they're just masters of non-fiction writing, and so that is extraordinary. And then the last one is actually a guest that you have had on your podcast. One of my favorite writers is Meghan Kate Nelson. She's also a best friend, but aside from the best friendness, her books and her writing is beautiful. But I have been able to watch her work on this new book, she's in one of my writing groups, called The Westerners, and seeing her put together these characters and put together a story and weave them together, it is such a gift to watch a writer at the peak of their game, do their process behind the scenes, both in terms of how she weaves it together, but then how she edits, how she incorporates feedback, how she goes back and makes it stronger and better. And then getting to talk to her about that process, I just have learned so much. I'm so grateful that I get to see it and I love reading it, and I can't wait for her to share it with the world.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, I normally ask people if they have anything there working on that they want to talk about. I always feel bad asking that when someone has a book just coming out, and in your case when you have a huge book just coming out and a huge job that you've just started, it feels extra unfair. I think this is how I want to phrase it instead, because it's what I'm really curious about is, for one, I guess just do you hope to write another book is the first question, but how will you think about what the next project might be?
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Oh, that is such a timely question. It's like you've been living in my brain for the last few months. Yes, there will be future books. I probably won't get anything done for the next… I'm telling myself that it's okay if I don't open the files until December. That is the deadline I'm setting myself, which as someone who loves productivity, it's painful, but I'm going to try. There will definitely be future books. I will continue to write about the presidency. There are two projects that I want to pursue next, and one is a project that I find the argument to be super compelling, but it's a really, really hard book to write and it will take a while. I need to master some new historiographies to write it. One, I think that writing it will be super fun. I'm not quite sure what the compelling argument is yet, although I believe that it should exist. I think writing it will be super fun.
It'll be narrative. It'll be much shorter in terms of the chronological scope. It will be chronologically organized. That's always great when you can just follow the chronology, and it will be much easier to write. It'll also be much faster to write. I am in a current battle of trying to decide which one I'm going to do and all sensible people and all a common sense says I should do the easy one and continue to publish books and write more books. The other one will be waiting for me and not ask myself to take on this impossibly difficult book while I'm starting a new job. I think that is probably what I'm going to do, but it is a puzzle. It is a conundrum.
And then I will have to get into a new rhythm of figuring out how that works with my day job. I do think that I will have time once I get my feet underneath me to work on it, and I will have a lot of research support, which is great, but that's also a new challenge because I haven't done that before. Lots of exciting potential challenges ahead, so a little bit of a stay tuned situation.
Kate Carpenter:
That is very exciting. I think regardless of what you choose, we are probably in for a treat when you get there.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Thank you.
Kate Carpenter:
But please don't kill yourself to do so.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I'll do my best.
Kate Carpenter:
In the meantime, Making the Presidency is wonderful. I think readers are going to love it and just eat it up. I think it could not be more timely. Like you said, spending time with Adams is always good fun, regardless of…
Lindsay Chervinsky:
I think one of the things that Adams… He felt, I think, sometimes like an anathema to his peers, but he's actually shockingly relatable to the 21st century. He's almost like the founder we need in this moment because he was so self-deprecating and so aware of his own flaws and loved his wife, who was just the most incredible intellect. So, he's very relatable for the 21st century, and I hope that people, they will completely see his flaws in this book, but I hope that they will also appreciate what he had to offer.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. Lindsay, Chervinsky, I definitely appreciate what you have to offer. Thank you for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Lindsay Chervinsky:
Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Drafting The Past. For links to all of the books we talked about in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit draftingthepast.com. There, you'll also find past episodes, show merchandise, and more. If you'd like to support the show, you can leave a review on your favorite podcast app, tell a friend about it, or even give financial support at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Thanks for helping me keep this conversation alive and for remembering that friends don't let friends write boring history.
