In this episode, I’m joined by historian and writer Dr. Surekha Davies. Surekha is a former history professor who now writes full-time, and she can also be found speaking about history and consulting on monsters. In fact, monsters have played a major role in much of her research. Her first award-winning book was titled Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters. Her second book, which is aimed at a general audience, is out now; it’s called Humans: A Monstrous History. The book looks at, as she puts it, how people “have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way.” I spoke with Surekha about how she made the switch to full-time writing, her newsletter, Notes from an Everything Historian, and how she organized what could have been an unruly book.
Mentioned in this episode
- Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters, Surekha Davies
- Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies
- Notes from an Everything Historian, Surekha's newsletter, and her post about getting an agent
- Scrivener
- Endnote
- Zotero
- Portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus
- Between the Covers podcast
- Jack Hart, Story Craft and Word Craft
- Neil MacGregor, A History of the World In 100 Objects
- Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature
- Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
- Ed Yong, An Immense World
- The Craft of Research, Booth, Colomb, and Williams
[Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, the cost to you is the same, but purchases bring in a tiny bit of income to help keep the show going.]
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast about the craft of writing history. Today, I’m joined by historian and writer Dr. Surekha Davies.
Surekha Davies 0:10
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:11
Surekha is a former history professor who now writes full-time, and she can also be found speaking about history and consulting on monsters. In fact, monsters have played a major role in much of her research. Her first award-winning book was titled Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters. Her second book, which is aimed at a general audience, is out now; it’s called Humans: A Monstrous History. The book looks at, as she puts it, how people “have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way.” I spoke with Surekha about how she made the switch to full-time writing, her newsletter, Notes from an Everything Historian, and how she organized what could have been an unruly book. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Surekha Davies.
Surekha Davies 1:03
Well, I guess I became a writer, initially thought of accidentally, I went up to college to be a theoretical physicist, because I spent my childhood watching Star Trek, and this is what you do afterwards. But I took quantum mechanics classes and realized, well, there ain't going to be no warp drive in my lifetime, and I won't even go camping. So what planet did I think I was on trying to be an astronaut. So fortunately, my natural sciences program, you had to take several subjects in the first couple of years anyway, and so I had started taking history and philosophy of science. And I'd always loved the creative writing side, which I had given up to supposedly go to other galaxies. And so I started as historian of science, and then, you know, you eventually went off and got a PhD and started as a tenure track professor. So my early writing was as an academic, but I wanted that first book, which was about European ideas, about the peoples of the Americas and the ways in which map makers reconfigured what the word human meant. I wanted it to be read by more than, you know, the narrowest subfield of people working on, you know, say, 16th century maps. And, you know, gradually I kind of realized that the academy was, you know, not necessarily the place where I was going to be able to be in the long term. My university was in financial trouble pretty much from the moment they hired me. And I taught four courses per semester, no TAs and I thought, well, I may get tenure, which I did, but it's not going to feel secure in the medium to long term is, how on earth will I write another book?
And you know, what I kind of ended up doing was give up tenure in order to really, almost like prepare for kind of future changes that might come down the pike. And ended up in Europe on a four day a week, three year job, which allowed me to do something that had been at the back of my mind for a long time, which is, prototype, a book for a general audience. Because, you know, I had a day and a half a week to do that, and I thought, well, you know, if it turns out that I can't give a literary agent, and, you know, I can't get a book deal or, no problem, I'll just turn that side project into another academic book. But actually, I got a really good deal from the University of California Press. Everything was unexpected about it. You had to get a great deal from a University Press, and then, you know, I was already on a fixed term contract, and so that was something of a game changer in that I didn't want to move on to some kind of job that would jeopardize my ability to write the book. You know, by this point, you know, I'd written the first book. It had won various prizes. People still didn't want to hire me into an institution with a with a greater focus on research. There were all of these, these financial uncertainties in a lot of institutions at the time, and I decided not to apply for jobs and to write instead. You know, I got this deal a year into COVID. Wasn't even vaccinated yet. There seemed, it seemed important to write for a general audience, and a lot of people want academic jobs. I spent 10 years applying for things off and on. I wasn't prepared to spend that time doing that anymore.
Kate Carpenter 5:01
Well, let's dig into the details of your writing life. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Surekha Davies 5:07
I like writing first thing in the morning best. I discovered this during my PhD. You know, you don't have time to get nervous if you get out of bed and, you know, make coffee and immediately sit down, and then you can make words before your super ego has woken up. That's still the case. And I will start on the dining room table, just close to the kettle, close to the coffee and depending on the weather, dining room is south facing. The study is north facing. I will move from side to side, tracking sound and light. But when I have a draft and I'm working through making it better, I can focus on writing at all kinds of moments of the day, because you're only working on a small bit at once, and it requires somehow less cognitive creativity to problem solve once you have a draft than those you know those kind of first sets of words.
Kate Carpenter 6:12
Do you have a certain amount of time or words or something that you set as a goal each day?
Surekha Davies 6:17
Depending on where I am in a project, I may or may not be setting goals, but setting goals and like drawing in multicolored pens a big graph is actually really effective whenever I remember to do it, because you stop concentrating on whether you're tired and how confident you feel about what you should be writing next, and all you're thinking about is the square on your calendar where you're going to put a Pink Star once you've hit your target. Perhaps the most effortless bit of writing I ever did was the first draft of my first book. So I already had a dissertation. I had a postdoc for a different project, which is not unusual in the UK, and I was kind of two years into this three year postdoc, and I had a three month summer in which I really wanted to send the book out for review, and I thought, right, I've got about 11 weeks, 10 chapters. That's a chapter a week, that's 10,000 words a week, that's 2000 words a day, and all I need is for the CV to say book under review. I don't even care if, you know, nobody wants it. I just want it out for the CV. And so I had this folder with all my dissertation chapters. Then I had, at the start, an empty folder with book chapters. And, you know, I just, you know, picked 2000 words every day that were easy to do, and you could do them, doing them minimally in, you know, an hour even, because I'd chosen them strategically. And then you've got the rest of the day to do anything that takes a long time, you know, two hours translating, you know, one paragraph of Latin, or going to the library, reading various books. And so that 2000 a day, five days a week. I mean, that worked all summer, and I keep trying to make that work again, and sometimes it does for a little while, but not always.
Kate Carpenter 8:17
How do you like to organize yourself? Are there tools that you use?
Surekha Davies 8:21
I have a few tools that I use. I have often been an early adopter of technology, but I feel as if each piece of tech has its own place and possibilities. And I've never wanted to try doing everything with one tool where, you know, still use paper and pens. So for like, the most kind of creative, strategic stuff, there's nothing like multiple colored pens and, you know, mind maps, which I'm kind of showing you, which I started making as an undergrad, that really kind of unlocks thoughts for me. During my second book, I started writing into Scrivener, which I really enjoyed, because, you know, it's very easy to have little scraps of text that you can move up and down. You can also code every scrap of text. And I have, like, code names, like first draft, fake draft, which is everyone else will think it's complete, but it's not actually complete. Half draft, which means I've started, but it's not yet a first draft, and you can see how many words you're writing in each section, which is helpful for balancing stuff out. For my first book, I built a file maker database because I was going to look at, you know, several 100 maps and atlases and see what kind of images they had of peoples of the Americas. And I knew there were various regions of the world where regions of the Americas that where there were the certain kinds of imagery, Brazilian kennels, Macedonian giants, but I needed a place to record it, so I built a database to with a bunch of drop down menu. We said some free text, so that when I sat down to write, say, the Giants chapter, I could quickly search for the maps that were manuscripts and had giants on them and were produced in Portugal, and you put them in Coronavirus galore, and you can just, you know, do your detailed analysis of each one. And what I found was, once I'd actually completed the database, I knew all the content, especially since I'd found most of the maps by negotiating my way down to the British Library basement. So I've been kind of pulling trays to go from the 2000 maps the British Library had to the 150 that had images that were more than stick figures. I have found both end note and Zotero very effective. I keynote. I keyword all of my entries so I can look on there and like, find my literature on cannibals, and that's as useful as the effortless generation of footnotes for photos. You know, I have, you know, stayed low tech relatively in that I use iPhoto, and the photographs are arranged by date. Tropy came along after my first book, but the second book, I thought I was going to be writing fairly quickly, and I didn't want to add new kinds of tech to something I was supposedly writing quickly, word Scrivener and a lot of printouts that I mark up in multicolored pen are the basis of how I work.
Kate Carpenter 11:35
What does the revision process look like for you?
Surekha Davies 11:38
I love revising. The research goes better, once I have a text, it seems to activate the critical thinking muscles as I, you know, look at each section or each point and think about how to make it stronger, see if there are any loopholes and whether they actually don't work at all. As an undergrad, I read this book called The craft of research by, I think it's Booth, Colomb and Williams, and the book is 100 years old now, but it talks about how to revise a piece of writing, you know, to go through it and underline, you know, the argument sentences, to go through and underline the topic sentences, so you can see whether you have too much description and no analysis. So I will often go through a printout and mark it up in different kinds of colors, so I can get a sense of where I'm actually advancing some thoughts and where I'm not. I will also go to a blank document at the drop of a hat, I love blank documents. So I might have, let's say I might have the, you know, cannibals draft two. And, you know, I've come to some kind of halt. I want to make it better. I'm stuck. So what do I do? I have I rename cannibals, draft to cannibals draft to crop doc. And what that means is, this is the, this is a cannibals draft to that I'm going to cannibalize, literally, and, well, cut things out, not copy things out. So bits that are worth keeping, I will cut out, and so the crop document will become shorter and shorter, and so I'll know that that's the stuff that hasn't yet been incorporated into a nice, shiny document. And I will start a blank document. It's called cannibals draft three, and maybe write a few brand new sentences, you know, some topic sentences, perhaps some sentences that I had drafted by hand in order to break out of whatever log jam was happening with draft two, and then from the crop document, I will cut and paste out so I get a sense of progress as draft three grows. And like the cut cutting version of graph, draft to get smaller, and it means that, you know, I can look through my folders and all the crop documents or all the scraps that didn't make it into the next version, and I can check always easily, check if there's anything there that's still usable. I revise a lot. I write very fast, and then I revise a lot in building more research along the way.
Kate Carpenter 14:19
It sounds then like you start writing fairly early in your research process. Is that right?
Surekha Davies 14:25
Yes, I do. It helps me think. And as a grad student, it was built into my graduate program. So I was doing my PhD half time because I couldn't get funding to do it. So I went. I first took a job. I was working in the British Library as a curator. Then I went half time and started my decision half time, and the place where I did my PhD, expected everybody, full timers and half timers to submit their first chapter by the end of the first year. And so I had to submit 7000 words eight months after I began. Remember, I'm half time, so it's basically four months of work from zero to handing in 7000 words. And you know, I must have kept about two pages of that in the final dissertation, but, you know, it was work I needed to do. And then, from then onwards, the next, you know, five years, say, twice a year, 7000 words. So there's no daily dallying. But it did mean that I had a, you know, I processed what I was seeing into into thoughts and potential arguments, which which gradually got better. As in the in the last year and a half, I was revising everything with the second book, which I wanted to write fast. And I guess it did get written reasonably fast. I started writing possibly even too early. So rather than simply processing my, you know, the reading I was doing by doing, like, kind of just close readings, close interpretations of my sources, I tried to kind of immediately move into, like arguments and chapters, partly because it was a new genre, which I naively thought I could write in more quickly than I could, partly because, you know, I had been somewhere other, been thinking about monsters my entire life, you know, first as aliens, And then, you know, my dissertation was about monsters. I'd been teaching, you know, monsters to students, so I had a good understanding of the range of material I wanted to include. I feared, I feared writer's block. I didn't want to not write and then have writer's block. And then I realized, well, actually, I never have writer's block. I've now done the opposite thing to me, which is like, you know, hastily creating content without being okay about, you know, sitting and mulling and drawing more mind maps, rather than going immediately to writing words that can be countered with word count.
Kate Carpenter 16:58
When you say relatively quickly. What does that mean to you? How quickly did this book come together?
Surekha Davies 17:03
This book come together? Let's see. I think you could say I, I started working on the proposal in 2019, I think I had an idea of the, well, you know, they're like, you know, maybe kind of one or two, kind of false starts before then. But I think I started working on it. You know, one day a week in kind of fall of 2019, I got an agent in april 2020, by which point I had made my first draft of a proposal. I started writing my sample chapters, I guess in April, May. So I guess I started doing research that wasn't for the proposal in May 2020, 7 months later, I had like a 50 page, big sample chapter with my agent ready to go on submission a month later. So you might say that with this particular book, writing and research were almost simultaneous, because I already had an argument in my head from the material I'd been reading, as you know, as faculty. So maybe it was a very atypical book, even for me. I mean, the dissertation was a lot of writing very quickly. You know, effectively, every four full time months, or every six full time months, I had to turn in a finished piece of work. And that seems to be a timeline that I've ended up sticking to.
Kate Carpenter 18:38
It seems like you're a pretty self disciplined person in terms of keeping to a writing schedule. What did it feel like to go from a role in academia to writing full time? Was that a difficult transition?
Surekha Davies 18:50
Well, I had no idea what it would actually feel like, and I was aware that I had no idea. And then I woke up one day and it had happened, I was like, Whoa, this is so cool. When it had happened, my second book was under peer review University Press, even a trainees book, it goes under previous review, at least with University California Press. I had so much to do coming up that there seem to be external deadlines all the time, whether it's I'm going to do a lot of podcast interviews or, well, I won't get the next tranche of my advance until I generate a first draft. Somehow, my circumstances seem to create deadlines. I don't know if that that is me being organized. I had, I had, I had exciting things to look forward to. I think I It was December 2022, I was free in the world, but I had, you know, a three week trip coming up to the US in late February of 2023 including a weeklong, Distinguished Visiting Professor position, which you love giving, you know, one one lecture. But, you know, I had a trip and talks coming up and and then when you have a research trip, but those are also moments when, well, I want to get x, y, z, done before I go. There seems to be no lack of deadlines.
Kate Carpenter 20:21
I've really enjoyed your newsletter, which you write and and has been giving sort of an inside look at your process of writing and revising. And you even have a wonderful post about getting your agent, which I will link to for any any listeners who want to hear that. Why have you taken that approach to your newsletter?
Surekha Davies 20:39
The newsletter I started in a great hurry. I had seen other people had them, and I'd been, you know, looking at them with interest, but wasn't ready to start one. And then Twitter got bought. My, you know, engagement went down by 90% only 1/10 of the people even saw the thing. So there was even less motivation to actually post on there. And it seemed as if I had better, you know, connect with my readers as soon as possible. And the moment I began, you know, I found it immensely fun, and I had, you know, really not expected that to be the case. I thought it would just feel like an obligation. You know, why? Well, I'd gone and left my job, and now I had an obligation to a newsletter. But actually, you know, because it's free, you know, I don't feel as if it has to be in any particular shape. People can unsubscribe if they wish. It started off as something that accidentally created this space of self discovery I had not been expecting, because I used to write every week, back when there were a few fewer newsletters that everybody had to read, and just seeing what I wrote about was a way of figuring out what I had to say. I found myself writing about music more often than I could ever have imagined. I played the piano very, very seriously as a child to the point of, well, shall I audition for the Royal Schools of Music? Level of of seriousness that was self motivated. And here, here I was suddenly kind of writing about it all the time. But I did appreciate the kind of regular connection with with readers that no one had to wait seven years for the next time I had to say something, it meant that I could talk about the process of becoming a full time author, and I would also meet people in real life who had been reading my newsletter. So I got to also, you know, hear from others that they actually like reading about the stuff. So it's been great to have feedback as I've written about all sorts of things that are not obviously in my in my academic training, because the dream would be to, you know, get a syndicated column somewhere to write, you know, an array of strange things as I saw fit. I think it's helped me be bolder in my published writing by seeing people join the newsletter, open it and not leave.
Kate Carpenter 23:12
Let’s take a closer look at Surehka’s new book and how the writing came together. I asked her to read an excerpt that comes from the opening of Chapter 2, which is titled Human or Animal? Here’s Dr. Surehka Davies reading from Humans: A Monstrous History.
Surekha Davies 23:27
She peers out expectantly, a folded sheet in her hands, almost as if she is waiting to show us her homework. The vibrant pattern on her dress makes it look like a party frock: a celebration of orange-and-crimson stripes, swirls, tendrils, and tulips that echo the blooms in her hair. Slashed sleeves show off a rich green fabric underneath her dress, picking up the leaves that garland her head. Antoinette Gonsalvus, or Antonietta Gonzales, born in Paris in the 1580s, was perhaps eight years old when this watercolor was copied from a recent painting. Someone, not knowing how old Antoinette was, penned the caption, ‘A twenty-year-old woman with a furry head resembling that of an ape and a smooth, hairless body.’ Antoinette’s portrait appears in the massive repository of drawings, watercolors, books, manuscripts, artifacts, and objects of nature amassed by the sixteenth-century Bolognese physician, collector, and naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, a man who rivaled Pliny the Elder in the vastness of his interests. Aldrovandi and his assistants assembled a gigantic, encyclopedic collection, sifting acquisitions with an eye to his manifold interests, from archaeology to medicine. As I leafed through the digitized volumes of drawings now housed in the University Library in Bologna, Italy, it was difficult not to do a double-take at this portrait of little Antoinette, for her face looks decidedly furry. And this picture is in a volume largely devoted to … animals. How would this girl in a dress have felt to find herself here: would there be surprise—or knowing? Little Antoinette is unlikely to have found animal comparisons flattering. Her condition, now termed hypertrichosis universalis, is extremely rare: only about fifty cases are known through surviving documentation. Antoinette was the daughter of the also-hairy Petrus Gonsalvus, or Pedro Gonzales, an Indigenous person from the eastern Atlantic Ocean archipelago now called the Canary Islands. In 1547, when Petrus was a boy, his life had been turned upside-down. He was captured by Spanish invaders of his island and taken to the French royal court. There he was schooled – in Latin, the language of the educated – and he became a courtier. He married a Frenchwoman named Catherine. The couple had six children (three daughters and three sons) who survived infancy. All the children apart from one son seem to have been unusually hairy. Petrus Gonsalvus’s kidnapping and subsequent life took place against a backdrop of flotillas of ships from Europe, crossing oceans to deposit explorers, colonists, merchants, clerics, physicians, and naturalists on distant shores. From these invaders and their writings and imagery, people in Europe learned of an immense number of species that were new to them. These creatures baffed and amazed newcomers and collectors back home. Where did an armadillo go on the map of life, or a bird of paradise, said to lack legs and to spend its life in the air, even while sleeping? To an observer in Europe, Petrus might have appeared to straddle the boundary between human and animal. To an observer like the naturalist Aldrovandi, perhaps Petrus was an extraordinary exception that proved the rule that humans are humans and animals are not. But if Petrus was not entirely human, then human and animal were not entirely separate categories. He had hairy children—like little Antoinette—with a typical human woman. What did that say about the boundary between hairy folk and humans? If Petrus and his children were not entirely human, then human and animal were overlapping categories. Perhaps it was safer to recognize them all as entirely human, just unusually hairy
Kate Carpenter 27:41
Talk to me about what went into writing this passage.
Surekha Davies 27:44
I just find this watercolor just so compelling, and we can add a link, perhaps in the show notes, to an open access conversion. And something I tried to do with each chapter is to open with something that was going to be ideally visually arresting, or some actual story with people on the ground doing things and use that to create a bit of a cliffhanger, To make the questions of the chapter matter to to the reader. And one of the things I did in the depths of COVID, when everything was online, is I attended a three hour craft intensive run by tin house, which is this amazing kind of literary hub of online and in person events. There's a magnificent book podcast between the covers. And this author and editor, Jen Baker, ran a three hour session where people could work on, you know, voice and storytelling. And you know, one part of the craft intensive was where we each kind of read out a really short piece of text that we wanted to with, which we wanted to think about voice and in live and our writing. And I read this bit out, you know, very nervously, because I'm a historian of ideas, and most of my plot, quote, unquote, is people thinking thoughts? I mean, it's not really something that translates to movies. But this was a passage that the other people in the session enjoyed very much, you know, much to my relief, and some of the conversation we had there was about how to create in the mind of a reader, a sense of a place through the sensory you know, what might it have been like to, you know, be Antoinette without imposing too much of us on her what was there to see, to hear, to smell, you know, what was what? How much atmosphere is actually there in the sources, if I use those details in the story, and it seemed as if the dress and the flowers and her hair were places I could, I could lean into the story a bit something I found, you know, very, very useful as I could figure out how to advance through the book, chapter by chapter. Were a couple of books about writing by someone called John Hart, sorry, Jack Hart, one is called Story craft, and one is called Word craft, and he writes about the documentary style of non fiction writing where you have you might have a plot running through a long form magazine essay, and every so often you have to break the plot to explain the historical circumstance, and then you go back into the story And out again. So what I was trying to do with that passage was, you know, you have this plot. You know, here's this little girl who's being drawn, and then pull you out to the context of who, who draws kids and puts them in, you know, volumes full of animals can show you this. This, this position in Bologna, and then take you back into the story a bit, and show you how Petrus Gonzalez ended up in mainland Europe in the first place, and pull out to say a bit about those voyages of exploration. So it was a combination of thinking about all the kinds of ways I wanted to engage the reader, if I could, you know, the sensory, the intellectual, the emotional, the esthetic quality of, you know, the words and to kind of move them through, basically a Documentary written in words. There is some action, but there's also, it's more a bit like a science book, really, in that we're learning stuff about ideas and mysteries.
Kate Carpenter 32:11
This is, to put it mildly, an expansive subject for a book, both in terms of time and space. How did you decide what to include and what to leave out. I know. I mean, I read that it was difficult for you to leave some things on the cutting room floor. So what guided those decisions?
Surekha Davies 32:29
At the start I envision, I envisaged the book as maybe kind of slightly lighter, slightly easier kind of book. So when I was kind of sitting down to draft the proposal, and I was thinking, okay, what are the sections of the book and what's going to go in it, something I had in the back of my mind was Neil McGregor's a history of the world in 100 objects. And the very first title of the book might well have been a history of world 100 monsters, because I was trying to think of like a book that was practical to write, and incorporated the fact that, well, I read all this stuff for years anyway, for teaching and my first book. And so, you know, I think I had kind of 10 chapters, and I thought, Well, I only need, like 10 monsters each, or something like that. And I wrote various monster examples down on little scraps of paper, and I moved them around, but, you know, fairly soon, I realized that I didn't really want this bitty cabinet of curiosities approached. There was a there was a more important kind of set of questions and findings that were at risk of being trivialized if I just had 20 or 100 little two page vignettes. And then I realized, Okay, well, just have, you know, eight to 10 chapters, and then they they have to flow like a story, and then the selection becomes a question that I could then address chapter by chapter, what were their chapters going to be? I suppose they, very quickly seemed as if you know about eight of the chapters were fairly obvious. I think this goes back to me thinking about the kind of categories of being beings in the world, since I was about 10 watching Star Trek. So, of course, you know the you have the ecology. You know, where's the boundary between human and ecology? Where's the boundary between human and animal? Then there are boundaries that societies create within humanity. And then you move on to, you know, gods and machines and extraterrestrials. It kind of came fully formed to me. And you know, I think I added an extra chapter at the very end, late in the game. But otherwise, that structure seemed unproblematic and it didn't fall into pieces along the way. Then the question is, okay, so we have a chapter on, say, because a human animal boundary, well, what's going in it? And I guess right from the start, I wanted to give a sense of the sheer, you know, variety of modes of thinking with monsters. And so providing a sense of that variety was was important, and yet I wanted them to I wanted there to be a story as you move through each chapter. So I tried to end each example with a sort of cliffhanger or a mystery that you needed to go to the next section to answer. I mean, sometimes it's closure at the end of a section, but as you you move through a section you went from, I think, for the animals chapter, you go from, like, macro differences, you know, like the, you know, hairy people, people are not the kind of human simian boundary. And we move on to things like transplants and the microbiome. And you move from the macro to the micro. So I, I wanted to kind of touch on a kind of range of ways for each chapter that the category of the human has changed. But the, you know, potentially, the subject was, you know, so huge, because in theory, you could have looked at Monster making all around the world. And when I began, I did want to have a decent coverage of monster making on every continent, but I realized that that would then risk turning the book into something quite dry, something encyclopedic, something that had less of a through line. And you know, I, my taste is not for that kind of book. I wanted something that felt more coherent. And, you know, there was a defensive line or maybe a snarky line that didn't make it into the final book, and it was, this is not a monster telephone book or wiki. I'm sorry your favorite Monster isn't here, but there were so many that it I clearly couldn't possibly read them all and then pick so I picked ones that seemed to help you know the chapter move through a narrative arc of the ways in which the idea of the human change in relation to that theme, and to pick examples that allowed me to say something in an effective way, and someone else might have picked different examples because they would be able to see and connect different things in an effective way,
Kate Carpenter 37:40
As you've talked about here, your chapters are really organized thematically. And I know from reading about your process of getting an agent that was very important to you, especially rather than organize it chronologically. And you got some pushback from a couple of the potential agents you talked with, although not the one you ultimately went with. How did you decide on that structure, and why was it so important to you at the start?
Surekha Davies 38:04
So, you know, before I had talked to any agents, I suppose I have always kind of naturally thought about the world through themes. And you know, chronology goes within the theme. So, you know, with my first book, there's roughly some chronological progression. But really the chapters are arranged thematically. There are cannibal chapters and there's a giant chapter, then there's like Amazons and, sorry, there's Aztecs and Incas. But I was looking to explain very particular phenomena, rather than to, you know, arrange things in a row, which, but I mean, within each theme, there was a chronological arc. Though, in a way, I had, you know, many arcs when it came to So, when it came to this book, it was how to articulate something that seems, you know, it was so clear to me that there was a story to be told that was thematic and that the chronological story, to me felt kind of boring. I wasn't the one to I couldn't see an exciting story that hadn't in some way already been told in the academic literature, and that was part of it. I mean, Daston and Park's Wonders and the Order of Nature. In only one chapter is about monsters, but they go somewhat chronologically. I was, I was open to needing to change my structure. And when two of the three agents I spoke with suggested making it chronological, at least for the purpose of getting a deal. I thought, Oh, dear, you know, I really need to think about this, but I couldn't write that book because it just seemed boring. It's it was just going to feel to me like a lit review or something, there was nothing I was going to be be adding that. Said, I did come up with a compromise, you know, towards the end, which is, the earlier chapters do skew earlier in content, and the later chapters do skew later in terms of examples. So rather than every single chapter going from antiquity to the present, there's there's less antiquity in the latter half of the book, in terms of the amount of column images the antiquity gets in chapter eight, it's supposed to, you know, chapter one, I see now how there would have been an even more economical way of doing it, which is to keep it thematic, so that my brain, you know, could actually engage with but then, for each chapter, only look at one period in time to kind of move forwards, but only address one thing at the time. Perhaps it wouldn't have worked perfectly for this book, but I will certainly think about that for the next
Kate Carpenter 41:01
Obviously, in a book of this scope, you can't be the world's foremost expert on every subject that you touch in it. Did you deal with any imposter syndrome around that? How did, how did you get past that?
Surekha Davies 41:13
Yeah, I guess you know, anyone who's a scholar probably feels some element of that, because the more you know, the more you realize there is out there to know. But it seemed as if, well, you know any, any. There were books out there that covered multiple centuries and multiple continents. You know, they were also written by people just like me. So, you know, was I going to somehow decide that I couldn't? Well, I don't think so. So there's that, which is, you know, How is anybody going to kind of know all the things? So, yes, I don't know all the things, but that's just, just par for the course. I did want to do justice to the material. And I did want to, you know, make sure that I knew what the current literature was on the various things that I was talking about that that was important to me, and that's, you know, where I did feel more imposter syndrome. Can find a bunch of reasons to join reading, but you can't know what the internal debates and arguments are that for every single different little topic that you cover, and I had to be, I had to be okay with That and choose, choose my materials from, you know, reliable journals and presses, and use my own critical faculties to to establish, you know, what work, the thought of the authorities. And, you know, by the end of the book it, you know, the by the end of the draft number for the I was, I was covering a smaller, kind of geographical range of materials than I had imagined when I had first been drafting the proposal. And, you know, one reason was to make sort of more of a through line. And secondly, it did, you know, make me feel more comfortable to kind of focus on kind of Europe and the Americas and add, you know, some additional material on top of that, rather than try to kind of cover them in some balanced column inches, kind of way
Kate Carpenter 43:28
In the last of our time together, I want to talk a little bit about your own influences. I know that you've talked a lot about accountability, writing partners, other people who have been sort of part of your writing community. Are there people who you turn to for feedback?
Surekha Davies 43:43
I'm really grateful to all the friends and mentors who've read chapters for me over the years, who've read, you know, the whole book or the whole, you know, version, book one or Book Two, depending on the what I'm writing, I show things to different people, and different people show me their own draft writing during the first year or so of the pandemic, I did have a fairly regular writing buddy with whom we exchanged, you know, writing Like every couple of weeks, and that was, that was great. We were both writing trade list, but I've been, you know, lucky with kind of editorial feedback I've had. And, you know, I've made a point of of seeking out voices who are not of people who weren't academics, but who were very kind of literary to read the manuscripts, and I knew, especially with going through a peer review, that part of me would automatically be trying to tick a set of boxes that were are less important, you know, like, like, covering things and going into great amount of detail. I wanted to make sure I focused on writing something that a general reader would want to read. And, you know, with someone who works on the history of ideas, there are, there are more steps to get to that than if you're writing about something that has plot.
Kate Carpenter 45:24
Are there other writers or types of books or even other media that you look to for inspiration for your writing?
Surekha Davies 45:32
Certainly. One of the things, if there's one thing I resent about the book that I finished because the the range was so wide that I spent a lot of time, just like hastily learning the content. So I was like, consuming primary sources, consuming secondary literature, academic writing, just to learn the content. And I had less time than I might have liked to think about the craft of writing. But I do have, especially in the first year, I spent a lot of time trying to think about, you know, what this new voice will be. And I think my first model was, was great fun, but maybe not the best model, and that was the New Yorker. During the pandemic, I self medicated by getting hard copy, you know, subscriptions of things like The New Yorker and Harper's because, you know, my eyes were struggling with all the time on screens. It's like, well, I need more things on paper, because I'm not going to the library to read this stuff. And, and I think I kind of maybe absorbed that a bit too well. And we tried to kind of undo that elusive New Yorker style. You know, between draft one of the book and and draft for fiction is quite became eye opening for me. And the interesting thing is, it was only once I had gotten an agent and I was really doing this trade list writing thing that I started to notice a whole bunch of different things. And I knew I had to write, you know, with with no jargon, and more straightforwardly, and you know the stuff you have to do, but I also knew I didn't want the book to read like a textbook. That's really not what anybody wants to read for fun. And the amazing thing about fiction is often the language is very simple, and yet the the writing is very fulfilling to read. And I remember reading Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys deep in the pandemic. I'd heard him interviewed, and I thought, right, it's time I read this book. And the very first line is incredible. The book is about boys in a correctional boarding school, and the first line is "even in death, the boys were in trouble," and my mind was totally blown. I thought, right, I've already given you the Pulitzer you want for that line, I'm going to fall over and die now, because I'm never going to write that well, you know, it's something like 10 words, only two of them have more than one syllable. But it's not boring, it's intellectually riveting. And that was when the penny dropped for me, that that you can lay words out in this kind of magical, poetic way that makes them tremendously stimulating. And for even a nerd, while not having any kind of barriers, for someone you know who didn't learn the grad school vocab, and you know, there are ways in which you can introduce words you want to use along the way. Then for you know, because I have less plot than some other books might, a great suggestion I had was that I read Ed Yong's An Immense World, though it's a book about animal senses, and I'd already read, you know, other other things by Ed Yong, and the animal senses book is is kind of amazing, because it has there about, look now, about 10 chapters, each with about a different kind of sense, and there's a bunch of animal examples in each chapter. And I read this fairly, you know, late in the game, I think, maybe three months before returning the manuscript for, like, a final sign off from the from the press board, who would confirm that I had done what the peer reviewers wanted. And it's extraordinary. Each, you know, a chapter on, you know, say, hearing would have half a dozen animals in it, and we'd have a little bit of story about an animal, then we'd zoom out, and we'd come back in, talk to another animal, talk about another animal. Sometimes a paragraph would have several animals. There'd be a beautiful segue where one animal and example ended, the other one would begin. And I realized I was never wondering about the animals that weren't in the chapter. I'm too busy enjoying the chapter, and I realize so when I look at all my chapters and think, Well, what about all the things that aren't in there? I realize that that's not how a reader is going to approach it. They're going to be too busy consuming what I have given them and the segues that that Yong has between quite different animals is really extraordinary. Sometimes there are, you know, maybe four or five different animal examples in a paragraph, and it was as if, you know, each of them was kind of holding hands or holding tentacles. You know, a hoof would go out, and a flipper would hold on, and they would build this extraordinary kind of smooth theme through a chapter and so, so that kind of smoothness in writing about ideas, rather than plots, is something I that that inspires me.
Kate Carpenter 50:36
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Surekha Davies 50:40
This is from Tony Grafton about a decade ago, and he said, books are never completed. They are only abandoned. And I was, you know, trying to finish revisions on my first book, and I thought, oh, right, it's never gonna feel finished. I'm just gonna have to throw it out. Now on, you know, onto my email and over to my, you know, editor. And so I think that was one of those lessons in learning to separate how I feel about whether something is good or whether something is done, and how it actually is, and that that is is quite helpful now as well.
Kate Carpenter 51:22
Fantastic. Well, as I'm talking to you now, Humans is about to come out in a few weeks, and by the time this airs, it will be recently released. So I know that this is an unfair question, because I'm sure your focus right now is on promoting the new book. But do you have new things that you're thinking about that you're up for talking about?
Surekha Davies 51:41
Actually I have, and you know what I was saying about, there are all these deadlines, even though I don't have a job. And like, is it my fault? And I think I have a good idea. I, you know, I would love to get the next book under contract during this calendar year. Let's give myself a big leeway. That means I have certainly been been doing some work on that. I'm going to stay with stuff that is strange and creepy. So I realized, well, that that's what I do. I look at things that seem kind of uncanny, and that that challenge boundaries and categories and show how you can't actually understand normal until you understand those things that are supposedly strange or creepy. So I can actually see a couple of the next couple of books that are that stay with the method that I've developed for the first book, thematic stuff, moving through kind of mysteries almost, you know, Please, believe it or not, you know, meet Indiana Jones kind of feeling. And hopefully get, get get better at that over the next couple of books, and hopefully the next book will be one that all the readers of Humans also want to read.
Kate Carpenter 53:07
Well, I look forward to your continued explorations of the strange and creepy. Dr Surekha Davies, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about writing.
Surekha Davies 53:16
Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been great fun.
Kate Carpenter 53:18
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past for links to the book and all the things we talked about in this episode. Visit drafting the past.com think about signing up for the newsletter while you're there to stay updated on the show. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
