I’ve heard from many academics that writing their second book can be even harder than writing their first book. That might be surprising, especially if you’re still struggling with the first book. But with less free time and without the support of a dissertation adviser, some historians find that second book to be more challenging than they expected. But today’s guest turned that struggle into an opportunity for herself and other writers by launching a workshop specifically for writers of second books. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Jessica Lepler.
Jess is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her first prize-winning book was The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creations of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. Her second book came out this year. It’s called Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions. It’s a history of the ultimately failed effort to build the world’s first interoceanic canal in the 1820s. Even though it was published a decade after her first book, I was surprised to learn that she actual started working on it alongside her dissertation and first book. We talk more about that research process in our interview. You’ll also hear more about starting a second-book workshop, and why some of her best ideas come in the swimming pool.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Jessica Lepler, Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions
- Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creations of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis
- Zotero
- Second Book Writers Workshop, SHEAR
- Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica M. Lepler, “Modeling Midcareer Mentorship: Creating a Second-Book Writer’s Workshop”
- Upcoming OAH panel
- Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America
- Emily Pawley, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North
- Catherine Howe
- Geraldine Brooks
- Kate Atkinson
- Lauren Groff
- Susanna Clarke
- Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us and An Immense World (Young Readers Edition): How Animals Sense Earth’s Amazing Secrets
Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. Drafting the Past earns a small commission on books purchased through these links, which helps to keep the podcast going.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
I've heard from many academics that writing their second book can be even harder than writing their first book. That might sound surprising, especially if you're still struggling with the first book, but with less free time and without the support of a dissertation advisor, some historians find that second book to be more challenging than they expected. Today's guest turned that struggle into an opportunity for herself and other writers by launching a workshop specifically for writers of second books. I'm Kate Carpenter, and this is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Jessica Lepler.
Jessica Lepler 0:40
I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:43
Jess is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. Her first prize winning book was The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics and the Creations of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. Her second book came out this year. It's called Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions. It's a history of the ultimately failed effort to build the world's first interoceanic canal in the 1820s. Even though this book was published a decade after her first book, I was surprised to learn that she actually started working on it alongside her dissertation and first book. We talk more about that research process in this interview. You'll also hear about starting that second book workshop and why some of her best ideas come in the swimming pool. Here's my conversation with Dr Jessica Lepler.
Jessica Lepler 1:36
I've always loved stories, and my maternal grandmother told fabulous family stories, and she brought these people I'd never met to life, and I had great public school history teachers all along the way that made the past something that could be touched as well as imagined. I've always loved to read, but it actually took a little time for me to realize that I also loved writing. When I got to graduate school, I took a class in narrative history, narrative history writing, and it involved several rounds of peer workshops. And these workshops made me cry. They were really rough and they but they were great in that they taught me a lesson. They taught me how to write for story, but they also taught me that criticism is actually praise, because somebody would not spend all the time and effort to try to improve your writing if they didn't think it was worth it. And so I repeat this lesson to my students, hopefully without the crying, on a regular basis, because when you get feedback, it should be a good moment, not a bad moment. So that helped. And I should also add that I have gotten to be a better writer because of amazing editors. So not only my history mentors and colleagues, but also my family, my parents have always told me when they didn't follow something I was writing. So it's nice to have a non academic perspective, and my husband is a font of writing wisdom. So he taught me my favorite writing lesson, which is, you should always enjoy the end of a sentence. And this revolutionized my sentence structure for Canal Dreamers. He also taught me that Word has a read aloud feature and it's on our phones. So I started listening to my chapter drafts as I wrote them and revised them, and that really helped me listen my way through the book.
Kate Carpenter 3:36
I love that I also love that you got to take a narrative history writing class in graduate school, can I ask who you took that with?
Jessica Lepler 3:42
Jane Kamensky, my doctoral advisor, and I think she was just learning how to do that herself, and so she turned it into a course, and it was an incredibly helpful course.
Kate Carpenter 3:53
Fantastic. I wish. I wish more grad students had that opportunity. Well, tell me when and where do you like to do your writing?
Jessica Lepler 3:59
I'm kind of unusual. I went to college in New Orleans, and I wrote my honors thesis outside at a coffee shop, and it was beautiful, like the delicious spring weather of the Gulf South and the whole spring term in New Orleans, you can write outside. It's no problem. And so ever since then, I write as much as I can outside, and I've always tried to find housing that had a balcony or a porch or a patio, somewhere with shade and a table and an outlet. At this point, I have lived in New Hampshire for nearly two decades, which means I have a really short window of outside writing time, from about May to October, but that May to October coincides with the end of my teaching year, which is when I actually have time to be productive. So I just do as much writing as I can in the summer. I don't write much during the semester, I try to aim for a book review or a conference paper, and during sabbaticals and fellowships. I shed the outdoor writing desire as soon as it gets cold. And I just jump into writing every day. I have a standing desk in my office, which you can tell, but the listeners won't be able to my office is a blue. It's like a really pretty blue that kind of reflects the Caribbean. It's like a really warm feeling. And so I try to imagine that I'm outside enjoying a tropical breeze while I write at my standing desk.
Kate Carpenter 5:25
I'm always curious, you know, when you're, when it's a school year and you mostly write during the summer, do you kind of have a project in your head during the year that you're mulling over, or do you just go into sort of full teaching and advising mode?
Jessica Lepler 5:40
I mean, sometimes there's, I worked on this book for two decades with another book in the middle. So it wasn't like I was only working on this book for two decades. But, you know, I often am thinking about the bigger research project that's lurking in the background, but I think about teaching as writing too, and so I just embrace that also. Yeah, I kind of have to quit it cold turkey. I mean, I try not to, and every year I promise myself I'm going to block off some amount of time for my writing. And sometimes I write a conference paper, and that's like, I give myself a big pat on the back for that, but a chapter that's a whole different story.
Kate Carpenter 6:22
How do you like to organize yourself while you are researching and writing?
Jessica Lepler 6:25
Well, I should say first I have, I have a nine and a half year old, actually, he's almost 10, and so it isn't always easy to find time to write. And I have wonderfully supportive family and and spouse, and so we all kind of trade off, and I get work shifts that I can work in. And so organizing my writing is some something of trying to leave a breadcrumb for myself of what I had been doing, so that when I pick up, I feel like I'm continuing in the same place. So as for organizing sources, I use Zotero for everything web based, I create folders for photographs or archival materials and use Word files for transcriptions that are housed in folders by archives. So I have like two different sets of folders, one that's Word files and one that's image files for each archive. For this book, I gathered lots of stuff over the decades, and I created a massive table in Word that's a timeline of my evidence. So it was not It's not like just when a letter is written, although I did definitely record that, but also sometimes in the State Department, especially, they note like when a letter was received. So I also have all the received points in the timeline, and if a letter mentions an event like that gets its own entry in the timeline. And so I had a very detailed timeline that was pretty helpful. At some point I stopped updating it, because I was writing so much that it was I was writing quicker than I could data entry, so I just kind of kept with the writing. Also, when I'm writing, I save drafts of each chapter in its own special folder, and then I save them by date, so I have many multiple versions of a chapter draft as I go along. In case I want to go back, which does happen sometimes, sometimes I'll have like, 30 different drafts of a chapter in one of those folders, yeah. And if I decide that, like, I don't like the organizational structure, I'll make a new folder for the newly halved off chapters or whatever, and start again and move that whole folder to sort of cut chapter graphs. So I keep it all. I also keep logs. So when I have a sabbatical or a fellowship, primarily, I'm always like, conscious, conscious that I want to be working, but I want to, like, have a trail of what I did. And so every day, I write down what I did that day, very short, like one sentence, but I keep a word count of where I am in a chapter and I can sort of see them grow over the course of a month and then move to a new one, that sort of thing. But I also write down like when I spent time on students' work, or when I read somebody else's material, and it kind of makes me feel good that I didn't waste my time. But it's also a really useful record for making my work legible to people in administrative positions and elsewhere that don't necessarily understand that a historian takes a lot of years to write a book. So, yeah, that's that is. I think that's the that's the organization. Oh, I also keep a table of the chapters with the word counts for each chapter, and I update that as I go along. And it sort of serves like an outline and a table of contents all in one.
Kate Carpenter 9:38
Do you always have sort of a target word count for each chapter?
Jessica Lepler 9:41
Not always. I think I start with complete freedom. I'm a pretty I write pretty bad first drafts, and so I just let them come out, you know, and then, and they're usually really long. The chapters in this book, those first drafts are just gigantic. And then I later cut them down, split them up, move things around. But I don't really have a target word count. And I didn't have a target word count for this book until I had a book contract that told me what my target count was.
Kate Carpenter 10:10
It sounds like you start writing while you're still researching. Is that right? How do you, How does research and writing interact for you?
Jessica Lepler 10:17
So it kind of depends. Not sure when, when I start writing. I started. I started this project back in 2003 on my very first dissertation research trip to London, because I found a box of folders in the Rothschild archive that just didn't make any sense to me. They were a series of letters from this guy named Aaron H Palmer to the Rothschilds, who were like the most important bankers of their moment. And I couldn't figure out why an unknown man was writing to them, and so I this is back in 2003 so as soon as the archive closed, I ran to an internet cafe because it was the only way to get online. And there was this brand new website called Google, I stuck his name in Google, and I learned two interesting things about him, one that he was credited later in life with by Congress. Congress credited him with inspiring the Perry mission to Japan, which opened US trade with Japan. So that was like a big, important thing. And then the other thing I learned was that he won the first contract to build a canal across Lake Nicaragua. And I thought that was also very interesting. And so, as I was collecting sort of sources for my first book, which was my dissertation on the panic of 1837, I was also collecting materials on Palmer, and I think I wrote my first Palmer based story in 2009 so my first book came out in 2013 so I was already sort of thinking about this, but I was thinking about it as a biography. I didn't really shift into writing a story that was about all of the people involved in this canal venture until much later. And so I started writing, but not, not necessarily with the aims that would be the end result.
Kate Carpenter 12:05
You entioned earlier, as many as 30 drafts for a chapter. What's your approach to the revision process? Do you have sort of techniques to revise and think through drafts?
Jessica Lepler 12:16
Gosh, I wish I did. That sounds lovely and delightful. Yeah, that just sounds great. So I have this friend, Hunt Howell, who's a lit professor, and we he lives in where I do in Exeter. We take walks through town, and he would tell me how much he loves revision, and I have a really hard time embracing that enthusiasm, but at the same time, like I over the course of revising, and I had to cut something like 70,000 words out of this project, I came to see his point that, like I was making it better, I was making it stronger. So I think the cutting feels better when you know the end result is a tighter, stronger, more readable manuscript, but it's just hard to let go. I guess the thing that I most tried to do was to find the places where I had said the same thing twice and just cut that repetition. And also try to make my choice of quotations as concise as possible. Like, what from this quote Do I really need as a quote, and can I paraphrase it instead? And that also cut a lot of bulk that was not really serving the goal of the book. And that's the other thing. Like, by the time I had to do the revision to cut from 200,000 words to 135,000 words. 1000 words. I knew what the point of the book was, and so it was much easier, in some ways, to say. Now, does this serve the point of the book? Do I need this whole long section on all the alternate people who could have held this, this diplomatic post? Well, maybe I need to reference it a little bit because it's quite interesting, but I don't necessarily need a full biography of each not appointed diplomat.
Kate Carpenter 14:09
Sure. Canal Dreamers is your second book. It's interesting in that you were sort of working on it in some ways while you were also working on what would become your first book. Did the process then differ between the two books, or did they have a lot of similarities because you were kind of working on them concurrently?
Jessica Lepler 14:28
I should say that my that that was actually really good advice from my one of my undergraduate mentors was, if you find another topic while you're researching your dissertation, like store the stuff, like just, you know, make records of it and hold on to it. Because sometimes when you're in a teaching career, it can be rough to do that original research again. So if you can find stuff while you're going collect it. So in some ways, the beginnings of the research for the project happened while I was writing the first book and the dissertation, but the actual writing of this book happened later. I had in my, with my first book, my dissertation, won a writing prize that came with a publication contract, so I never had to go through the shopping the manuscript around or a book proposal around. I had to write a book proposal, but it was mostly like it was tailored for one press. They told me what I needed to do, and I did it. The second book, I thought long and hard about whether the book could be for a general audience or whether it was an academic book, and I decided it was what they call a crossover book. So somewhere in between, and I sent proposals to a few presses that produce this type of compromise between a full on trade book and a monograph. And I never knew these distinctions existed until my friend Emily Conrad Krutz and I founded the second book writers workshop for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. So Emily and I met in 2016 and we were both sort of struggling to get started. We both had been starting, but we were sort of struggling with the issues of the second book. And we met at two conferences that were about a month apart, and by the second one, we were like, you know, we should do something about this. We talked about how we missed an advisor. That is a big difference between a first book and a second book. We missed the built in peer reviewers that come from graduate school. We missed we both had young children, and although we loved being with our young children, it meant like picking up and going for a residential fellowship somewhere wasn't really an option. So we missed those fellow fellows and the conversations that stimulate one when you're writing, when you can do that stuff. So we also were, like, totally mystified by the publishing world, and so we decided that we could propose a program to SHEAR, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, to create a grassroots support network for mid career scholars in the shape of workshops for in progress work. And they jumped at it. They were so excited to get on board with this idea of supporting mid career academics. And our plan was to have people apply to participate, and then about a month before the conference, pre circulate either a chapter draft or a fellowship proposal or a book proposal. And then we group those people together by genre and assign or recruit a mentor who was a experienced, you know, well known scholar. And then have these folks work in peer review kind of workshops, spend time on each person's draft, give feedback, discuss the common problems that all of those genres of writing struggle with, you know? And so they meet before the annual SHEAR conference, and have this four hour or so workshop, and then Emily and I also organized at least one panel during the conference that would be on a professionalization mid career theme. So not a historical theme, but a like, how do you do this job theme? And the first one was called How Not to Write Your Second Book, and it was great. It was these wonderfully generous folks who gave fabulous advice. And actually we coordinated publishing it as a forum online, so it's out there in the world. And the second year, our panel was called to trade or not to trade, and it was a super helpful panel about the distinctions between trade publishing and not trade publishing, and that's where I learned about crossover books. So I had no idea what type of book I was trying to write until I did this work to create the support network that taught me that this category even existed. And I spent seven years as a participant in the second book writers workshop, and those deadlines, man, they were so helpful in getting things done, and the peer support and mentor support was so essential. And Emily and I became really good friends, and we both had a fellowship year the same year. So we traded drafts of chapters, and we set each other, like, one month deadlines for getting things done. And it proved so helpful.
Kate Carpenter 14:28
Was there a great, I mean, seven years, it sounds like there was a good reaction from SHEAR participants. Did a lot of people recognize the need for this?
Jessica Lepler 14:28
Oh my gosh, it was. The response at first was gigantic. Like people were like, Oh, thank you. Like, we really need a place where we can talk about our work, and the stakes are really low. You know, it's just, it's a chance to share and collaborate and learn from each other. And so people were really excited about it, and it's still going. And several other organizations, um, adopted a similar plan, like, in fact, we got so many requests from other organizations to explain what we were doing that we ended up writing an article about about what we were doing, and we organized a panel at the O- no, the AHA, about grassroots mid career support. And then this year, you are actually going to be with me on a panel at OAH rethinking all of this in our current moment. So like I think it has become a very successful way of thinking about a systemic response to what is a sort of industry wide issue of of trying to support scholars when they are done with the work that they did in graduate school, but haven't entirely formed the next body of their sort of work.
Kate Carpenter 15:10
Absolutely, I think it's maybe even more now, because so many people don't have as much sort of traditional even support in an academic department when they are contingent faculty or doing lots of different kinds of scholarship. So I think there's even more demand for this kind of networking.
Jessica Lepler 17:57
And the more that we can help ourselves do this as a community, I think, the better. I mean, I love the idea of some sort of angel out there coming out and endowing all of us to have the support we need. But if we're not going to get it from, from funders, at least we can give each other support and and building a structure for that, making it not just informal, seems really significant to me, because not everybody, especially when you're not necessarily connected to the university world in the same way that people might have been at another moment, finding your fellow travelers, finding the other people who also need that kind of support, can be rough. So if it exists as a structure, then it's just about putting your name in the hat, as opposed to trying to build it from scratch.
Kate Carpenter 20:37
To learn more about how Jess brought her own second book together, I asked her to read an excerpt for us to discuss. Here's Dr Jessica Lepler reading from chapter four of Canal Dreamers, titled "The Rain."
Jessica Lepler 20:37
Warmed by the sun shining on the tropical waves of the Caribbean Sea, a tiny water molecule, imperceptible to the human eye, vaporized. As a gas, it rose until the atmosphere’s cooler air condensed it back into liquid. Around a dust particle, the molecule and its neighbors formed a cloud. Tropical trade winds pushed the cloud west until it hovered over one of the wettest lands on earth. Here high above the massive Lake Nicaragua watershed, the cloud’s water molecules bumped into each other, forming droplets. Accompanied by thunder and lightning, the heaviest fell to the earth as a tropical rainstorm. But the lighter moisture lingered, slowly succumbing to gravity in prolonged temporales, a persistent rain that soaks this region from May through October. Like a river in the sky, this slow and steady precipitation drenched the soil, filled the lake, a gushed down the desaguadero, or drain, an old Spanish term for the San Juan River. Rushing over the river’s rapids and avoiding evaporation or absorption, the well-traveled water molecule reentered the salty Caribbean Sea, its cycle completed. Upward of 27 trillion gallons of water fill the Lake Nicaragua and San Juan River watershed, which stretches over 16,000 square miles, an area bigger than Switzerland. On just the lake, an average of more than 100,000 gallons of rain falls each second. But not all seconds are equal. Predictably seasonal and yet full of variable microclimates, the water cycled shaped life along the would-be canal route. The Rama-speaking inhabitants of some of the wettest of these lands migrated with the rain. The Spanish descendants, who lived along the western and northern reaches of the watershed, built Granada’s sidewalks two feet higher than the seasonally flooded streets. Even Nicaraguans’ politics followed the rhythm of the rains. In 1824, a bloody civil war ebbed and flowed, resolving just before the rainy season of 1825. Canal dreamers, who wanted to turn this watershed into a waterway, might cut through the land or circumvent the rapids, but they could not change the cycle’s timing. Too much rain in the summer, too little in the winter, and furious winds in between turned the task of surveying the route into a race against the rain. Such was the case of the only surveyor to reach the canal route in the 1820s. Hired by an international network of canal dreamers, he tried to chart a means to connect the oceans, but the water falling from the skies proved a formidable foe.
Kate Carpenter 20:37
I picked this passage, as I told you ahead of this, because I wanted to talk a little bit about your narrative choice here and in a couple other places in the book. Often in histories, as we all know who have listened to this podcast or read histories, we often open with sort of an anecdote about a person, some sort of person-based narrative. But here you focus some part of the environment, something that historians sometimes call non human actors. How did this passage come together? You mentioned that it was a little bit of a struggle.
Jessica Lepler 15:10
This is the only chapter of the book set primarily in Nicaragua along the proposed canal route of the 1820s and it was one of the first chapters I wrote, because its source base was among the most manageable. I found the journal and a few other documents of the only surveyor sent to the route in the 1820s and it was a private surveying mission sponsored by New York merchants, working with British and US agents and Mexican and Nicaraguan politicians, which sounds like it had lots of support, but the politics in the region were shifting so rapidly that the letters of support from these prominent men became potential death sentences by the time the surveyor actually arrived in Nicaragua. So the mission was incredibly deadly, with several members of the team dying of disease. One drowned in a windstorm, and the surveyor was held prisoner and prevented from actually surveying until the rainy season began. And when I first wrote this chapter, I focused the story on the surveyor. You know, he was covered in bugs and starving and itching, and the local folks he hired abandoned him in the middle of the rainy season in the rainforest in Nicaragua, and his his struggles to produce scientific data were the focus of the chapter when I first wrote it, but something didn't feel quite right about this framing, and I realized that this was my chance in the book to turn the extreme environment of the route into a character in the story. So there was no doubt in my mind that the dichotomous dry and rainy seasons were a major issue for a canal plan, but the dreamers of the era didn't see that. They didn't see it because they partly they didn't have any data, like they couldn't even get a surveyor there to figure it out. And also, because they didn't ask the indigenous Rama and Miskito people who lived there, or the local Nicaraguans on the western side who lived there, they didn't ask them about the climate or the geology or anything that might have helped them figure out the science of building a canal in one of the wettest places on earth. So I rewrote and reorganized the chapter to focus on the rain. I didn't mention it earlier, but one of the things that I do as a as a writer, as a researcher, as a human, is that I love to swim. And so the idea for reorganizing this chapter around the water actually came to me while I was swimming. And in other chapters, as you mentioned, I write about these fascinating sharks that live in Lake Nicaragua, and they are everywhere in the historical records, and I didn't know what to do with them. And so kind of like this chapter where I realized that the water was a character in the story, and that I this was my only chance to actually paint that picture, to make somebody try to understand what the how the water could shape a place. I really like the story of these sharks that for ages, people thought were the only species of freshwater sharks in the world, and they pointed to them as a example of Darwinian evolution, that these species had gotten trapped in a lake that went from salt water to fresh water, and they evolved along with the environment. But later, they figured out that actually these individual sharks migrate up and down the river, which they didn't think was possible, because there are these rapids that boats can't get over. But it turns out the sharks can get over them, and the sharks are models of adaptation, because they change their internal salinity to be able to survive. They're also really, really common sharks that are in basically every river in the world. So that it's a really interesting they just seem like the case study of what was able to continue to exist in this place because a canal wasn't built. And so thinking about the non human actors seemed really relevant for this project. I didn't want this to be a story about failure. I wrote a book about panic like I didn't want this one to be failure also. So to me, this is not a story about success and failure. It's a story about various dreams and and sometimes not having something happen is actually a success. I also teach a history of animals course that's really popular. It's a 135 student lecture course, and I love teaching it. And so history of animals become kind of passion of mine. And so the more I teach it, the more I think of the role of non human actors, history.
Kate Carpenter 15:41
I want to talk a little bit about that historical record because you, you mentioned, I think, in the introduction, or maybe the conclusion, anyway, that you had to reference, let's see, five, sources in five languages, in 10 countries, when you're researching this book, which is pretty spectacular. And I think, I think readers, especially ones who aren't themselves, historians maybe take for granted, like how how we use and process those sources, and that it takes a lot of work to work in that many languages and locations. What did that look like, practically for you? I mean, did you go everywhere? Did you were there? Where there multiple ways of acquiring sources?
Jessica Lepler 15:41
This is a fun topic to talk about because it's kind of the detective work that we do as historians, and that's so much fun. So I started collecting, like I mentioned earlier, I started collecting materials for this project along the way. So some of it is the product of 20 years of collecting materials and everywhere that I went to look for panic of 1837 materials, I also looked for these sources. And so some of it organically, sort of collected. And those archives were in the US, primarily the US and England. And so I did a lot of the US and British archival research in person. But when the project expanded out from a biography in around 2019 I sought help with a couple things. So I was taking Spanish. I took French, that's where my background is. But the I started taking classes in Spanish, but then I got pregnant with my son, and it became very hard to do that and and take this, take care of a small child, teach full time, write and also take Spanish classes. So I got really lucky that a graduate student at UNH came to work on modern day. Well, not really modern, 1950s Costa Rica, and he's fluent in Spanish, and he knows Central America, and so I got the support of my department, and we hire we hired him as a research assistant in the summers to translate, and he ended up translating more than 100,000 words of Spanish sources for me. So James Irving, huge shout out to him. I could not have tackled all those sources without him. And as far as getting to places, so I found a researcher in Guatemala City who did a bunch of research for me there, and he had connections in El Salvador and Nicaragua that did a little research for me in those places too, during covid, lots of archives were willing to scan things and send them. So I got some of my archival material. I was actually planning a research trip to the University of Texas when COVID happened, and I ended up not going. They sent me much of what I needed. And so it was that worked out, although COVID was a very hard time. But that was a bright side of it is that some of the archival materials became available, and the Interlibrary Loan folks at UNH, they found rare print materials from Central American countries, because in the 20th century, lots of the papers of political leaders in Central America were sort of turned into print volumes, and so I was able to get copies of those and work through those. Yeah, it's just been a really fun process of piecing together a community of institutions and people and scraping together resources to get the documents to produce this book.
Kate Carpenter 34:01
I mean, with all the sources, it's not surprising to me that you had an earlier draft that was much longer than you needed it to be at the end, which you mentioned earlier. And I know one of the strategies you mentioned for figuring out what to include and what to leave out came when you kind of knew what the book was about better you could sort of judge based on that. Did you have other strategies for cutting words from from the final version?
Jessica Lepler 34:26
I mean, I think revision's really rough. I, sure, I hunted for passive voice phrasing, right? Any anywhere you can take out and it was, is a, that's gone, you know, and adjectives, they just have to go, I think. I had a graduate mentor who encouraged us to use verbs, to make verbs into the centerpiece of sentences. And so I tried to turn sentences that were driven by adjectives into sentences that were driven by verbs, and so that cut the… Peer reviewers who are wonderful at UNC press told me to edit with a scalpel, and that means, like, cutting just singular words here and there. So that's what I did. I also thought about like some of the subjects that this this book ranges across a huge historiographical span, but also historical geographical span, as you might guess from all those archives. And I really wanted to tell the full story of the Miskito and the Rama, who live along the Caribbean side of Central America, but I realized that this was really a book about the attempt to build a canal across between the oceans in the 1820s so I could only spend so much time writing a history of those folks. And so I had to pare that down. It hurt, but I had to do that. You know, my first book was on a financial crisis. There's a big financial crisis involved in this story, the panic of 1825 which is a bubble in Latin American stocks in London. And, you know, I had a robust chapter about that panic, and it became like five pages because I just couldn't, just couldn't devote that much energy and time in this budget of word count towards towards a topic that was important and needed to be there but wasn't the center of the book.
Kate Carpenter 36:19
I always love hearing what gets left on the cutting room floor when people edit books, because it's such a good reminder too, that just because something is interesting and there doesn't necessarily mean it belongs in the book, which is a hard lesson for everyone.
Jessica Lepler 36:33
I think the hardest one for me was Aaron H. Palmer, because he was the starting point for this project, and I don't remember exactly what the word count was, but I want to say I wrote 80,000 words on Aaron H. Palmer, like I had so much material. And so it ended up being a 10 page section of a chapter that's about a lot of other things, including John Quincy Adams's sort of moment of losing his father and the country's, you know, 50th anniversary, and all that stuff had to fit into that same chapter with Aaron Palmer's life story. And so I just kind of promised myself, as I was cutting things, you can write this later. This could be a different book. You have so much here. Don't worry, it's not a waste. You got to the core, essential story you were trying to get to anyway.
Kate Carpenter 37:22
Well, in our last little bit of time, I want to talk a bit about your own influences. Do you, do you have a group of people you regularly rely on for feedback?
Jessica Lepler 37:31
My husband reads or listens to everything, which is really lovely. And like I said, I often draft my parents to tell me where my writing has gotten to to but you can't follow it. Emily Conroy Krutz has been my writing buddy for a long time now, and I have several other friends who I draft to read chapters or like they're very generously read the whole book. But I don't have a regular writing group. I kind of wish I did, but I have the second book writers workshop, and that worked pretty well.
Kate Carpenter 38:01
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Jessica Lepler 38:05
Oh, my, my husband's a font of this stuff. So his, he has two that I want to share, besides enjoying the end of a sentence, which basically means that, like, when you get to the end of a sentence, it should just end. There shouldn't be a clause afterwards. There shouldn't be a long list that ends a sentence like it should just have a nice conclusion. He also taught me purpose, sorry, purpose before task. And so thinking about what writing I should take on like thinking about the purpose of that writing is really helpful. So that's really good. I mentioned that one of my grad mentors taught me about verbs and how important they are. Another talked about engaging the senses. I try to do that and also to use wit, I think, like laughing and engaging people's sense of humor is such an underused tool in historical writing. We're so good at irony. We we master getting people to be, to feel for our characters, but we very rarely use laughter. And I just feel like as a field, it would be so much healthier if we engaged humor along with all of our other literary devices. So that's another good one. And then from your show, I have learned so many things, but I cherish the advice that historians have shared, that you need your rough drafts, right? You need those imperfect, long, wordy rough drafts. And I'm a terrible first draft writer, but I need to do it, to think through writing. So accepting that the first draft will be bad has been so helpful and supportive. So I'll share that one too.
Kate Carpenter 39:49
Are there writers or books that you look to as writing inspiration?
Jessica Lepler 39:54
Gosh, I love all of it, but my all time favorite history book is Scott Sandage's Born Loser, which, man, it's history as poetry. It's just so beautifully written. And my dear friend Emily Pawley is so witty, so her writing is always inspirational. But I love to read novels. I don't have much time to sit down with a book, so I've lately started listening to both novels and history books as I run, I drive, I garden, I can't really listen to them while I swim, which is probably a good thing. That's why swimming's so good for coming up with my own ideas. But this this summer, I read or listened to books by Catherine Howe, Geraldine Brooks, Kate Atkinson, Lauren Groff, Susanna Clark, but my favorite was An Immense World by Ed Yong. And I'm getting to relive my enjoyment of this book because I'm currently reading the young readers edition to my son at bedtime. And it's, it's just a fabulous book.
Kate Carpenter 40:55
Yeah, that's, that's a very good list that you just gave us. There I will, I will link them all for listeners, of course. Well, you know, I know you've wrapped up a book that took you a couple of decades to write, so this is no small question. But do you have, do you have a next project you're tackling? Are you? Are you taking some fallow time? Is Aaron Palmer in the works next?
Jessica Lepler 41:17
Aaron Palmer, someday, someday, I will do Aaron Palmer justice. He's an amazing and infuriating historical figure, but actually, what I'm working on right now is a history of animals. That class has been absolutely inspirational for me, and I kind of want to turn what I do in that class into a book. I haven't I haven't started doing that process yet, but I started with a really small scale study of those Nicaraguan sharks. And so I am in the process of researching the story of these models of adaptation and the scholars who tracked them down. But I think history of animals is next for me as a historian of capitalism, it offers a really wonderful opportunity to think about the non human and economic life. But also I really just want to kind of center the stories of of these, not yet sort of focused on folks who influence history. And so I think that's, I think that's the next project. I'll start with the sharks, I get so attached to small stories. As anybody who reads this book will find out, I just love stories. And so I'm hopeful that I'm able to zoom out, but I tend to be someone who zooms in, so we'll see how it goes.
Kate Carpenter 42:36
I love it well. As historian of the environment and science, that sounds like a book right up my alley, so I I hope to read it eventually. Dr Jess Lepler, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing process with me.
Jessica Lepler 42:50
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 42:52
Thanks again to Jess for joining me for this episode of Drafting the Past, and thanks to you for listening. At Drafting the Past.com you can find show notes, which includes links to Jess's books and all the other books and articles we mentioned in this episode. Would you like to help keep Drafting the Past going? Consider becoming a monthly sponsor at patreon.com/draftingthepast. For as little as $2 a month, you'll get access to occasional bonus content, ad free versions of the episodes, and more. Even more importantly, you'll be helping me continue to make these great conversations freely available to all. After all, we could all use a reminder that friends don't let friends write boring history.
