This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Today's show is a conversation with Jennifer Banks, a first-time book author and senior editor at Yale University Press. Today, we're speaking with Jennifer Banks, who is a senior executive editor for religion and the humanities at Yale University Press. where she has worked for over 15 years. We're going to talk about Jennifer's work as an editor that will hopefully provide some insight for our listeners. 
But first, I want to congratulate Jennifer on your new book, Natality, Toward a Philosophy of Birth. It's a very readable book. I got it on Friday and finished it by Monday and was really sad to be finished with these very interesting but not too long or too dense group biographies. of people including Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Sojourner Truth, Toni Morrison, and Adrienne Rich, and others. So you talk about this in your introduction, Jennifer, but I wonder if you can tell us about how this book came about, considering you do have a full-time job as an editor, so you have plenty of work to do. But why did this book need to be written and you needed to write it? Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. 
It's a real pleasure to be here and reconnecting with you after a number of years. So the book began the way that many of the books that I publish begin for me, which is as an idea. Part of the vantage point that I have as an editor is just seeing not only what's being published, but what's not being published. So I'm, you know, which is about 98% of the submissions that I get, I do not publish myself. So I'm seeing a lot of what's out there. And it struck me Early on in my tenure at Yale Press, I wasn't really getting submissions about birth. I was a new mother at that time, so that absence was felt acutely. And there were other things going on at the time that made the absence more glaring. 
For instance, there was a course on the Yale campus on death that was very popular with undergrads. There was definitely nothing comparable on birth in terms of the course offerings or the books that we were publishing at Yelp press, the books I was seeing coming out from other publishers. So I thought, you know, I would love to publish a book on birth. And of course there are many books on birth out there, but what I found easily accessible was more in the self-help genre. It was medically oriented. I was really interested in, you know, what is the place of birth in a larger life story and the bigger stories we tell about ourselves, um, Individually and as communities, as a species, this felt like a major rite of passage. 
So I was really interested in the myths and meanings that people had applied to birth in some of our kind of deepest and most penetrating accounts, largely in the humanities. And so I started to approach people with the idea, as one does as an editor, and I couldn't find anyone to do it. Many years later, I understand why it was hard to find someone to do this. It's a very difficult topic. And so I asked around. It was probably a couple of years of just sort of asking people as it came up, as I met someone that I thought might be interested taking on a project like this. And all the while, the book was sort of growing in my own head. It began to particularly take shape when I just stumbled upon Hannah Arendt's Idea Natality. 
This was in a a book proposal that a philosopher had sent me and she was writing on childhood. And it was just a very, very brief mention of natality, but I really latched onto it and began to go deeper. I had not been a reader of Arendt's work before that. And so it was really an introduction to a whole body of work, but also a way of thinking about birth that was very, very different than what I was seeing in the broader culture. So that idea started to grow. And I was kind of constantly spanning and collecting and thinking and processing. And so the book was starting to take shape. And I started to have a sense of this is what it needs to do. 
This is what it doesn't need to do. And it was when I had lunch with an agent that I have worked with, a very wonderful agent, and I brought the idea up to her. And said, I would love to find someone to do a book on this topic. And it needs to do this and this and this. And there are this body of work that I can draw and then this argument. And she just looked at me and she said, I know who needs to write the book. She said, it's you. And she's a very compelling person and with great agenting and editorial instincts. And so it was hard to say no to her. So it I do have a background in writing. 
My master's had been a master's of fine arts and creative writing. My background was more in poetry, but I had had a background of doing my own work, sending it out, going through submission processes, getting published as I was getting out of grad school and beginning a career in publishing. So it wasn't outlandish that I would take on a book of my own, but I had reached a point in my life where that ambition had sort of fallen apart. To the wayside, I was raising children and working a demanding full-time job. So I needed the encouragement. And it really was just that one person kind of encouraging me on the path. I sometimes wonder how many books or journal articles are birthed as a result of somebody else telling us, oh, you need to write that or you are the one to write that, giving us those words of encouragement you're describing. 
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know as an editor, so many of the books that I have published have come out of conversations. And it's rarely a matter of me pitching an idea to an author. Sometimes that happens. But I think the more interesting projects tend to emerge out of a conversation where you usually need more than those half an hour meetings. At AAR, you need an hour, an hour and a half where you just sit and talk and things start to emerge. And very often something someone's been thinking about, a question they've had in their own minds, maybe they hadn't been thinking of it as a book, maybe they had and they just needed some feedback, they needed a sense of, you know, what sort of framework might work for this concept that would carry it out into the world in an effective way. 
So I do think those conversations are important. Not all, I mean, some authors can just come up with their own ideas and initiate the whole creative process on their own. But I certainly think that for many, many of us, encouragement along the way and camaraderie, but also just creative exchange is really important to the process. Did you have a writing community while you were writing this book? Who were you showing it to, if anyone? I did not. That's actually one regret that I have is I think, you And I think I didn't want to impose the work on anyone. I felt like I had my duties. And so it was sort of in the quieter background. And it was many years of emerging kind of slowly at its own pace. 
And other things were on deadline and were paying the bills and were therefore more urgent. But as the project was coming more into fruition, I did reach out to some people I knew and was amazed by the generosity of some of the authors I had worked with. Some of them weren't authors I had worked with. And those exchanges late in the process were very important to my own creative process, to the process of the book taking its final shape. But if I could go back, I would probably get feedback earlier. Even the feedback that I've had as the book's coming out and people are reading it in its final form has been really interesting and to me, very much a learning experience. It has shaped some of the smaller pieces I'm writing now that will be coming out. 
Just gives you a chance for your thinking to continue to evolve. Definitely. So it sounds like, are you writing pieces related to the book now, short pieces? Yes. Yes. I have a number of pieces coming out in various places. That has also been really a different experience for me because I was... basically writing poetry, and then I was writing a book. There was never an in-between of short essays, although I love that form, and the form itself is pretty natural to me. I think the challenge is, at this stage, is that each of those places is in a very different kind of publication. So, you know, a book needs to stand on its own and will be read on its own terms, whereas a 
going to be read in the context of that magazine. Many places have house styles. So that was a little bit more challenging to just think about what I wanted to say, what my voice was, but also trying to think about the context in which the piece would be read. And they were very different. I've had interest from very different kinds of places. So... So are these the kind of pieces, because I know some of my academic colleagues, we are encouraged to try to get op-eds or magazine pieces out around the time of publication to kind of help spread the word about the book, or get people possibly interested in it. Is that how you're seeing these smaller writing projects? Yeah, I mean, one of them is a piece that I initiated that will be coming out, I believe, this weekend in Lit Hub. 
It's about mothers. But the other pieces were published. people kind of hearing about the book coming to me. One was a piece that I just submitted yesterday for Big Think, and they were interested in doing an excerpt. But the excerpts, the book doesn't excerpt very easily. So I went back and did a decent amount of rewriting and recasting and rethinking of the material that they plan to use. So yeah, I mean, I hope that it will... get the ideas into different sorts of places. It's certainly been a lot of fun and it's been great to be able to shift gears quickly and to think about the content from different angles. There were also unresolved questions I had at the end of the book that just, you know, it's now been well over a year since I finished the writing. 
And there are things that I've thought, oh, I wish I could have gone into that more or something now makes a little bit more sense to me. And so I have a piece that will be taking up some of the questions that I felt like I didn't go into enough depth in the book. And they're related, but I mean, they don't need to be in the book, but they were things I've continued to think through and question. So that has been great to kind of expand out from the book to work on a piece that's related, but not just a summary of the book's contents. That's great to hear. I think a lot of us have the experience of having submitted something or having something published. 
And then, of course, afterwards, you feel like, oh, but I really should have made that point. Or this is actually much more what it's about. Or now, with the perspective of it being out of me, I can really see it. And so it's great to hear that you're actually able to take advantage of that new perspective now and kind of continue to think with some of the material. You know, it doesn't have to be all sort of regret, which some of us sometimes feel at that point. But there's more you can write. and a continuing conversation to make out of it. Yeah, the book for me was a kind of signpost of my thinking at a certain point along the process. So I think we tend to think of books as kind of the definitive statements, but in fact are thinking, oh, we should continue to evolve. 
And particularly as the book comes out and there's conversations around it, sometimes it just makes you more sure of what you've said, thought it through from new angles that you hadn't considered before. It sounds like finding an agent wasn't a problem because luckily, I'm sure your work gave you some of these contacts and these were part of your networks. But I'm curious with finding an editor, what kind of challenges, if any, did kind of selling this book present? Yeah. I mean, being in the industry, I don't think helped me really at all other than having that initial contact with that agent. So that was a first open door. But after that, I really had to go through the process just like anyone else. 
And I tend to be so busy with my own list and my own world that I don't know the world of New York publishing in and out. I'm not having lunch and dinner with all of those people all the time. So I was as much a newcomer to that scene as most authors are. And Just remind me of your question. Were there challenges to selling this manuscript, finding the right editor? Because it sounds like the agent was kind of into it from the beginning. But I'm curious about the next step to finding your editor. Yeah, it was a process. And I actually had that offer from Norton early on, which was great. But I had the kind of feedback I got through meeting with different editors and 
discussing the book made me think I need a little more time. So I actually didn't accept the offer at that time. And I took a couple years and worked more on the book because I have a full-time job and family. I was a little nervous about getting committed to something that I couldn't yet see how it would be completed and exactly what sort of path I was going to be on. So it was, I believe, about two years later, we re-approached Norton and just approached them and they still, you know, were interested. So that was, that was great. But I, you know, I had to go through it all too, just that those submissions and getting rejection letters and not knowing who to go to when, or it was helpful certainly to have a great agent doing all that work, but I don't know that it makes any of it necessarily less mysterious. 
Yeah. From your perspective as an academic editor, in what ways do you think being published with a trade press was different from what your authors of nonfiction at Yale University Press experience? Well, I don't know that it's so different. I mean, there's no peer review process, so that is different. I actually would have loved to have a peer review process. It's a great chance to get feedback before that feedback has to be made public to the rest of the world. So that wasn't there. And I think the, you know, I wasn't writing the book with the intention of necessarily contributing to the scholarship, although I may have done that. Others can decide. But it wasn't written with scholarly aims necessarily. So there was a different orientation in terms of the publishing. 
But the process, I would say, was fairly similar. Yeah. I think there were more expectations on me as an author on the trade side in terms of really trying to hustle and, you know, get the word out and put various pre-pub materials together that I think was probably a little bit more intense than at an academic house. Some of the expectations about rewriting may have been a little bit higher with a place like Norton. And, you know, I think it varies editor to editor. Some academic editors do a lot of editing too. So but yeah, I was actually amazed at how much was was very similar. That's interesting what you said about the hustle, some of the folks we've spoken to, I guess, some academics expect, you know, the ones who haven't been published by trade, that the trade press will do more for you will actually do more of the hustle themselves and 
terms of that publicity and putting the word out there. But it sounds like from what you're saying, they also were hoping or looking for you to do some of that too. Yeah. And I mean, Norton has done an amazing job, so they were certainly working very hard too. But I think this is true for all authors. This is the publishing landscape in our moment, which I don't always actually think is a great thing for authors that there are such... high expectations about their involvement in the publication process in terms of getting the word out, connecting with their readers. I think it can be really hard. Some authors really gravitate towards that. They love just talking and talking. They love doing, you know, being on TV. 
They love writing their op-eds. They love using social media. And I think others don't. And it can work for either author sometimes, you know, All those efforts don't necessarily translate into a book's success. Sometimes they do. But yeah, I think industry-wide, it's become a really important part of the process. I think audiences expect more of that direct contact with an author. Even from when I arrived at Yale 15 years ago, where it was really, you know, you're looking for print reviews in the New York Times book review. You know, it's just a different landscape now. There's just so many different ways a book can get out there and authors... can be involved in so many ways, which is also empowering, I think. I'm curious what ways you think your being an editor did help you write this book or get it out into the world in a better way. 
Well, I was surprised at how little publishing knowledge helped me, to be quite honest. In some ways, it was a burden in the sense that it made me too aware of what can go wrong at every stage. On the other hand, I think it gave me a certain amount of perspective. One of the things I see, which I think others don't see, is that almost no book sails right through the process ever for anyone. There are challenges that each and every manuscript and book and author face along the way. And so I think it gave me a sort of toolkit to navigate any choppy waters and to feel like, oh, this isn't this isn't just me, this is just part of publishing a book. 
And having it come out into the world is just dealing with a range of opinions and challenges. So that I think has been the most helpful thing. And it's the thing that I would want other authors to see. The number of Pulitzer Prize winning authors who go out with a submission and get zero offers, like you would be shocked. You think that once someone has reached a certain status, that's it. Everything's going to go well with them, for them. And it's not entirely true. There's probably some truth to it. And I do think some people have a smoother passage through the process and others don't. But I think that it's not particularly easy for anyone. Anything that you felt you have more empathy or insight into about, you know, having, I 
come out into the world now that you've been through this yourself? Oh, certainly. I think that, you know, I feel a lot of empathy for my authors. I think I've always felt that just because I did have a background of submitting and publishing and getting rejections and having one's work critiqued. So I never forgot that experience and it's always been with me. But I think it's certainly going through it in terms of a book. certainly gave me a level of depth in terms of insight that I hadn't had before. And I've always found my authors very, very brave and skilled and sane and talented. And I've always been amazed at, you know, just about all of them navigate the process reasonably well. And I think it helps to probably to have an editor who is sympathetic when you have those, you know, little moments of doubt or... 
or all-out breakdown, as I've seen happen, for sure. But just that it's, you know, it's kind of a nerve-wracking process. These are things that we pour our lives into, and it's a piece of ourselves, and we put it out there, and it's not an easy world, particularly right now. Has this made you want to write another book? Maybe someday. I'm not rushing into another book right now. I, you know, I may have underestimated how challenging it would be to... work 10, 12 hours a day on another job and write a book at the same time. It took me a very long time and I did get there. But I think I will want to do another one. I have a number of ideas. 
I do like the idea of working on some essays in the meantime and doing something that's smaller form, possibly with the idea that something could evolve into a book form at some point. But it will be interesting to see, you know, just in terms of circulation, what reaches people. I have a real attachment to the book form, almost increasing every year, just because I think it is so unique and it's so different than the formats in which we encounter the written word in other ways. So, yeah, I would love to have the chance to immerse myself in that way and really explore think through something in terms of a larger idea and a larger structure and drawing on a larger body of material. 
Since we're speaking about writing habits in this podcast, also, I'm curious to hear how you actually did create a schedule, if you created a schedule, or how you fit this book writing into your already very busy life. The last, I guess, year and a half to two years where it was under contract, The pandemic hit. I needed to get it done. I put myself on a schedule of every other day at 3 a.m. I got up and I wrote. And, you know, I had kids up by 6, 7. They were off to school. And then my day got going from there. But I really needed a few uninterrupted hours. And so I had to make the most of them. And then I found that I also was constantly processing ideas kind of in the background. 
chunks of uninterrupted writing, but I also had time away. I wasn't, you know, writing eight hours a day or I wasn't even able to write every day at all. So I had to be kind of thinking through different problems and exploring different solutions and letting things take shape in my head as I was doing other things. And sometimes, you know, it was in the course of my day where I'd get a submission or I'd be reading one of my author's manuscripts and the way they had you know, started a chapter or something, some idea that, you know, had been missing, maybe some source that I didn't, a book I wasn't aware of that, you know, I came across in the course of my day that I was able to then read and, you know, opened up new possibilities in my own mind. 
So I think this, you know, I hear a lot of people who have various responsibilities in the world and, and don't necessarily have tons of time for writing that they tend to work like this. Um, There's a kind of writing that goes on when you're not writing. And several people we've spoken to also have said that as much as there is this advice about writing every day, not everyone is able to do it. And in fact, having these breaks from writing is often very helpful for the kind of processing you're mentioning and just having a fresher perspective when you come back to it. Yeah. I mean, I was also finding my own habits and my own routines, my own creative process as I went. 
One of the things that I learned is that I can generate a lot of content. And so at a certain point, the goal wasn't to generate content. It was to figure out exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it. So sometimes that just sort of sitting down and writing and producing your 500 words or whatever a day, sometimes that wasn't actually very helpful to me. It could even potentially be distracting, kind of taking me on a different path. Because of your extensive experience as an editor, we wanted to ask you about your advice for getting the attention of an editor at a top university press. I'm wondering if you could tell us about what works and maybe as important what doesn't work when an academic is trying to approach an editor. 
Well, I always tell people to just keep in mind that editors are just people and they're in the they tend to be overwhelmed. They have a lot coming through their inboxes. And to try to imagine what it would be like to be on that side of it. I think when you're on the other side of it, you just see someone who's sending out rejection letters, you see closed doors. I think sometimes editors are seen as these authority figures who are gatekeepers, which I guess they are. But it's also, in my mind, publishing is very much an act of devotion, pretty selfless devotion. You are basically staying behind the scenes and committing yourself to helping another person and their work and their career flourish. 
And you don't tend to usually get much credit. There aren't tons of rewards, but it is a deeply gratifying process, I think, for people who like to do that kind of nurturing of other people. So, you know, I mean, to think of the possibility that the editor you're approaching is working in that mode. And to approach them as a person, to try to help them see you as a person. I think that we get so much that's just these sort of shots in the dark that can feel kind of aimless, like they weren't actually intended for you, sort of for anyone. And they don't, you know, maybe the pitch doesn't really give you a clear sense of who this is as a person. 
So allowing some of that personality and style out, to come through and trying to communicate that to your editor and also try to just engage with them as a person. So sometimes that means, you know, familiarizing yourself with who they are, what their list is. Now with so many people in publishing on social media, it's actually very easy to start getting a sense of a person without necessarily meeting them at a conference you can also you know start to track the the publications that are coming out of that house seeing what books you've read and in the acknowledgements getting a sense oh this person i keep seeing this person getting thanked in the books i tend to read and so when you reach out to them you're pitching your project but you're also trying to give them a sense of why you are reaching out specifically to them to them as an individual to the house to 
You know, the conversation that's going on there, how do you want to be a part of it? So sometimes just mentioning the books that you've read that you've loved that the editor may have published or, you know, if there's a mutual acquaintance or some sort of personal connection that you can make. I, as an editor, tend to take a little bit more time with those proposals just because I feel like, oh, if someone has put thought into approaching me, I should take thought, take care and take my time in evaluating things. their project. So that's probably the biggest one. I think that so many of these conversations about publishing that I hear, there's a sense that there's a set of rules that if everyone could just learn them, it would all magically happen. 
And unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. I have certain things that I do my way, but I know editors at other university presses or trade presses that would give a complete different set of guidelines. And so to know that there's no exact right way of doing things, there's a wrong way in the sense of being rude or just not giving enough information in your pitch letter. So there are some basic things about like I like in an email, in the body of the email to have the pitch rather than just a series of attachments. There is something that when you're getting 20 submissions or so a day, having to reach for that attachment when you're already in a position where you don't need more projects, you really are not highly motivated to be signing up a lot more, but if something just grabs you right in. 
So that is just a little trick for me is to put that pitch letter in the body of an email. Don't make it too, too long. Don't make it too short. A few paragraphs, tell them who you are, put your bio in, have a good proposal. Proposal is hugely important. Some people will approach publishers with a full manuscript, and occasionally that works more so when I think someone has a strong publishing track record, and there's a lot for the publisher to already go on. But most of the time, you really need to have a good proposal. I think when I first came to the press, I had been at Harvard University Press for a couple years before that, and so I had done peer reviews there too. 
But even after a couple of years of peer reviewing there, when I came to Yale, it did feel initially more like, oh, this just hurdle we have to get over. And I think now I think about it very, very differently because it's just true that the books are going to be out in the world. We want them reviewed. So your, you know, your book is going to be hopefully reviewed in the peer review is in many ways is a much safer, more private space for this sort of exchange to happen. Yeah. I wonder if you can also, and by the way, I, I, I agree with you. It's the minority of times, just even anecdotally among friends, that there are these really difficult or what seem like overly negative reviews. 
In those cases, I guess there's this question of how do we move forward? I mean, first there's the emotional response to a difficult review, but then the letter that you write in response to it that then seems like the most important thing because it feels like that one review could possibly sink in. project. And so it's a kind of scary moment. And I don't know if you've been in communication with your, if any of your authors have been through that kind of experience. Yeah, the author response is a hugely important piece. When I bring the projects to our faculty board, that's one of the things they really look at. If there are substantial criticisms in the reports, they really want to know how the author has responded. 
And The most important thing from their perspective is that the author is committed to making this the best book possible and is open to the process, open to the feedback. You know, this is a crucial part of what we do. And so, you know, it's more the spirit of that response that's important than I think necessarily every little point. You can have a very open and gracious response. response that also specifies where you think maybe the reader wasn't right or you have an alternative solution to the problem. Sometimes you'll get different reports and they will say different things, but they're identifying something that's not working. And so they'll have very different solutions. So for an author, it's not a matter of saying exactly which suggestion you're going to follow. 
It's more about realizing something's not quite working and that you are going to need to solve that. Yeah, that's really helpful to hear what you were saying about the spirit of that letter. I know sometimes friends and I have wondered, is it the number of things or how many of these points that the reader has brought up? Do I need to say that I will do? But as you're explaining it, this, you know, expressing that desire to make the book stronger, which usually includes some receptivity to feedback is probably more where it's at. Yeah. And I think to not be too defensive as an author, I understand why one would want to be defensive and sort of make, you know, correct any errors and justify your decisions. 
But generally, they're not looking for kind of point by point refutation. It's more, you know, often short and sweet is good. A few paragraphs, briefly outlining. you know, how you're going to go about your revisions. Grateful you are for the feedback. Right. And since we're kind of in the weeds on this, I'm curious, is Yale a press that sends manuscripts back to readers? And it seems like sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't. And colleagues and I are often confused about when it does or doesn't happen. So you mean a reader has read a manuscript and then it gets revised? And so occasionally... There are cases where something needs very significant revisions. We don't get support to publish yet. So I need to bring the project back to our faculty board. 
Or maybe if I don't have strong enough reviews, I usually won't even bring it to the board. I will just work on revisions and resubmitting to readers again. just so that when we get to the point of presenting, I'm in a strong position. And so they don't feel I'm kind of sneaking things through. And we want the book to be in its best form by the time it's out in the world. So yes, occasionally we would go back to the same person. If a reader has written a positive review that had a whole bunch of suggestions for revision, as long as they've basically recommended publication, as long as the author and I have feel like we have a shared vision of how to go about the next steps. 
And I can tell they're invested in doing the work. It wouldn't usually go out for revision again, or I'm sorry, for review again. Right. Interesting. There's two questions we're asking all guests. One of them is, what is something that you wished you had known earlier in your career about writing or publishing? And with some of the editors we've spoken to, we ask about what they think academics might benefit from knowing? Or you might answer that question as an author yourself. Well, I think I've touched on this already. Just really two ideas. First is that it's not an easy process for anyone. I think people can be very daunted by getting their first rejection letters, and they take those as indication of the value of the project. 
When in fact, publishing is really about timing and connection, finding the right person at the right time. And there are great projects I see all the time that maybe only get one offer. They go out on large submission, maybe they get one offer and it's not big. And then the author does the work and it comes out and it's a great book. There are other things I see that go out on wide submission, get lots of offers. There's lots of interest and then perhaps not as much excitement about the book when it comes out. There are parts of the market that are the authors just have fewer possibilities depending on what you're publishing and how you're publishing. So there are areas that are overpublished. 
There are areas that are underpublished. Certain subjects will be harder to place. So just to know all of that, that it's kind of an unpredictable industry. A rejection letter is not necessarily a value judgment. It's a statement about the potential fit with that particular house and editor. And What else? I think to, you know, to do the work that you want to do, which is of course easier said than done. But I think that while there's always a little bit of negotiation back and forth and, you know, working with the house and the editor and the style and the conversation that's going on there, to really also hold to your own vision. And it might mean a house that is different than what you originally thought. 
It may be an editor you weren't aware of, you know, you may have had the person you thought you wanted to work with, but to kind of hold true to your own vision for the project, to what excites you about the material, because a lot of, a lot else is just, it's extremely unpredictable. And is there a writing practice or habit that is working for you now? Just the morning. Right. Yeah. Like I said, I have a very, full and busy life. So I've realized I need that time in the morning where no one is expecting emails from me. There are a few distractions. I tend to think better in the morning. I've also realized for myself that I'm a reviser. I think this is, I didn't understand the degree to which I was a reviser when I was kind of at the beginning of all this. 
So that's something I've had to learn is that I have to kind of work with something again and again and again and keep looking at it. And to understand that, you know, sometimes that's more time intensive, but it usually is worth the effort. I think, you know, I have authors who tell me that, you know, they hardly edit a word. Some of them are slow writers. So they sit down and every word is kind of carefully composed. And They're really pretty sure of what they say once it's down on the screen or down on paper. Some people just write impossibly perfect prose and it comes out that way. Not many, but there are a few I have worked with. Although even those authors do tend to struggle, I think, in different ways. 
Sometimes it's a matter of pulling everything together. Working with a longer form can still be a challenge. And then I have... authors who just produce a lot and then have to cut a lot, revise a lot. I think for most academics, they tend to overwrite a little bit. Most manuscripts come in over length. They're rarely under length. So that's something I've learned as an editor too. And I think the process of writing the book for me was also realizing how much can be winnowed down and how much needs to be discarded. It's the... kill your darlings. People say, you know, the things that you write and you think this is great, but very often you end up having to let go of material that you like, but it just isn't serving the whole or, you know, a closer examination wasn't good to begin with. 
So this, you know, the one thing I will say that is just always and endlessly fascinating to me is just how many different forms of creativity my authors have exposed me to and that they work in such different ways. And, you know, for me, I've had to try to observe and support and understand that not every author is going to write the same way, produce the same way. And some authors need me to step back. Some authors really need me to dive in. Some authors need cheerleaders. Some, you know, just want to be left alone. Do you think you've learned about writing from your authors? Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, editing, I think part of what I've learned is editing my own prose is from editing other people's prose too. 
Of course, it's harder to do your own. You don't have the same clarity, you know, coming to the material fresh in the same way, but yes, certainly. And I think it's been helpful to see projects at different stages. This is one of the gifts of, of, being in the industry because when you're just on the receiving end as a reader, you see these, you know, beautiful finished products. What you don't see is everything along the way and realizing that there are decisions made along the way all the time and that they're quite consequential. Sometimes coming in too late to a project for me is hard if the framework has already been established, but that framework doesn't seem like it's one that's going to serve a 
a book well. So what writing the book kind of reminded me of, I already sort of knew it, but not with the same depth, is just what it's like to be in the middle of the materials as they're taking shape and to understand the different ways you can play with them and play with structure and think about things like length, all the kind of elements that go into a manuscript and to not feel like, you you know, shouldn't be reconsidered at any point. There's always a different way to do things. And so I think that experimenting and just trying things is important. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer. This has been really interesting and fun to hear your experience and your perspective. We're very grateful for you taking the time to do this. 
I know you're very busy. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writingitpod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.