New Year, New You

Happy New Year!

This begins the second year of Inquiry Editing, LLC. I’m thrilled to share more information, book reviews, and newsletters with you. I am also excited to continue working as an editor.

This year, my own writing plans include working on another book length project. This certainly feels exciting to me (and, I hope, it does for you as well). But, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t explain all that has already gone into making this decision.

You’ll note that I do not say I made a resolution or I am hoping to work on a book project. The language of hope and “new year’s resolutions” tends to be lofty wishes. If hope is the thing with feathers (per Emily Dickinson), then these hopes tend to fly away. They take flight for the same reason stray papers and debris do in a strong wind: they aren’t grounded.

Plans can certainly ground a project and make it sturdy. We’ll cover that next week. For now, I want to talk to you about the thinking stages of a project.

Thinking or mulling over or marinating happens before you begin to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. For me, it includes a lot of reading and a lot of note taking. I follow the trail of the research by scouring footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and CVs. I find that the footnotes and endnotes give me tidbits that I find fascinating and places to explore them. The bibliography tends to speak to a pattern. I note which books have citational ubiquity and which speak to my burgeoning interests. In people’s CVs, I see a trajectory of thought. Sometimes, I follow that thought process from beginning to end, noting which ideas shift and which are never interrogated. In the pre-pandemic times, I would like to go to the library and look for one book, then look five to the right, five to the left, up and down… I’d take as many as I could in the circle.

I understand I have a wide variety of writers here: academic, non-fiction, poets, technical, multi-hyphenates. Your research process may look different from mine. But, the grunt work should feel familiar.

This is the unglamourous part of research. Often, it doesn’t look like much. Folk often complain that they are spinning their wheels. Sometimes those interesting trails don’t lead anywhere fascinating. Sometimes you receive a bit of information and don’t know what to do with it. To non-writers, the thinking part often looks like procrastination. They aren’t sure what the hell you’re doing with all the books, papers, conversations, archival material.

That’s fine. You don’t see a plant making roots either, but it happens. You gotta keep watering it anyway.

I love new beginnings because they give me a chance to restart: new calendar year, new school year, end of school year, new month, new week, new day. I like the potential of it: something akin to magic happens when possibility exists. To me, there isn’t much more magical than the spark of new information, new connections, new thoughts.

As the new year falls upon you, give yourself time to think.