By MARCUS REDIKER*
Eight practical writing tips for historians
Forty years of thinking about the craft of historical writing must be worth something, so here are the eight tips I've given you over the last ten days – practical suggestions I've found useful about the vexing business of putting unruly words on the page.
(1) While writing a book, I bury myself in a brilliant work of fiction about the same period, to fill my mind with its literary power. Example: when I wrote The Fearless Benjamin Lay, at the Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (for the fifth or sixth time).
(2) In my view, the essential unit of good writing is the paragraph. If you're stuck, spinning your wheels, write a strong paragraph, just one, on whatever topic you're working on. In my experience, this breaks the deadlock and allows thoughts to flow onto the page.
(3) When I know what I want to write about the next morning, I carefully reread my primary sources the night before. It makes it easier to get started the next day, and sometimes the unconscious mind does an impressive job of sorting things out.
(4) Find a fragment of a poem from the period you are studying, one that incorporates one or two themes of your investigation, and write a paragraph, section, or chapter around it. Make this poem sing its historical significance.
(5) Whenever you can make an idea or concept come to life through a person or event, do it. Making your reader see your point through vivid, concrete human thought and action is far more powerful, compelling, and memorable than a dry abstraction.
(6) Economy of expression. Strunk and White said, "Omit unnecessary words." Blaise Pascal wrote to a correspondent: “I regret having written such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short.” Use three words instead of four; be ruthless. Shorter is more powerful.
(7) Keep reading your sources until you hear voices, and then write a deeply human story about your historical subjects. Readers want to learn about real people, making real choices, in real circumstances. Make your actors complex and multidimensional.
(8) Three things scholars need to do to write for a wider audience. First, you have to want it. (Most don't.) Second, you need to read and learn from talented prose stylists. Third, you must work hard at the art and craft of writing.
It's all very simple, actually.
*Marcus Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is co-author, with Peter Linebaugh, of The many-headed hydra (Company of Letters).
Translation: Sean Purdy.
