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| Train climbing Mount Snowdon Photo by blogee |
When I wrote the book-writing rules for
myself almost a year ago, I’d had an assumption that, correctly handled and
planned, the process of drafting the book would proceed at a steady and even
pace throughout the year of British Academy-funded leave – like a well driven
train, just puffing along.
I had some hazy recollections of the last 2
months of writing my first book being slightly grim, as I ran out of physical
and intellectual energy, of crawling to the finish line: a large envelope stuffed
with the MS in the post to the publishers, and a plane to the Canary
Islands . This book has now had nearly 12 months of steady ascent,
but the track suddenly seems to have got steeper, and the general feel of the
book-writing experience more intense. There is ever more to think about, as you
keep realising, as you work on chapter x, how what you’re writing will affect paragraph
y in chapter z. There’s a sense of the key arguments starting to lock together,
but with a lot of mental noise and effort.
This sense of entering a more critical
stage is probably tied to the fact that I’m about to start writing the two core
chapters of the book, on how religious identities are constructed (or not) in
early 16C Poland
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