Writing is Personal
What it Was Like Writing This Book
This post is part of an ongoing series by the authors of Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online: A Student-Centered Approach. For more information about the entire series and to meet the authors, check out our welcome post.
Post Playlist:
Mirrorball by Taylor Swift
Nobody by Mitski
Duvet by bôa
Go as a Dream by Caroline Polachek
Rises the Moon by Liana Flores
When I think back to when this started, all the way back in 2022, something I wasn’t prepared for was how emotional it would be to put a book together. Writing is a vulnerable and personal process, even when writing about something like instructional design, so in retrospect perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that there were parts of this process that affected me personally. This post includes some of those parts of the process and the questions I asked myself along the way. A big part of this writing came from the processes outlined in Chapter 17 of the book about reflection, so if you get interested in this process that chapter might be of interest too!
Is this chapter perfect yet?
When writing a book, you might expect that everything can be exactly the way you want. Unlike presenting or teaching live, writing something allows you to go back and edit until it’s perfect. At the beginning of the process, the timeline seemed long: a year or so to write a book? That will give us plenty of time to make this exactly the way we want it. Or so I thought.
While it’s true that a book can be edited as many times as the authors have time and energy for, that doesn’t mean the time is unlimited. It also doesn’t mean that repeated edits will make the sections better. Sometimes, even an imperfectly-worded sentence can perfectly communicate what needs to be communicated for that moment. Allowing perfectionism to enter your thoughts can mean that you’ll never be quite happy with the way the book is going, which might result in the book never being done.
A perfect book for us meant a book that was finished on time that was useful to librarians who wanted to learn about instructional design. That doesn’t mean every paragraph is exactly perfect or every sentence is perfectly clear. Instead, looking at the big picture and allowing those small imperfections to persist in the final copy is its own kind of perfect.
Do I know what I’m talking about?
Imagine sitting down to a Google Doc to write about something you know about, but have never written about. You begin writing, then as you are writing you begin to wonder… do I need to cite any of this? I learned it through my experience, but how can I validate these claims? Who else’s expertise can I bring in, to help me prove that I know what I’m talking about?
I had these thoughts throughout writing, which were then followed by a question: aren’t I the one writing the book? Aren’t I writing this book because something similar doesn’t really exist? What would I cite, even if I could?
Of course, it isn’t true that we don’t cite anything in our book. Many works that came before us informed our writing, and we made sure to properly attribute them throughout. That being said, though, there are many things that come from our own experience: processes for reflecting, writing learning outcomes, or managing projects are all “home grown,” in a way. For me, it took time to overcome the idea that we needed to justify our expertise through citations or “prove” every claim. As the authors of the book, our expertise was accepted by our publisher, so a big part of this was letting that be enough for me.
Are we ever going to be done?
For a very long time when writing this book, it felt like we were never going to finish. The book is over 250 pages, and our table of contents included over 20 separate chapters we needed to write. At the beginning, this task was so daunting. The very idea of writing 20 chapters about instructional design seemed so out of reach as to be unachievable.
And then, one day (literal years later), we received the cover image and a final proof to look over. Finally, it snapped into focus that this book would actually be finished. The feeling is hard to describe: a bit surreal, a huge accomplishment, a final decision that this book would actually come out. Holding the physical book in my hands was another major milestone along this process. The book feels like a 3D-printed copy of all of our thoughts and meetings over the past three years, and now it is out and able to be purchased. It’s humbling and exciting that people will be able to read and (hopefully) benefit from the work we’ve been doing.
Wait, people are going to read this now?
That sense of accomplishment is paired with vulnerability, as well. Now that it’s out, I know people will read it and have opinions about it. Some, ultimately, will choose to use the book and find it helpful. Others will dismiss it. We don’t have any control over how people respond to the book. Now that it’s out, in a way this book isn’t ours anymore. I mean, obviously it is: our names are on the cover as authors, after all, and that CV line isn’t going anywhere. But, just as publishing a lesson plan means that others can use it and adapt it however they see fit, publishing this book means that now it’s in the hands of the readers. How will this book be used? How will people respond? I don’t know, but what I do know is that it represents the culmination of multiple years of work and long hours typing away on a Google Doc.
The end, for now
Over the past four weeks, we have published a series of four posts about our experience writing the book. This one, part four, concludes our series. Thank you for your time spent reading this post, and hopefully the others in the series, and we hope that we’ve inspired you to check out our full book and learn more about the work we’ve created.
Info Literal will be back to its regular schedule starting in 2 weeks, on May 21. Subscribe below to get new posts delivered to your inbox.