There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with deleting pages you fought to write. In this episode, I talk about why that feeling is so common when you’re turning a dissertation into a book and what it reveals about the shift from writing to be evaluated to writing in service of an argument and a reader. I reflect on why cutting isn’t a sign that something went wrong but an essential part of how book projects take shape.
I also spend time with the emotional and practical side of letting go: why we cling to material that no longer serves the book, how scarcity thinking around writing makes revision more painful, and why early drafts are best understood as thinking tools rather than finished prose.
If you’re revising a long project and feeling stuck, this episode is an invitation to trust that cutting isn’t erasing your work. Instead, it’s creating the space your book needs to become what it’s meant to be.
This episode is one in a series of turning your diss-to-book. Here are the others:
Five Key Shifts from Dissertation to Book
A caveat before we begin: dissertations are field-specific creatures, and I’m primarily speaking to those of you in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. If you’re coming from a field where dissertations look radically different, some of this may not apply to you.
Diagnosing Dissertation Mode in Your Book Manuscript | Ep. 25
If revising your dissertation for a book feels harder than you expected, there’s nothing wrong with you or your project. In this episode, I talk about why dissertation writing trains you into very specific habits—and why those habits can linger long after the degree is done. I reflect on the deeper shifts required when moving from dissertation to book, …
Trained Not to Trust Ourselves
If you’ve been following along, you know I recently wrote about the five key shifts involved in transforming a dissertation into a book and published a follow-up podcast episode that explored some more specific examples of what to do and what not to do.
