Kate Carpenter: Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast where we talk all about the craft of writing history.

I’m Kate Carpenter and I just want to say that, if you’re anything like me right now, you might be finding yourself feeling like writing or talking about craft feels a little insignificant in light of everything else happening in the world.

I really, really get that.

But I’m gonna suggest that everything that’s happening makes it all the more important to get together and talk about how we tell our stories, how we share our humanity, and how we add our voices to the world.

One of my favorite writing quotes is attributed to playwright Edward

Albee: “The act of writing is an act of optimism.

You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it did not matter.” We’re here to remind each other to keep taking the trouble.

For this episode, I’m delighted to be joined on the podcast by Dr.

Emily Herring.

As you’ll hear, I’ve been following Emily’s career for a while now, and I was eager to ask about her first book and her shift from academia to full-time writing.

Her book is called “Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People.” It’s an intellectual biography of philosopher Henri Bergson, who achieved remarkable fame in the early 1900s, and it’s a genuinely fascinating and pleasurable read.

Let’s dig into it.

Here’s my interview with Dr.

Emily Herring.

Emily Herring: When I was a lot younger.

When I was a child, I always liked to write, but I did sort of pastiche or write out plagiarism, really, of all the books I was reading at the time, so like the Lemony Snicket books and that kind of thing.

But I was, I grew up in in Paris and in France, in high school, in particular, in university, there are some very sort of strict and particular rules about essay writing, and you do a lot of it, and you study the methodology, and so a lot to do with structure and how you formulate the problem.

And I think that had a huge impact on me.

And, you know, in France, everyone studies philosophy in high school, and we would have these four hour exams where we would spend four hours answering one question, you know, and I feel like that that definitely must have had an impact on on how I approach structuring my, writing and how I think about writing.

And then later I moved to the UK to do my PhD, and that, again, is another kind of writing, academic writing.

So I was introduced to that and also to a more relaxed, I guess, way of structuring my thinking than the French Way, which was quite nice, and then, and then, more recently, in the past, sort of five years, I I've left academia, and I have had the pleasure of of approaching writing again, completely differently, in a in a more creative way, writing for a general audience.

So, so my biography of of the French philosopher a son, and that was that was a real pleasurable experience, and it sort of at once applying all the rules and things that I'd learned over, you know, but also just completely breaking with all those rules and being able to be more creative and use everything I'd learned, but also do what I wanted to do.

Kate Carpenter: Well, I'll start here with just my practical questions for you.

So when and where do you like to do your writing?

Emily Herring: So, I tend to write at home for a very practical reason, which is that I for the for the research I was, for the book I was writing, and for the research, I needed to have a lot of primary sources with me, and that it would if I wasn't writing at home, it would have involved lugging around lots of heavy books.

But if I could choose to, or if, if, if I somehow had digitized all those sources, I might have chosen to write in a cafe or something like that.

And I tend, I find that I tend to find myself writing later and later.

The further I advance in a project, the later in the day I tend to start and then towards towards a looming deadline, I tend to be working through it through the night.

And I find that Yeah, at night is when my mind is the clearest.

I don't know if that has to do with sort of short attention span things where, actually at night there aren't many distractions.

And so therefore that's when I'm most able to think and concentrate.

Something relaxing about that for me.

But then, obviously, then I'm sort of jet lagging myself.

It's not, it's not ideal.

Kate Carpenter: Are there, how do you like to organize yourself?

Are there tools that you use?

Emily Herring: Yes, so I'm quite chaotic, I think, in general.

So I try to be as organized as possible to compensate.

I guess I use Scrivener for this book, and that was really how.

Helpful because of the way I sometimes feel like I need a blank page to be able to think.

And the nice thing about Scrivener is you can sort of organize lots of different files and things so I could, I could hide something away, if it was, if it was getting too overwhelming, and just start fresh with the new page kind of thing, whilst having everything there and then sources and things like that.

Again, I have a tendency for chaos.

So I used to just have piles of notebooks, and then I that, you know, I would take lots of notes, but then forget where, where I'd written things down.

So now I have a tablet where I can write and then organize all my notes, because I do like writing by hand.

When I'm taking notes, I find that I need to do that.

So that's one helpful thing that that I sort of started doing while I was writing the book and and I also take take notes, sort of in Word documents.

And then, so I'll take very extensive notes, and then I'll try to create these master files by theme.

So for writing the book, it would be something like, you know, very important biographical information.

So I would compile all of the things that I'd found in from various sources, and then things about bergson's personality, you know, that kind of thing.

So it's, it seems a bit insane, but it's just the way I mitigate the other ways, just complete chaos that that that would be my life.

Kate Carpenter: Where in that research process, then do you like to start writing?

Emily Herring: Again, there's no-- I found, both in my sort of when I was doing still in academia, PhD research, and then for this, I've not found the right way of doing this.

And I found that I was doing research until the very end, which I'm sure isn't ideal, but that's just the way.

I just kept raising new questions and then finding new things, which meant that then I was having to return to parts that I'd already written.

So yes, I wouldn't advise doing this, but that's how, that's how it worked for me.

I did so it took me about two and a half years to write the book, and I would say a solid maybe there was at least six or seven months, which were only research.

And then I think I must have started writing.

But I think it's important to start writing, even if you haven't, you don't feel like you've completed the research portion, because you never really complete the research, research portion.

And and even towards the end of the of writing the book, I felt like I could have easily spent five years, you know, right, or 10 years working on this project.

So you just have to start at some point, otherwise you never will.

Kate Carpenter: Absolutely.

What is your approach to revision?

Then, how do you?

How do you tackle that process?

Emily Herring: I think I tend to be a bit hard on myself.

I I tend to.

I tend to.

I say this because I'm just having flashbacks of of going back to drafts and thinking, Oh, no, this isn't, you know, this isn't working.

This isn't right at all.

And and sort of, really spending a lot of time torturing myself over the choice of a certain word or another and again, chaotic.

But I tend to write and revise at the same time, so I'll be writing something new, and then in the same sort of writing session, I'll be going back to something I've already written and revising.

So the revisions seem to be happening constantly.

It was my first book, and I think that perhaps because I hadn't had the experience of having, you know, professional editors working for me, I didn't quite realize how helpful they were going to be later in the process.

And so I had the the idea that I had to produce something that was completely ready, which I later realized, well, no, actually, there are editors there to help me.

So I might have, yeah, it might have been next time, is what I'm trying to say.

Maybe, maybe I'll manage to not be so hard on myself.

But there's no guarantee.

Kate Carpenter: Well, without sounding too alarmingly creepy, I have been following your career for several years, as you have sold this book and left academia to focus on freelance writing.

Can you tell me a little bit about your decision to make that career shift?

Emily Herring: Yeah, absolutely.

So I finished my PhD in 2019 and then I was immediately hired for a postdoc, which was, which was great, except that I was sort of, I hadn't recovered from from the PhD process, so it would have been nice to have a bit of a break, I think.

But obviously, I was extremely, sort of fortunate to land anything, and because i.

I'm, I'm sure so some of your listeners, or many of them are aware that the the academic job market is quite horrendous and very competitive, and sort of early career academics spend so much of their time writing up proposals and job applications and and funding applications and things like that.

It's, it's, it's really difficult, but so I started the postdoc not having sort of recovered from the PhD, nor properly taken the time to celebrate the fact that I'd completed a PhD.

Because I think that's something as well in academia that we're not very good at celebrating achievements.

You know, we do these huge things and then we jump onto the next thing.

And it coincided also with the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

And so I just started the job, a job in Belgium, in a town where I didn't know anyone, in a living alone in a small flat.

And then suddenly it was sort of lockdowns were looming and that kind of thing.

And so I moved back to France, and I had the the experience of being suddenly, being surrounded by people who weren't in academia at all, and who were kind of asking me questions like, but what do you really want to do?

Do you really want to be doing this?

Or what?

What is it that you like about academia?

Because they could tell I was very tired, very stressed.

And so I started thinking about that and, and sort of progressively started realizing that a lot of the things that I liked about academia, I could still pursue outside of academia, whilst, you know, getting rid of the things I didn't like, which was, were the sort of intense pressures of it and the competitiveness and and also the fact that I was so I was in my by then, I was sort of nearing my 30s at that point, and, you know, not having a stable place to live, not owning your own furniture, the prospect of successive short term contracts potentially all over the world if you're lucky, because if you're not unlucky, then you know, just no job and no no no financial security kind of thing.

So all of those things kind of made me re evaluate, like a lot of people did, I think, during the pandemic, made me re evaluate why I was doing what I was doing, what I actually wanted to do, and I actually secured the book deal for my for my book while I was having all these, all of these thoughts.

And so that kind of pushed me in that direction as well.

And so I was then thinking, Okay, well, what can I actually do that will secure me a form of income?

Because obviously the a book advance is one thing, but you know, that's not a regular form of income.

And so I looked into freelance writing and editing, and found that through the sort of network of contacts that I had managed to build during my time in academia, there were a lot of people who are interested in working with me.

So I've been doing a lot of things, like helping people who for who English, so English isn't their first language, and they need someone to look at an article.

So that would be one form of editing I'll do.

But I've also had some what we would call developmental editing jobs where people either have a book deal or are self publishing a book, and they they want my input, not only on the content, so sometimes it will be things about philosophy or things like that, but they also want me to help them organize their thoughts.

And so that's been very stimulating.

That kind of work is really fun.

So I've met, yeah, I've managed to find myself some work doing that, and I've been really enjoying it.

And although working freelance is by no means, you know, a very stable career move, it's it still feels more secure and more stable than jumping from postdoc felt, yeah, that was quite hard.

Kate Carpenter: It makes sense, at least you get to stay in one place.

Yeah, exactly.

How has your work as an editor affected your writing?

Do you find that it shapes your own approach?

Emily Herring: Yeah, I would, I would say that I was talking earlier about being quite hard on myself, and I think I'd never be that hard on a client who hires me to edit for them, and so that, in turn, has perhaps helped me look at my own writing with a less harsh view, because no one is going to produce a perfect first draft.

And actually, that's, you know, part of the process, and that's what drafts are for.

And it's also shown me how valuable having a second pair or third pair of eyes on a project is, because I've been, you know, working on all sorts of projects that people have.

Sent me, and most of the time they're really fascinating, really interesting.

But, you know, people get stuck because, because they've been working on something for so long, and no one, no one, can really escape that.

So it's kind of pushed me to to perhaps show my own work more to other people as well, or to not be as afraid of that.

And then just sort of, I guess it's a, it's a bit of a, an almost cyclical thing, of of the distance that you have to take on your own work, you then apply that to the vision of of the of the other people's work, and then, in turn, that can inform how you look at your own work.

I don't know if that makes sense, but it's it's just something to do with taking a step back from from the page, be it your own writing or someone else's writing, is such an important part of the writing process, so editing definitely helps with that, I would say.

And then I guess it's also just a matter of helping as an editor, helping people say what they want to say as clearly as possible, then makes me very aware of what I'm trying to say when I'm writing my own stuff, and is it coming across as clearly as possible, and then being able to put yourself in the shoes of read your own work as a reader and not as a writer, which is really difficult to do, but try and try and put yourself in the position of someone who had who hasn't been spending years working on a subject, Absolutely.

Yeah, it's very challenging.

Yeah.

Kate Carpenter: I hope you can talk a little bit about the process of selling this book, first in finding, you know, writing a proposal and finding the agent and then selling it to a press.

I'm especially wondering, it seems to me that maybe the idea of selling a biography of a philosopher for a general audience is maybe not like an obvious slam dunk for a press so I'm wondering how you approach that.

Emily Herring: Yeah, so I was very lucky in many ways.

I think the thing that set this whole process in motion was that I initially, I was approached by an editor at Aeon to write an essay about about my research on Bergson, which I did, and it was about how it was about Bergson's female audience, and how that kind of impacted him, and how it was used against him.

So it was, I guess, quite a colorful, evocative piece that then ended up kind of on the radar of both an agent and then later my publisher.

And so I was contacted by my agent while I was still finishing my PhD.

And so at that point i She, she just asked me, have you ever considered sort of writing something for a more general audience.

And at that point, I was finishing my thesis, so I said, No, I do not have time to think about anything else than my thesis.

But then, as I said later on, when I when I finally had some time to think, I contacted her again, and she, she helped me put together the book proposal, and I actually used that a on article as a sort of sample chapter, because for for non fiction, you don't have to have the whole book already written, whereas for a novel, you know, for fiction, I think people tend to have something like a a draft, a finished product.

But so I did have to spend quite a lot of time thinking the whole structure of what the book would be.

And that was really challenging, because obviously, it was very, very early days, so it felt like and I mean, I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, I'm sure it's very, very far off from what the final structure ended up looking like, so I guess it didn't matter too much.

It was just a matter of giving an idea of of what the contents of the book would be, and what the, you know, the raw matter of it was.

But that took me quite a long time to put together, and she helped me with that, and then most of the publishers she then sent that to just said, No, we don't really see there being a market for this or well, from experience, we know that even you know some really good recent philosophy biographies haven't done that well.

So so she got turned down by nearly everyone, but basic books for my publisher were were very interested.

And I guess it makes sense, because they they're kind of in between academic and general audience publishing.

So it was a very, I think, really good, nice fit.

And she did, actually, my agent managed to get one of.

A press sort of vaguely interested.

So that was a really exciting moment, actually, but, but Basic Books were the ones who were really, really invested in they made a strong case, and they were really interested.

But so, yeah, I guess it was a hard sell, and I would never, I don't, I mean, I'm not even sure it would have occurred to me to do this, if I hadn't been approached by some because perhaps the task would have been too daunting, you know, to how do I even go about selling this idea?

So it was a it was a huge help.

I mean, it was indispensable, sort of having an agent walk me through it and help me.

But so far, the response has been really now that the book is actually out, the the response has been really wonderful, and there's been quite a lot of press about around it.

And that both has to do with the fact that, you know, I have publicists who are who are helping with that.

But also, I think there seems to just be that there was kind of a gap in the literature, in in the in the general audience literature, you know, people wanted to learn more about Bergson and his life.

So, so it's been very exciting.

But as I said, Yeah, I was, I think I was very lucky.

And if anyone has a, you know, if there's any sort of academic people who have a general audience book idea, my advice would be to start by writing something like an Aeon article, not only because it will the editors at a on, for instance, are really good at sort of, they're very serious about how they about the editing they do, and about getting the tone right and the fact checking.

So at the end product you'll have, there will be something very close to what you would then end up doing, I think, for for a book.

And it not only would put you on the radar, probably of the right people who are looking to publish that kind of thing, but also it's a good exercise in seeing whether, whether there is a book there, and as and as I mentioned, it can then serve as a kind of sample chapter as well.

Kate Carpenter: I asked Emily to read an excerpt from the introduction to her book to give us a sense of how she approached the writing project.

Here's Dr Emily Herring reading from the introduction to Herald of a Restless World.

Emily Herring: “At first glance, nothing about Bergson screamed avant-garde.

At the peak of his fame, he was a peculiar little man in his fifties.

It seemed that at any moment his frail body might be crushed under the weight of his massive forehead, which he usually covered in a high crown bowler hat.

His light blue, highly expressive eyes, overhung by thick dark brows, gave him a perpetual air of mild astonishment.

He spoke softly and moved slowly, with the calculated agility of a large insect or small bird.

Although his lectures entranced the most fashionable crowds of the early twentieth century, he was, at heart, a deeply private, almost timid person.

Acclaim and flattery left him uncomfortable, and he found the whole situation embarrassing and inconvenient.

On one occasion, Bergson entered the lecture theatre to find his desk entirely covered in

flowers.

Mortified, he cried: ‘But…I am not a ballerina!’ He found celebrity ‘stupid’ because it distracted both his followers and him from what mattered the most: his philosophy.

Fame, he said, had rapidly become ‘odious’ to him.

Whenever he could, Bergson sought refuge from the madness of the city and the obligations that came with international celebrity in the sanctuaries he had created for himself and his family.

He spent his summers in the country home built for him in the cool air of the Swiss mountains.

The rest of the year, whenever he could, he enjoyed the quiet of his Parisian home, which sat at the end of a garden in a private residence called the Villa Montmorency.

When he looked up from his papers, he could see the neighbours’ cats playing amid the trees and flowers, and he could pretend he had left the city.

‘What I dislike about Paris,’ he told his friend Jacques Chevalier, ‘is the lack of sunshine, the lack of air, the lack of silence…People talk about progress.

But every new advance is accompanied by the invention of a new kind of noise: trains, cars, aeroplanes…I would have loved to live in the countryside.’ He envied the peaceful existence of forest rangers, who lived among the trees, breathing in pure air away from the commotion of the city and enjoying levels of freedom he could no longer hope for.

It seemed to Bergson that each stage of his career had pulled him further away from a life that better suited his temperament.

Yet he also knew that, step by step, it was a life he had chosen.

When he had been assigned his first teaching positions in the smaller and quieter cities of Angers and Clermont-Ferrand, he had grown restless.

Although he valued quiet, he had eventually decided to move back to the turbulence

of Paris: the gravitational pull of a prestigious academic career in the capital had been too strong.

And while he preferred private, meaningful conversations to what he viewed as the empty chatter of social gatherings, he was adept at networking, playing the career game masterfully, making friends with the right people, and seeking out their support at the right time.

His College de France position and various Academie elections came as the result of relentless campaigning on his part.

The quiet Bergson always had to make concessions to the ambitious Bergson; later, one of his main regrets was that he had not taken better care of himself, that he had not followed the advice he so often gave to his friends—to take time off and rest.”

Kate Carpenter: Talk to me about what went into writing this passage.

Emily Herring: It's interesting that you chose this passage, because I spent a lot of time.

Remember spending a really long time on this particular passage, because it was really important for me to capture.

So it's very early in the book.

As you said, it's in the introduction.

And to give a sense of Bergson's physique, his character and this kind of really central contradiction that inhabits that he, that he lives, and that he, you know, he lives and breathes this kind of really difficult tension between the ambitious side of him and then the side of him that would just like to live as A hermit, basically.

And yeah, I really wanted to convey all this and give the reader a sense of, early on, a sense of this internal conflict, because it is what is going to carry the whole story of his life, really, and yes, the humility, but also the deep ambition and the urge to be, perhaps not as famous as he ended up being, but but respected, I guess, and so, yeah, I found it essential to give a reader a strong sense of all of that.

And I remember struggling because, because, I guess it's a difficult thing to do, to write a portrait of someone in only a few paragraphs.

But it was, I remember just thinking that the reader needs to get who this guy is early on, and then, and then I have the time to slowly unravel everything throughout the throughout the book.

Yeah, I'm actually interested in why you chose this, this passage, if I can ask you.

Kate Carpenter: Sure.

It's interesting you say that because, as you were at for listeners, I sent this passage to you a while ago because we had to reschedule, and I was struck anew as you were reading it, how much you were doing.

So what feels to the reader effortlessly in this section, although I am certain that it was not at all effortless that you in just a few paragraphs are giving us a sense of his personality, kind of a sort of sneak peek overview of the trajectory of his career.

And you're also really setting him firmly in place.

You know, we see these very concrete environments that he's operating in, his desk covered in flowers, you know, looking out the window of his neighborhood to watch the neighbors cats, and then the life he dreams of of a forest ranger, which I also found so relatable.

It's powerful.

So I think I mean to me, that's what I could have chosen many excerpts from this book, but I was really struck in this one that you do so much here in such a tight amount of space, but it also doesn't feel to the reader like an overwhelming amount of information.

You know, it's really lovely.

So I was, yeah, I was sort of curious what what it was like to try to pull all that together.

Emily Herring: Thanks.

Yeah, that's lovely to hear.

I think it was a mix, yeah, of it was also, you know, the the description I give of him, which is quite mean, really, you know, I describe it, but it's all, it's all based on, on sort of people, you know, first hand sources, sort of describing him, because so much has been written about him so people who actually knew him, and then, yeah, describing and often, so what always was at the forefront of these descriptions was the kind of contrast between his weird body and his weird physicality, but then his his absolute poise and confidence when he was speaking and the.

You know, hit, so I guess that's what's going on in the in the first paragraph, it's almost like a I've condensed hundreds of pages of people describing him, and I've tried to take the things that I found the most striking and then try to convey because it was so fascinating for me to see.

Because obviously there's no recordings of his lectures.

There's, there's only one very brief recording of his voice when he was very old.

So it doesn't give me, or anyone that you know, there's no way of knowing what, what he what it was actually like to listen to him speak.

And yet, there are these, so many of these really vivid descriptions of him, where people and saying how weird he looked, on the one hand, but also how incredible he was as a speaker, and how entranced they were and the musicality of it all.

So I really try, I try to bring that contrast, and because that's kind of part of the mystique of it, all of you know, and he is, he is odd and fascinating.

So I was trying to, but I remember writing that and thinking, Oh, I'm not being very kind to a when I describe him as a, you know, his very large forehead and his comparing him to an insect or a bird.

But then you look at photos, and you kind of think, well, and yeah, I think I was most fascinated when writing about him.

I just find it so fascinating the idea of someone becoming the most famous person in the world while not wanting to be famous, or while hating fame and the noise of it, and hating noise in general, and hating the noise of modernity, whilst at the same time being seen and perceived as one of the most modern, you know, interesting, exciting writers of the time.

So I was also trying to play on that contrast as well, because I think it's, yeah, again, I've already said this, but it's what's at the heart of the book.

So it was a way of laying it out.

Actually, this is, this is what the book is about.

It's obviously about his ideas and his time and, you know, all the things that were happening around him.

But at its core, it's about the story of a man who was quite extraordinary, but that who was also swept up in a, in a, in an extraordinary way.

And, you know, who had a level of celebrity that was extremely rare, I think, at that time in the early 20th century, and who had the particularity of not liking fame, which I just find so interesting.

So I think that's what I was trying to get across.

But I remember sort of agonizing over those few paragraphs, so which is why I was like, Okay, well, I hopefully it showed and you the fact that you chose them was, I was, I was quite pleased, good.

Kate Carpenter: I'm glad.

I do want to ask you a little bit about sources, because in this introduction, you talk about how there's a huge challenge in writing about Bergson, which is that so many of the sources you might have used were destroyed because he wanted them to be.

How did you cope with that?

Especially, it's such a compelling portrait of him.

So how did you evoke that despite the lack those sources.

Emily Herring: Yeah, as you said, he he asked his wife to destroy all of his papers as a kind of act of a final act of self preservation, I guess, and of control, because he knew that, he knew that the vultures would come and try and and he worried about his correspondence or or his unpublished writings being misinterpreted after his death.

So yeah, that isn't ideal when you're writing a biography.

But the thing is, because he was so very famous, a lot actually did survive, because anyone who had anything with his name on just held on to it.

So there, in terms of correspondence, we have a lot of his letters that have survived, just because, yeah, people held on to them.

So, so that's one thing.

And then, as I mentioned, there's a lot of people who were sort of disciples, I guess, or in contact with him.

They they wrote extensively.

Some of them kind of journaled, um, every single meeting, and then those, those things were published.

So it was still possible to, I guess, gain, gain access to him, even though the things that, um, that were destroyed included, apparently, a manuscript he was working on, but he didn't want to publish.

So, I mean, that's obviously really sad for for the researcher, um, but you kind of have to respect, I guess.

Well, you're kind of forced to respect his wishes because he enforced them so in such a radical way.

So it was, yeah, it wasn't as much a challenge as you would think.

But I think that's down to Yeah, his immense fame.

Kate Carpenter: One thing that I really admired about this book is that your prose is just beautiful.

And I confess to not being a person who regularly reads biographies of philosophers, but I was, I was drawn to this one.

I really loved it, including the explanations of complicated philosophical subjects.

Was that, does that come naturally to you?

Or--please say no.

Or did you have to revise a lot to get that sort of level of smooth writing?

Emily Herring: That's very, very kind of you to say.

As I've already said, I revise so much, constantly revising.

I'm never to the last minute I was I was rewriting or reorganizing sections.

But the way in which I'm able to stop the revisions is that, so I compulsively revise, and then I compulsively sort of reread passages.

And there's I the thing, the one thing that does come naturally to me is, I think there's a I get a sense of rhythm.

Eventually something just feels right.

So I don't know it until I've got it, but once I've got it, I read the passage, and I think, okay, the rhythm of the passages is correct.

Now I don't have to revise it too much, even though I probably still will move one or two words around, but it gets less intense, but a but other than that, no, obviously it doesn't come naturally.

It's a matter of painstaking.

I'm never happy with what I've written in the first instance.

And actually it normally, it usually takes several versions for me to feel okay with what I've written.

And then, even then, and also the way I because, as I've said, also because the research and the writing were happening at the same time.

There were, there would be lots of passages where I would leave big blanks and say, okay, insert something about this here, and then by the time I got back to it, I actually ended up restructuring the whole passage, because I, you know, found out so, so the short answer is, No, I'm extremely chaotic and extremely, yeah, obsessive, I think, over the way, until it feels right.

I can't really stop.

But I think the danger of that is that you, you don't allow yourself to stop.

You have to, you have to, at some point, trust that you know what.

You have to be able to somehow be in tune with what sounds good.

Work.

For me, it's a sound I have to sort of hear it in my head a little bit, and I think, okay, the rhythm is a bit abstract to say rhythm, but it is something to do with rhythm.

Kate Carpenter: You mentioned earlier in our conversation that you had not realized how you would get really useful feedback from the editorial team that you worked with.

What, what sorts of feedback did you find helpful from that part of the process?

Emily Herring: Yeah, it was a weird process, because I was completely on my own for, you know, between signing the contract and then actually having people, uh, carefully look at what I'd written.

It was, it was a it was only when I was nearing the end that they actually started looking and the thing that was most helpful for me was them telling me, No, actually, this section doesn't quite you know, this section in itself is interesting, but it doesn't quite work in the context of the rest of the book.

Back those kinds of decisions I think are very hard to make on your own, because you don't want to delete things when you've spent, you know, when you've spent months and months researching and writing.

And it is vital to have someone who can just look at it and say, either this, you know, this needs to be shorter, or this, this just doesn't work in, you know, this chapter or this section doesn't need to be here, really.

So that was one thing.

And then also, there were actually points where they said, Actually, you should probably develop this a bit more, give a bit more context.

Or, you know, this is actually very interesting, all the things that you can't really see because you've spent too much time obsessing over it.

So that that was really, that was really, really helpful, and really, I mean, it's such a lonely process, and it was so nice to suddenly have, I suddenly had two people who were independently, kind of giving me all sorts of feedback.

It's also very scary because, because you just start thinking, okay, what are they doing to my baby, you know?

But actually I, I agreed with most of what they told me.

And actually there were one or two things I didn't agree with, and I just that there was, there's one passage in in one of the first chapters where I sort of go all the way back to pre Socratic thinkers and kind of, and one of the editors said, I think this really breaks the flow of the chapter.

I don't think you should have this here.

And I kind of ignored that, and they were okay with that.

So there was a lot of room for I took on board most of what they said.

But that was one thing I didn't but it was just, it was just nice to not.

On my own, because I tended to be a bit nervous about sending things to people, even though I kind of forced myself to towards the end, I had shown a lot of it to my partner, so he's read about six versions of the book, but it was more for moral support than for actual comments.

But then I did end up sending a few chapters to some to get people's expertise as well, to make sure what I was saying sounded right.

And you know, that kind of thing as well.

So more to do with the content, rather than the structure or the writing itself.

So I'd say that's important too.

Kate Carpenter: In the last bit of our time, I want to talk about your own influences a little bit.

So I'm wondering, are there other writers or books that you look to for inspiration in your own writing?

Emily Herring: Yeah, it was interesting, because when I started writing the book, my publisher recommended a few biographies I might read to for inspiration.

But then I quickly just found I couldn't do I was finding it too.

I was getting a sense of I was finding it stressful to read other people's biographies.

And I think it was because I felt that it was going to influence me too much.

I was going to feel confined by, you know, other people's brilliant, brilliant works, but just feel like, Oh, there's one way of doing this, and I have to stick through it.

So I ended up not reading the biography she'd recommended, and instead, I, aside from all the sources I was reading for the research, I actually remember one summer during the process, I was reading only Ishiguro novels, for instance.

And I mean, the themes that he writes about are not too far from, you know, he writes a lot about sort of memory and and, but I just found that the way he was able, he's able to structure a narrative and structure a story, and also sort of gently guide the reader into that sense of nostalgia and memory.

That's something that I found really inspiring, and I can't say that I applied it.

I mean, I can't say to which, to what extent that was applied in my own writing, because obviously it's a very different kind of exercise.

I've never really written any fiction, apart from when I was a kid and I plagiarized the writers I enjoyed.

But I think there was, there's something, there was something so that that was really that had a big impact on me.

I think reading Never Let Me Go.

And what's the one with the with the butler, the Remains of the Day, those books that are all about memory and nostalgia, and then bringing, bringing that into my writing, bringing the flow of of the of the ideas, and I think, just just, and so reading fiction.

So I ended up just reading a lot of novels while I was writing the book.

And I think there's something because also, I was trying to tell the story of a, you know, tell a story even though it's, it's, it's one that was sort of dictated by historical fact rather than my imagination, but that, you know, you still want to draw your reader in.

And I found that novelists, the novelists I admire.

And I mentioned Ishiguro, because I think I it was his work I read the most over the course of of writing.

Yeah, I don't know if that's a satisfying answer.

There was another book that really there's a book called Everybody by by Olivia, Olivia Laing, and it's kind of about, it's kind of personal essay, but also history of science, and it's to do with with bodies, and sort of the history of how bodies are treated and obsessed over and portrayed.

And she had such a cool way of within a chapter, starting from a certain point, moving on to something completely different, but then somehow tying it back in.

And I remember reading her book and thinking, oh, oh, I can do that like you know, you're allowed to do that.

I don't have to be super linear about everything, as long as, as long as I show the reader that they can trust me, and that, you know, there's a starting point and there's an end point, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna guide you from point A to point B, and we might go in all sorts of directions.

So that was that, yeah.

And I think if I had stuck to reading biographies, I wouldn't have had those epiphany moments of, oh, you're allowed.

You know, there's so many things you can do with with a biography or with any sort of writing assignment.

Kate Carpenter: What's the most influential writing advice you've ever received?

Emily Herring: So it's advice that I wish I applied more.

But the few times I have done it has really been great.

And it's actually my uncle told me that he so I can't remember where he got this from.

He told me where he got it from, but the idea is simply that you just get the ideas on the page edit later and and that's something I have to So, yeah, that's something I have to remind myself, because sometimes you just get stuck on a first sentence because you want, or I do anyway, because you want that sentence to be great, or you want it to be exact, to exactly convey the idea you're trying to convey when experience has shown me again and again that I'm going to completely change that sentence anyway later.

So there's no point in trying to to produce it fully formed and perfect, and actually just almost having a brainstorming session with your page on your own and getting everything down, and then returning to to model it.

And I guess the idea being that you can't do any writing unless you start writing, and you will get stuck, and you'll procrastinate and you'll get frustrated.

So that's, yeah, that's, I think, really helpful advice that I wish I was able to apply more.

And I mean, I did mention earlier the sort of rigid nature of the French education system to do with, but I do think that was really helpful in a way, because so much of it was about, was about making making sure that you were getting your ideas across clearly.

And one of the one of the ways you did that was, you will, there's a similar structure to every essay that you're going to write when you're in the French education system, but every paragraph you write has to contain one idea you know you can't have.

You have to make sure that your the person grading, you will know what's happening in every part of the essay you're writing and be really clear about your own structure.

And actually, in the four hour exams, we were meant to spend one hour just drafting the structure of the essay.

And I think you know, as as sort of rigid and confining as that can be at the same time, it's kind of, it kind of taught me to have that that critical reader in mind.

But you know, have devote a lot of energy to clarity and making sure that I know where I'm going, so that the reader will know where I'm going, kind of thing that makes sense to me.

Kate Carpenter: Well, before I let you go, Herald of a Restless World is out now.

It continues to get marvelous attention, which I'm so glad to see.

Is there anything new that you're turning your attention to as you continue to promote your first book?

Emily Herring: Well, I'm in, I'm in the process of figuring out what the next step is going to be in terms, I mean, I would love to get to write another book, but I have no idea what that book will be yet, but I'm currently thinking about two, two essays, which are very far removed from from books.

And I'm, I'm, I don't know if you know the the Apple TV show called Severance, but it's a really, it's a really cool sci fi show, and I'm going to try and write something about severance and philosophy.

So I guess that's quite it's not so far removed from Berkson.

And then I also really enjoy writing about music, so I'm hoping to do a bit more of that.

So those are the things I'm thinking about.

But I'm also thinking more big picture.

Am I going to become, you know, since this was my first book, are all my books going to be biographies of obscure French thinkers?

Maybe, I mean, I would actually quite like to be that person who does that, but it could be I end up doing something completely different, so time will tell.

Kate Carpenter: Fantastic.

Well, we will be lucky to see, I think, whatever, it is that you do next.

Dr.

Emily Herring, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing process with me.

Emily Herring: Thank you so much for having me.

It's been lovely.

Kate Carpenter: Thanks again to Emily for joining me and to you for listening.

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