Sometime last year a professor friend invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited collection he was putting together on a certain Scholarly Topic. I love to accept invitations like this! I still want to remain professionally active, but I'm sick unto death of submitting articles to journals for the brutality of double-blind anonymous peer review. It's so much more fun to write an article for someone who actually WANTS something actually written by ME.
I didn't have much of an idea for what I might write, but the deadline to send in an abstract was looming, so I did some pondering and came up with an idea for the Thing I Would Write. I sent it off to my professor friend, and he liked the idea for this Thing. He got a contract for the book, as yet unwritten, with a table of contents that included me as a contributor and my Thing as one of the chapters.
But then, when I started seriously reading up on the Thing, I saw that the main thing I had wanted to say about the Thing had already been said, thirty years ago, by a Brilliant Prominent Scholar - and said vastly better than I was going to say it.
Needless to say, this took a considerable amount of wind out of my sails. But it was too late to back out of the Thing. I somehow had to write the Thing anyway.
Still, I moped and whimpered and kept wishing I hadn't said yes to writing the Thing.
Finally, I realized that, as I wasn't going to back out, all I could do, limp as my sails were hanging, absent any stiff breeze to sail me along, was, yes, just Write the Darned Thing.
I plugged along on it diligently for an hour a day, day after day. I found some interesting background information to include about the history of the Thing. I came up with half a dozen fairly worthwhile insights of my own into the Thing. I reframed my discussion so that the part derivative from Brilliant Prominent Scholar was no longer the main point of the Thing, but just one of many points I made along the way, with plenty of effusive citations to her.
When I had done the best I could do, with a sigh I pressed SEND.
And you know what? The editors read the Thing right away and thought it was just fine. In fact, they used the word "great." I don't think it's a Great Thing myself. I think it's a Nice Little Thing. The single best part of it is still the points made by the Brilliant Prominent Scholar. But hey, that's why she's a Brilliant Prominent Scholar, and not me.
There's a ditty I learned as a child, from Henry Van Dyke: "Use what talents you possess. The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best."
There is room in the world - and in the academic world, too - for lots of voices raised in song. In the end, I'm glad I said yes to singing my own little song and wrote this Nice Little Thing.
