In summer 2010 I sat in the house furnished by Rhys Isaac in Colonial Williamsburg, and attempted to write my first dissertation chapter. I’d just finished my first research trip, to Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, and was in the middle of my second, at the John D. Rockefeller Library. I was trying to follow advice I’d read to write as I researched. There was no Wi-Fi in the house, which was a curse and a blessing. I couldn’t get distracted, but I also did not have instantaneous access to articles and books, which meant I couldn’t check basic facts and chronologies, which, turns out, tend to be missing from your research!

Fast forward almost six years and that chapter is now the first article based off of my book manuscript. I’m hoping that this post comes across less as an exercise in navel-gazing, and more as an attempt to reflect on the ways in which a dissertation chapter evolves into an article. I think it’s important to emphasize this process for the benefit of early career historians, but recent conversations with some of my students have also reminded me that we need to do a better job showing students that writing and editing are long processes; books, book chapters, and articles do not spring fully formed from our brains, and this fact should make them feel better about editing their own essays.

I think in a “normal” chronology, you write your dissertation chapter, revise it into a book chapter, and then revise it into an article, because we all know that a dissertation is not a book. What I also discovered, however, is that a book chapter is not an article, and if you’re trying to publish an article before you’re entirely sure what your book is about, peer review is going to be an adventure. I like to think of this adventure as the revise and resubmit route to writing your book. And although there’s been some ridiculousness with this process (not, I hasten to add, in the case of this journal), I’m increasingly coming to think that it worked well for me.

Basically, the revise and resubmit route to writing my book involved taking my first main chapter and final chapter (because they were where I knew I wanted to begin, and where I wanted to end up), revising them into articles, and submitting them to Fancypants Journals™. The Fancypants Journals ultimately rejected one article, and accepted another. I have mixed feelings about these peer reviewers, but pretty positive feelings about the process. I liked the process because what the process did was to give me a captive group of experts who told me what about my arguments were worth developing, what parts weren’t working, and what parts needed to be scrapped entirely. I listened to some of this advice and ignored other pieces, which is probably why Fancypants Journals number 1 and 2 rejected this article. This ended up being okay, because I’ve emerged with an article that A) made the argument I ultimately learned I wanted to make, B) landed at a journal I like and respect, and C) was most helpful to me in conceptualizing the book.

In sum, the article re-examines the 1800 event in Sierra Leone that historians have come to call a rebellion of black Loyalists. It suggests that the event may have been a food riot, and that even if you don’t agree with this interpretation, thinking about the food-related legislation leading up to the event changes a few things. It makes black Loyalists’ relationships with the white council seem more accommodating, and it reveals more tension between black Loyalists, Temne, and Susu. Here is that article’s long, arduous journey.

What did I take away through this thrilling romp through the wild and tangled forests of peer review?

1. I like making TOO MANY ARGUMENTS in my articles. Figuring out that I cared less about food and more about hunger prevention was hugely important for reorienting the direction I moved with respect to book revisions.
2. Submitting articles to Fancypants Journals was crucial in getting reviewers to tell me what I was arguing, and what was important.
3. An article goes over well when it pivots halfway through. I’ve used this technique before in other work, but I’d forgotten why it can be a useful technique. I didn’t really find my pivot until July 2015, and even then it took until October to realize that I wanted the second half of the article to be the first half, and the first half to be the second half. I had to pivot my pivot. 
4. My work combines a lot of different historiographies, and I am always going to feel insecure about whether I’ve understood them to the extent that I need to have done. Submitting to Slavery & Abolition restored my faith in peer review because the process offered me reviewers who made clear suggestions about which historiographies were missing. The article was not specific enough in its argument for a more specialized journal the first time(s) I submitted it. Only once it was did I get the critiques I needed to avoid making numerous errors. Though, in reviewing the changes to my article, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that some errors remain—and those are my responsibility, not those of the peer reviewers. Hopefully if there are critiques, I can address them in the book.
5. A dissertation chapter is not a book chapter! And a book chapter is not an article!
6. This. Shit. Takes. Time.