Help with novel, academics needed

[something2say]

Hi

I'm writing my 3rd book, 2nd novel and I need some help with my protagonist.

Helen went to Oxford or Cambridge and was very bright but lacks confidence. She had a brilliant idea but has not yet followed it up.

She married another brilliant academic, older than her but competitive, patronising and sexist. She is going to leave him and follow her idea.

There is going to be an older female academic who guides and encourages her.

I dont even know what her idea is, but I can see her working on it....
I don't know anything about the life of an academic either.

The help I'd like if possible would be around, what is your life like? If you do something ground breaking, is it easy to break through?
What's it like writing a thesis? What happens?
What might a successful trajectory look like?

Any real life experiences would be really helpful please.

Thankyou

describing the information you need in the level of detail required would be an incredible amount of work. maybe you need a co author who has lived in that world?

I agree. I don’t think this is something you can just sum up in a few sentences on a message board.

Read the academic common room section of Mumsnet for a while!

Your post does sound a bit as if you want others to come up with the content for you...

I think you need to meet with academics in rl

Good excuse to watch every episode of Morse I reckon

I second reading the academic common room section.
Don't read any novels about academic life and don't watch Morse or any other TV series about academic life. I can't think of a single one that's realistic!
None of them have you in a meeting with the VC with porridge on your dress, for a start, nor do they have you stepping out of a lecture because you have to answer a withheld call because nursery always withhold their number. They also omit to mention the abstract you submit for the conference while at soft play, because you work part time but forgot the deadline is at 5pm on Friday, the patronising git colleagues at a conference who go off to talk to someone more male, er, senior at a conference.
Etc. etc.

(My experiences are copyright, by the way).

Dh did a PhD at Oxford so had to do a thesis.

Thing is that it's a matter of luck. He did a lot of work on something, and it wasn't ground-breaking. However the PhD student who continued his work did the step that has meant it has been used by a number of you. If dh hadn't done his bit, then the student after him would have needed to do the boring stuff and someone else would have made the amazing leap.
Dh isn't bothered btw-he thinks it's quite funny and didn't want to continue in academia so in a lot of ways quite glad the other person, who did, was the one to make the leap.

Writing a thesis is boring and long winded. You have to do the experiments, record the results-and then check, recheck, before you write it up. There's a reason why a fair number of doctorates don't get finished. It's not to do with the information not being there, it's due to the time needed to write the thesis.
It's a case of applying your bottom to the seat and keeping it there until it's written.
Then you have the viva where you discuss it and they potentially pick holes in it, and question parts. Dh was very pleased that at his viva he only had one part to redo, and then he had to be viva-ed again.

And if your character is beyond doctorate level, a fair amount of what she will be doing is chasing funding.

I suspect that if you don't understand pretty well what your character is meant to be doing her thesis on, it will be very easily picked apart. So the first thing you need to look into is what she is studying and spend some time studying it yourself. Using the correct names, looking at recent theories and how research would be done.

TBH a PhD is unlikely to be properly ground-breaking. Much if not most academic work is building on other people's contributions. A successful trajectory would be getting a lectureship off the back of a PhD, then rising to a professorship after maybe ten years.

If you are going to write anything at all realistic about an academic's life, you first need to think about the subject. Doing a PhD in biochemistry is quite different from doing one in medieval history. In STEM there is often a lot of team work, in Humanities you may be quite alone. Like Witchend said you are not going to be able to write convincingly unless you can give a convincing picture of Helen's idea, the theories that underly it and the day to day work that involves.

As WeshMaGueule said, unlikely for a PhD to be properly groundbreaking. Though if you are in humanities, you may find, say, that yours is the only existing edition of an old text, so anyone coming after you may be forced to cite it whether it's brilliant or not. This is unlikely to lead to fame and fortune, though.

Someone aiming at a career in academe should also be getting teaching experience during your PhD.

The successful trajectory described- lecturership off the back of a PhD- is also getting more and more uncommon these days, with the growth of casual contracts. These days, unis tend to expect further publications and further teaching experience before they give someone a semi-permanent post. A good outcome would be a short-term post-doc and then (off the back of your second book) a lecturership).

As for following up Helen's brilliant idea, you first need to decide whether she is in academic employment or not. If so, she is probably (unless on a pure teaching contract) required to publish whether she likes it or not, so researching won't be about her confidence but about avoiding the sack. She also needs to be very aware of the dates of the next REF (national research evaluation) and plan her research accordingly: her department is going to be breathing down her neck about this.
If she is not in academic employment you are going to have to think about how she gets access to material and to ongoing academic discussions. If in STEM or Archaeology, this is probably going to be very difficult because of being shut out from lab access/researcg teams. More feasible in other branches of Humanities and what a lot of people have to do these days unless able to get post-docs straightaway.

And as Witchend said, a massive part of the job is going to be about chasing funding, and being rejected. A lot of academic life is about coping with rejection: you may have to rewrite part of your thesis, you will be applying for jobs you don't get, you will be turned down for funding, articles you submit will come back with requests for revision or simply be turned down. It's a life that consists of picking yourself up and trying again.

One of the things that always struck me as unrealistic in the Morse/Lewis films is how academics only seem to have One Idea and if anyone threatens that then we're in murder territory. If Helen has written a whole thesis and is setting out for an academic career she should have dozens of ideas. She may be terribly excited about one of them, but no modern academic can afford to be a one-trick-pony.

Stalk academics on twitter.

But (forgive me asking) does it matter how realistic it is?

I adore Lewis (less so Morse) and part of the delight is seeing academics poncing around in gowns during tutorials, where they invariably have 10 delightfully upper-class students saying things like 'oh, but wouldn't Lacan be more apposite than Plato when we're talking about Keats, Justin?'

It is utter fantasy, but fun.

I'd say Jill Paton Walsh's Imogen Quy novels are a bit more realistic - one thing I like is she includes academics who just get on with their research rather than being either brilliant or terrible. I like that.

I would want to know how she ended up married to an older academic. Depending on how old Helen is and what discipline he's in, this would be something to keep an eye on. Back in the day, it wasn't that unusual for older male academics to marry their juniors. It is a bit frowned upon these days, and marrying students is extremely dodgy. So if they're in the same field and he taught her (I hate to say it but many Oxbridge academics were Oxbridge students), he's a very unpleasant person who would have a distinctly negative reputation.

Agree that the main questions are subject dependent. But I think what usually feels most 'wrong' is when you see academics having 'break throughs' and they are quick. IMO in most subjects a break through isn't actually descriptive of the experience. It's more likely you get a hunch, faff around, try to get it funded, get knocked back, try again, find some people think it's shite, eventually get it published, get some good reviews and some bad ones ... maybe two or three years down the line someone says Dr So-and-so's book really was a breakthrough, wasn't it?

Might be different in sciences, but I bet it's still all pretty slow.

(Btw, I have to say - as an academic I cannot imagine enjoying a novel that is faithfully aware of the REF. I read for pleasure, not to make myself feel guilty that I'm not working!)

This article will give you a bit of insight about what we're up against:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03075079.2020.1712693?needAccess=true&fbclid=IwAR3MNJ-6Ex-jAnv6xF9ylwJEaH5SgYdjoNsMujWO5WpR8n3pO_ywUFzT3Yk

On consideration you're right about the REF, Sarah. Let's keep as quiet about that as we can.

For the rest, my impression was that this was going to be a serious kind of novel where you need to believe in the realistic setting, not the kind of whacky let's send ourselves up by some glorious hamming you see in popular detective series.

Totally agree about the brilliantness. Admittedly don't work at Oxbridge, but even the Oxbridge colleagues I meet at conferences look surprisingly like the rest of us: generally quite interesting, some good ideas, some that don't sound all that convincing...

Oh and totally agree re the dodginess of Helen's husband. Unless they are indeed very old.

OP, in the nicest possible way, this isn't going to work. You don't even know what field she's in (I mean, is she an astrophysicist, a classicist, an archeologist? When you say she 'went to' Oxford or Cambridge, do you mean as an undergraduate or postgrad, or both? Is she now a post-doc/JRF or what?), and while you might be able to fake up enough for an appearance or two from a minor character by asking people on an internet forum, that's not going to be in any way credible for your main character, especially if her brilliant idea is key to the novel.

I am both an academic (with an Oxford DPhil) and a novelist, and it has never even occurred to me to write a novel which in any way includes the reality of academic life, which is less 'brilliant ideas' than endless admin, funding bids and dealing with student MH issues. Morse it isn't.

Oh, yes, I take your point the OP presumably isn't writing in the Lewis line. But even so, a leetle bit of fantasy/inaccuracy is fine.

For example, OP, did I mention ECR researchers in medieval studies are all known to be exceptionally charming and beautiful? Just thought you should have the facts.

I did work at Oxbridge, and if Helen's young/ECR, then she is probably doing a postdoc (you don't go into an Oxbridge lectureship from a PhD). If she's doing a postdoc she's terrified she'll be exposed as a fraud and won't get a job anywhere, let alone Oxbridge.

If she's a junior lecturer she's probably done a postdoc. Probably at Oxbridge (not that Oxbridge is incestuously closed shop ...).

Sorry I know nothing about what your asking as I didn’t even go to uni, but I do have a little experience with writing, and the golden rule is write about what you know.
In your shoes, honestly I’d rethink the plot to something you’re more familiar with. You can still have Helen, bright but lacking confidence, married to Mr Twat, encouraged by an older woman to make something of her life but set it in an industry you’re familiar with or that’s easier to research. She could be a teacher with ambitions to be headteacher, set up her own business making cakes which becomes a huge success, or she could be a novelist who writes a best seller.

did I mention ECR researchers in medieval studies are all known to be exceptionally charming and beautiful?

Who are nonetheless beaten into a slight second place by roguishly delectable Readers in Eng Lit even though they have not brushed their hair yet today.

Naturally all the Readers in English I have met have been entirely delightful.

Another novelist here and I agree with PPs that you should write about what you know. It will be immediately apparent to any academic reading your novel that you don't know what you're talking about. You can keep the structure of the story but change the university side completely.

Hey, you're all presuming Helen has stayed in the UK. She might have gone for a more enlightened system abroad, in which case the REF is but a dim and distant memory

Hello!!!

Thankyou all so much for your input.

I will give some thought to changing the plotline because it really doesn't matter what her idea is, only that it was far fetched and yet worked out. Maybe academia isntvrught, from what you're all saying.

The point of the novel is that sometimes, against absolutely every odd, things work out and you should be brave, work hard and give it a shot.

Her academic life is not really important, just that she decides to follow her idea even though it is ridiculous. I had wondered what she'd study and how I'd float it. Now I've put fingers to keyboard I've got to get into it. But it could be changed yes, as specifically what she does is not the point, just that it's a long shot and it works.

Thankyou all.

Maybe she starts up her own business and he's snobby about that, saying she should stay in academia? It would work especially if it was a business which offered something for women, something a guy like that would know nothing about.

Sounds like the job could be anything, then, and she gives it up to pursue her big idea and her sexist DH thinks she’s crazy etc etc. Just have her work in any role you know and can write about easily?

Academics on this thread are giving specifics about how they spend their days, OP, seems useful to you.

fwiw, I am told I'm an Academic, & my day looks little like the stories on that thread. My experience of working in university research is like a different Universe from what the Academics on MN say they experience, tbf. Also, I get the impression that the Oxbridge academic experience is very different from most universities.

Must admit I find it cute that folk think we academics are off making amazing discoveries and contributions, and that those things = success. Or that lack of them = failure. Almost all colleagues in my world are humdrum doing the incremental stuff, nothing amazing discovered (see Kuhn's book).