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

Thankyou medschoolrat. Having asked and been answered, I will think it over for a while. This is my second novel and so far I ruminate in my mind before writing any of it out. I'm 6 chapters in tho. Not the end of the world to rework, but i liked Helen as an academic because she is thoughtful and imaginative and her idea is wacky. You say you think its sweet that the woman on the street projects this onto your field?!

Thanks once again for the advice.

You would be better off moving your protagonist to an area that you’re familiar with to be honest. Because you’ll need endless intervention otherwise.

And you know being an Oxbridge academic isn’t as cutesy as you might think. There’s a lot of politics for a start, people aren’t fusty old Blue stockings cycling around the quad!

Less "thoughtful" than a lot of MNers. OMG, people here can overthink.

Academics are extremely conservative (small c).
Hence, huge prejudice against the whacky.
Imagination only much welcome by management if it involves finding a way for Uni to save or make money

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That article linked to above

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

What was the recruitment strategy, can anyone see it? They didn't even publish in a Green Access journal .

My brother's an academic and said that everyone he knew was desperate to get out. I think you might have the wrong idea of academics! It depends on what you're going to write - if it's a very, very lighthearted book, along the lines of a Mills and Boon, then you can do whatever you like, but if you're writing in the women's fiction genre then you have to get it right.

My area is helping people escape trauma and rebuild their lives, so you can see why I'm writing this storyline. But you're right, I will change her narrative. My agent encouraged the story line so that was a good start..

I honestly don't think you can write about this unless you've experienced it. I have two doctorates; I couldn't write about working in The City.

I've seen the Big Short!
I read Venetia Thompson's book.
I could write about working in the City.
But it might be crap writing, admittedly.

But what is the ‘wacky idea’? I don’t see how you can be conceiving of your main character as an academic if you don’t know what field she’s in, or exactly what her idea is...? I mean, are you thinking of something like Philippa Langley’s campaign to find Richard III’s grave, for instance, which a lot of people considered ludicrous? Only she’s not an academic.

@Psychologika
I am intrigued to know how you came to study for two doctorates. Did you change field? Or is one a professional doctorate?

@MaybeDoctor I have a PhD and a DClinPsy Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. I did them back-to-back, so you can guess how cool I am 😎

Make her study something really sexy like mycology. Or one of my friends spent her post doc smelling meat at different rates of decomposition each day and rating the odour. He can study agricultural notes from mid century, mainly in Hampshire but with one project Sussex based- he’s pretty excited about that but it’s obviously a big stretch for him.

That would be realistic.

Why have you decided to set your book somewhere you have no experience of?

Yes, I know someone whose doctorate involved studying sheep shit distribution around the slopes of mountains in Galway, and someone else whose doctoral research was a study of a specific type of slug in rural Warwickshire.

Academic life is part teaching, and part sitting on your own reading and writing. It can be quite lonely at times and there is a lot of rejection compared to the successes. She would spend a lot of her time chasing and not getting funding, writing and submitting articles that then would get rejected or would require revision. Sometimes she would go to conferences.

That is just the rough outline of my life. I don't think there is a very interesting novel there!

Oh, and meetings and supervisions thrown into that.

The life of an academic from Oxford/Cambridge will differ from that of an academic from Sheffield or Bristol. It will differ depending upon the grade and the subject of the academic too!

Yes @sonjadog no one would say my life is interesting enough to put into a novel. My DD came into work with me and said' your job looks so boring mum!'

I find my work absolutely fascinating. Have fought very hard to be allowed to do it. But that, for the purposes of this novel, is the problem. All the excitement is happening inside my head or occasionally online or in RL conversations with my colleagues. It's not something you could talk about at all without mentioning what I am thinking about. "Cory had a whacky idea" isn't going to convince any reader either that Cory is a plausible character or that the idea was any good.

Ime the people who do not live like this are certain STEM researchers who work in teams under somebody else and don't have much ownership of the ideas (my SIL is an example), but then the whole thing about who Helen is is lost.

What it seems like to me is that you are using the academic life as a (thin) disguise for turning your life round by writing a novel. Which is something you do know something about. So write about that or find some other world that would stand in.

Agreed, @corythatwas. I love my work and find it absolutely compelling, but depicting me ‘pursuing my idea’ would be an entirely interior thing, involving me sitting at a desk or in a library/archive, thinking in extremely specific detail about literary texts/periodicals/authors. I can’t think of anything ‘wacky’ I could be pursuing as a line of research, unless it’s along the lines of correcting — with proof — a major misidentification (Shakespeare was really Elizabeth I! Marlowe! A woman!). I think the closest I’ve come to anything of that kind is coming up with a strong case for throwing doubt on the ‘accidental death’ verdict on the mysterious death of an author I work on.

If I were the OP and determined to make my character an academic or a researcher of some kind, I’d probably make her an unemployed recent PhD following clues to the discovery of Emily Bronte’s second novel, or something. Only that is going to involve huge amounts of research.

Well yes, I love my work too, otherwise I wouldn't spend so much time on it. But from the outside, it would look like someone reading a lot and writing on the computer. Not very exciting. Also, tbh, if I had a wacky idea that wasn't related to work, I am not sure I would have the time to pursue it.

I think an unemployed PhD would be a better character, or perhaps a part-time school teacher who had time to develop and follow an idea.

I reread The Subtle Knife over Christmas for the first time as an adult. I was surprised how much I recognised Mary! He really got the feeling of being a post-doc/junior faculty. She's not obviously particularly special, lonely, uncertain, panicky about funding in a lab with mismatching mugs and the feeling that all colleagues are going off to better things with a string of failed relationships. And then the intensity of conferences where you finally meet other people who are talking about exactly what you're thinking. Even down to the sudden human connection and interaction after months of loneliness which can trigger romantic feelings, even when it's completely inappropriate and you'd probably never be interested if you met them in the pub at the end of your street! Unfortunately, I don't think my research is ever going to lead me to another world though :-D

Hello again.

Thankyou all so much for your input and I value and take on board what you're all saying.

But I just can't stop seeing Helen writing at her table, just like someone said.... the idea is not important, just that it eludes her and then suddenly comes and she works like hell.

Based on what youve all said, I'm going to have to get into the detail now. Chasing funding is not for me, too money led and just wrong. Experiments are not right either, as she's working in a rented guesthouse in Kenya.... so she is alone...

The lady who said my even writing a novel is a thinly veiled attempt to change my own life and be someone, well....um...thanks! But this is my 3rd and my first was taken to round table discussions at Random House and Simon & Schuster etc although not picked up, so maybe there is something there. It is hard tho. This is my second novel, first unfinished as dont think standard is high enough... However I am 45 years old and I like daydreaming this story and I like crafting it and why not do it, why not learn and do it properly? I also play guitars. I seem to be a creative person. I am not trying to break out and begin to live, I already do live and perhaps would like to reflect some of that back.

Now. Does Helen have to do something else or is there....is there some subject that has a missing piece which has stumped everyone for years? I do not need too many details as the novel is actually about the relationship she forms with a local lion....title Absolutely Preposterous: A Lion Hearted Story....but i think I can make it work. Agent said people are sick of slightly jaded true life 'humanity is not very nice really' type books and the tide is turning towards things of a more hopeful nature.

As it stands with the plight of the world in peril and people needing to radically change their way of life, I want to encourage belief in what seems out of reach and indeed, absolutely preposterous.

If she is sitting at a guesthouse in Kenya writing, could she not be on a sabbatical from her job as an academic? That sounds like it might fit the story well.

I didn´t notice the past poster being negative about you writing a novel, but for what it is worth, I think you should give it your all and enjoy the process as far as it takes you. Life should involve trying to achieve your dreams.

Perhaps she could yes, thankyou.

She said it was a thinly veiled attempt to self realise or something. But anyway.

I think I might scan message forums for ideas. Just for something interesting.

The research is interesting and random, but really I do it for the joy of crafting the arc. That's when I love it the most. Getting lost in the crafting of words.

Perhaps she could be on a sabbatical studying and interpreting the data from a study?