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

Change the title!

Why's she in Kenya, though?

Btw, she'd be on sabbatical researching rather than studying. If she's on sabbatical, FWIW, I think she has a permanent post and is some way into it. Did she get funding to go to do a project in Kenya? I mean, she's not allowed to bunk off on holiday for a year and call it sabbatical.

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.

Maybe she's a budding novelist who has the germ of a an idea for a book which people think won't work but does?

she's working in a rented guesthouse in Kenya
I've done fieldwork (experiments) from a rented guesthouse in Africa. She could be doing biology, ecology, geology (watch out for the excess luggage charges), anthropology, public health, linguistics, educational studies...

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.

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?

Absolutely to both points, but that just doesn't work with her being an academic, and your idea that her preposterous idea isn't that important to your novel if she's on sabbatical in Kenya, she's either doing (a) research that necessitates her being in Kenya (for instance, in one of the areas @worstofbothworlds lists) and which will take up far more of her headspace than her relationship with a lion, or (b) she's writing up research she's already done, so she already knows her conclusions so there's no 'discovery' going on at this point. And someone will have had to fund her time in Kenya, which means she'll have had to write probably multiple funding bids, so the idea can't be preposterous, or no funding body would touch it over more well-founded projects.

I think you just don't have a grasp on how academic research works -- we don't sit about searching for ideas that 'elude' us then suddenly get them and write them down. Everything we do is based on fieldwork or experiments or research in libraries/archives etc, and those all need funding. (And, if you're writing uplit, which it sounds as if you are, you should know that mental health among academics in the UK is notoriously poor:
www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/21/cut-throat-half-academics-stressed-thinking-leaving )

Look, I write novels too, and I get that it's gut-wrenching to discard an idea because it doesn't work, but it happens to us all! I just got rid of an entire plot line (and about 25000 words) from my most recent one, because the main plot developed in an unexpected and stronger direction without it.

If what you see is your character sitting writing in a Kenyan guesthouse at a period of positive change in her life, then keep that -- but you need to find a different reason for her to be there writing.

Can you set it in the past?

If she were a certain kind of woman in, say, the 1920s, she would have had an enormous struggle to be recognised as 'an academic,' but she might very well be sitting around in a Kenyan guest house (because, if she's got higher education in the 1920s it is quite likely she is well off), especially if her nasty husband is doing his research out there.

And it would get rid of worries about REF and grant funding.

Also, while I would never ever ever suggest getting academic work published was easier a few decades ago, I do know of someone whose footnotes (supposedly, the place where you make careful acknowledgments of the rigorous and respected sources you draw your ideas from) include the line 'this came to me in a dream'.

Yes that's what I was going to suggest. Set it in the 1960s or something, as it sounds like she's basically Jane Goodall, but with lions not chimps.

that just doesn't work with her being an academic

She could be an academic at a Kenyan university...

I do know of someone whose footnotes (supposedly, the place where you make careful acknowledgments of the rigorous and respected sources you draw your ideas from) include the line 'this came to me in a dream'.

I realise I am basically asking the OP to write about a Dorothy Sayers type of academic. This is her writing academic footnotes on the history of emotions in medieval lit:

'The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin.'

I enjoyed that.

She could be an academic at a Kenyan university...

Then she'd be spending her non-working time in her side hustle (tutoring, running her own business, consulting for NGOs) that made her actual pay as opposed to her university salary. Not sitting in a guest house writing. If she wanted to go somewhere up country she'd be going to a family wedding/funeral/staying with elderly relatives who wanted a contribution, not quietly writing in a guest house.

We female academics in the West think we have our second shift bad. You have no idea how professional women in developing countries live. Of course she'd have a nanny and a cook (or a nanny/cook) so she could go back to work when her baby was 3 months old and have the baby brought to her at lunchtime for BF but she'd also have a small allotment to farm and if she wanted to do any research, she'd have to get said NGOs to fund it, on their agenda.

If I understood it correctly, the novel isn't actually about academic life. The novel is about something else and the character's job has limited relevancy. So the details of what funding she has received to be sitting in a Kenyan guesthouse is not really important. She is there on sabbatical to research x, and then something else happens that the novel is about. I might have misunderstood though.

No that's it.
She is there to evaluate her life and consider her direction.

How about she had a junior research fellowship (fits with the Oxbridge background and shows her intellectual promise) but failed to secure further funding at the end of the fellowship and is now not employed but trying to write proposals so she can stay in academia. Not quite sure how she gets to Kenya at this point - family connections, husband's job...?

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!

I didn't mean it nastily. A lot of novels, including some established-career works by very famous people, are about this very thing: their early struggles to become who they are and find themselves as writers. Doesn't make it poor literature or make them any less great authors. But their credibility partly hinges on the credibility of the cover story.

Writing an academic work is not quite like having an idea as a writer and then just sitting down and writing and writing. It is having an idea and then writing a massive bibliography on what work has already been done in the field, thinking about where your idea would sit in that, gathering massive amounts of data, checking and rechecking your facts, - and then eventually sitting with all that around you trying to beat this mass of material into some kind of comprehensible form, all the while checking data and references. While the creative writer can, to some extent, draw it all from his or her inner consciousness, the academic cannot: academic writing is a constant dialogue with the material and with other scholars. And every single step of that dialogue has to be documented in footnotes. So Helen's ability to write in a guest-house in Kenya will depend on how she gets access to her material.

The other thing I would say is, if you want to make a relationship with a lion a main thing, do read some good books on lion behaviour and watch a few films. People are more critical than they used to be, thanks to nature films and easy access to online information.

Could she be a missionary? They still happen, go out & push their religion.

Kenya guesthouse: she could be part of an NGO trying to encourage safe sex to reduce HIV transmission in local area. Possibly with a background (academic, MSc) of having looked at social barriers to effective messaging. On a short term job contract to evaluate effectiveness of a locally-run programme funded by the NGO.

Friend had a job related to facilitating safe sex promotion. The programme used puppet show stories to get people in the community talking about unsafe sex practices in their areas. He said that West Africa was great, people would candidly & enthusiastically engage and admit that all sorts of nortiness happened. "I recognise that! That happened in MY village! - No it didn't! Oh yes it did, you remember Samson & his 3 wives...." But East Africa is more conservative, people are more in denial about bad marriages, infidelity, incest, homosexuality, adultry. Was much harder to promote the safe sex messages in East Africa.

Writing an academic work is not quite like having an idea as a writer and then just sitting down and writing and writing. It is having an idea and then writing a massive bibliography on what work has already been done in the field, thinking about where your idea would sit in that, gathering massive amounts of data, checking and rechecking your facts, - and then eventually sitting with all that around you trying to beat this mass of material into some kind of comprehensible form, all the while checking data and references

You left out the bit where you then publish it with a major university press which prices it ludicrously high in hardback, and, after an initial flurry of sales, you then regularly get royalty statements for less than a tenner.

What if I abandoned the idea of academia and instead they're musicians? And shes out there writing an album? As a guitar player and singer myself it would be easy to write about. Degree in music. And the solitude. And older guy younger woman would be more common....

You could try reading (or watching) Notes From a Scandal and The Wife, plus some Ian McEwan.

And, if you're a writer, you surely know that "thank you" isn't one word?

I read a novel once where the main character studied Chemistry. It took you from being a Doctoral student (BTW at Oxford you do a DPhil, at Cambridge is is a PhD) to being a professor. What made it so memorable and brilliant was how realistic it was. Down to your experiment going wrong if your supervisor stood behind you. I have long forgotten the title though.
If you were writing about someone in the Humanities then the David Lodge books might be good background (especially "The British Museum is Falling Down").
And I agree if her partner is much older than her then there are almost certainly "MeToo" connotations. There was a lot of it about.

I think she should be a gender critical academic. Researching detransitioning or something...They're in an interesting position right now. See the feminism boards

Read Educated by Tara Westover. She was at Cambridge and pursued an interesting thesis (feminism in the mormon church if I remember correctly) against the advice of her supervisor

Writing an academic work is not quite like having an idea as a writer and then just sitting down and writing and writing. It is having an idea and then writing a massive bibliography on what work has already been done in the field, thinking about where your idea would sit in that, gathering massive amounts of data, checking and rechecking your facts, - and then eventually sitting with all that around you trying to beat this mass of material into some kind of comprehensible form, all the while checking data and references

Shit got too real, I'm going to bed

What's it like writing a thesis? What happens?

You sit for 10 hours a day, usually 6 days a week, at your desk. Or in the Library (that's a 12 hour stint). You read, you write, you sigh. You go to the gym. You eat. You have interesting ideas but they come slowly and they are complex and need 80,000 words to explain.

Breakthroughs are incremental. It's not "Eureka!" Maybe they come when you're walking the dog. And then by the time you get home, you've lost the vague threads of the apparently brilliant idea. So you keep plodding on, writing 250 words a day, day in, day out.

That's what success looks like (from my POV).

Her academic life is not really important, just that she decides to follow her idea even though it is ridiculous

No way is this in ANY way credible in academic life. Your heroine works in PR. Or UK railway management.