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165 & LEARNING THE TRADE WITH OTHERS 10 The last topic that I wish to discuss is how you as a scholar aspiring to develop a writing lifestyle can build in the kinds of accountability structures to ensure both initial success and continuing productivity. As I have said repeatedly and tried to emphasize above, there is no substitute for simple and regular hard work. This hard work requires the kind of discipline that forces you to do the necessary reading and research, to carve out the mandatory time for writing, and to find the means to deliver the final product into the hands of the publishers. However, there are a number of other techniques that can often help this process go a little faster and more smoothly. I give five of them here that I have found useful through the years. The five means to enhance a publishing lifestyle all involve working with others to build in accountability. These include (1) collaborative research, (2) involvement in the organization of your subject area, (3) the public instigation of projects, (4) research seminars, and (5) workshops. Collaborative Research I am a firm believer in the virtues of collaborative research, and I have therefore mentioned collaborative research a number of times in this work. I believe in collaborative research for a variety of reasons. Collaboration is an excellent way of working with and learning from others. Working with another scholar, or with other scholars, is often a very good means of benefiting from their learning and expertise, and of increasing your own expertise as you discuss various ideas. Collaborative research is also a way of generating new ideas for publication, because it has a natural way of expanding your boundaries to include new and different 166 Inking the Deal ideas that you would not have thought of on your own. Perhaps the most important feature of collaborative research, in light of developing a publishing lifestyle, is the accountability that it brings. I have had numerous scholars promise to deliver to me a variety of chapters, articles, and even books. I do not believe that many of them were intentionally attempting to deceive me when they said they would do so. However, it is easy for a scholar to promise to deliver a particular work to an editor or someone coordinating a project. It is even easier to promise to yourself that you intend to sit down and do some reading and study on a particular topic, and to write up an article during the next available period of time, such as the winter break or summer holidays. Persistent editors can be dodged reasonably easily, until finally they will give up and reassign the work to someone else. Promises made to yourself , like promises made in foxholes, can be conveniently ignored, or certainly easily postponed into oblivion, once circumstances change. It is far more difficult, however, to ignore your own colleague down the hall once the two of you have agreed to work together on a given project. I mentioned above my colleague who does brilliant PowerPoint presentations . We have worked together on a number of collaborative projects , and he is intellectually daring and insightful, and a lot of fun to work with. The one slight problem is that he tends on occasion to procrastinate , which can make collaboration a challenge at times. We were recent participants in a conference together, and we agreed to do two individual papers and then a joint paper. The night before the conference, my colleague—because he had the impending deadline of delivering a paper the next day—stayed up most of the night to put together a stunning PowerPoint presentation. This presentation went very well and was well received by the audience. For our joint presentation, he also prepared some PowerPoint slides. He unfortunately never converted his individual presentation into a finished paper, but he sent me a couple of paragraphs and footnotes and a couple of charts and the like for our joint paper, which means that I did most of the work to develop this into a final version of our joint paper. Most of my collaborations go more predictably than this one, including many of those that the two of us have worked on together, but even this one resulted in two papers for me, one more than I would have had if I had not undertaken the joint effort. As a set of guidelines for developing collaborative accountability, I would suggest that you find...

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