Hi all - I've come here before seeking some advice, and got some really great answers and leads on some histories to read.
I'm assembling a number of oral histories on specific toy products made in the 1980s and 1990s that employed grossout humor (Garbage Pail Kids, Madballs, Boglins, Gak, etc.). There was this loose thread that interested me--why did grossout humor and innovative toy design seem to wane at the same time? And I tugged on it, and started collecting stories from toy designers, sculptors, etc., and I've got some really solid stories of these toys.
And I managed along the way to find how these toy products interlocked with the overall toy industry, and how toys and TV were trying to work together, and how Mattel and Hasbro kind of scratched their heads when He-Man and G.I. Joe stopped selling millions, and floundered for a bit before doubling down on their sales data to become basically THE only two toy companies by 1995, and it's about the death of one particular evolution of the novelty gag/trick toy business, and it's about the end of the humor trading card business as a kind of master/apprentice genealogy, and it's about the death of post-WWII American satire, and it raises some serious questions about better diversity in toymaking, creators' rights, businesses' reponsibility regarding cultural history preservation... and and and.
I want to write some prose chapters to sum up what the oral histories are saying, and bring in the necessary other history to situate these things, just so the whole thing holds together... but good god what have I gotten myself into? I tugged a thread and now I've got... this. It's getting very unwieldy and I feel like I'm lost at sea. It would be a bad idea to throw everything into the book, right?
How do you all decide where to prune your monographs so that the work stands and isn't a tangle of tangents?
For context, I'm an academic reference & instruction librarian. I feel like an academic groupie who sees some interesting connections, but I don't have the discipline-specific training to know what makes a good cultural history, a good business history, a good object history, good oral history, good critical literary analysis, etc. All of what I've put together is wildly fascinating to me, and I just want to make sure it's worthwhile (and maybe entertaining, come on, it's toys) for its intended audiences.
Great topic. The first thing you need to decide is the nature of your venue and, importantly, your audience. What does the venue demand, and what will your audience tolerate. An encyclopedia of late twentieth-century toys implies a lengthy, comprehensive treatment. An article in a popular magazine must be concise with only a few examples.
The modern reader is impatience, but there is still room for comprehensive source books, so the real question is a matter of venue, audience, and the practical nature of publication.
It is also key to come to terms with your own approach to writing. An early series editor once observed after considering one of my first book manuscripts, that I am a "taker-outer." Understanding that has shaped my subsequent decades of writing.
A "taker-outer" must be on guard against taking out too much. I always ask myself if deleting a passage or an example is the right thing to do.
On the other hand, a "putter-inner" needs to be on guard against putting everything into a manuscript. This is even truer in this century than it was in the previous one when I started writing. People have become terribly impatient, so make certain you are not losing your audience - unless you are writing a comprehensive source book - is essential: again, know your venue and your audience.
I hope that helps!