How to Design A Self-Guided Study

Whether I want to try to write in a new genre or form or learn something new, studying is where I always start. Here's how I do it.

Jan 21, 2025

After I wrote my last post about how I’m creating an infrastructure for a creative life, I had a friend ask me if I had any tips for organizing your own self-guided study.

In fact, I do!

My time in grad school and teaching taught me how to create my own reading lists and syllabi, which is a useful skill when you’re attempting to teach yourself a new topic, literary form or style. In this moment, it may be useful to know how to find, organize and access texts to study by yourself and with others. Here are a few tips for creating a self-guided study plan.

As best as you can, try to narrow down your topic/focus.

Let’s use comics and graphic novels as our example throughout this post. Saying “I want to study graphic novels” is not quite as useful saying “I want to study graphic memoirs that focus on the teenage immigrant experience.” This gives you an age range, general content, and a form to work with. As you explore the texts that exist in that area, you’ll discover start to determine what other things will be important for you: what nations do you want to explore? Time periods? What art styles appeal to you?

Identify texts.

How do you begin even looking, though? Put on your detective hat, it’s time to do some sleuthing.

I recommend starting with a quick google search to find at least one book that mostly fits the bill of what you might try to study. Or you can pick a book that you already like, one that was recommended through a friend or a content creator you saw online, something you were assigned in school.

From that initial graphic memoir, you can follow some threads. Start with the author and illustrator. Do you like their style? Would you read other things by them? Do a google search to see if they’ve written or illustrated other things similar to the text you’ve selected. (They probably have.) You can probably add 2-5 more texts to your list just from that.

If we’re sticking with the author and illustrator, and you’ve searched up some more texts by them, likely they’ve created with other teams. The new books are written by Author A but now illustrated by Illustrator B, and Illustrator A has teamed up with a new author B. Check out Author and Illustrator B’s work on their website or Instagram. Anything you can use for your study?

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Remember: you’re just on a fact-finding mission at this stage. You’ll organize it into something more structured later.

Protip: If you haven’t been doing this already, now is a great time to develop a system for organizing the texts that you’re finding. As a grad student and early career academic, I used the software Zotero to save and organize my research, mostly because it could generate citations automatically for me. A well organized Google or Excel sheet could also do the trick.

Information I would collect as I go:

Title of text
Author
Illustrator (if applicable)
Genre
Year published
Publisher
Any Awards
Available at public library?
A link to the book on the publisher website

Write everything even remotely interesting down. You never know when you might come back to it.

Identifying Texts, pt. 2

By this point, just from exploring the author and illustrator’s immediate work, you probably have a fair amount of texts to work with. Patterns might start to emerge. Maybe you realize you have about four potential texts published by Drawn & Quarterly. That’s typically a sign that they publish work that interests you. A next step could be to google the publisher’s catalogue to see what else they’ve published that might work for your study.

Maybe you see the Eisner Award come up a couple of times in the books you’ve selected. That may be a signal to google Eisner Award winners by year and see if there are any books from that list that you could use.

By now you may have about 10 or so texts on your list, but you want more.

Go back to that initial book you started with. You’re going to flip to the back. Depending on the type of book you have—and this won’t work with fiction most of the time—you’re going to have a lot of ways to find more books using a bibliography, things referenced in the author’s note, and authors/editors mentioned in the Acknowledgements.

The bibliography is pretty straight forward. If it’s a graphic memoir that relies on some outside research, a lot of times, writers and artists will have some sort of list of work they referenced in the making of their project. It’ll probably be a mix of nonfiction, novels, and graphic work, if we’re sticking with the graphic novel theme, and I recommend you collect anything that’s interesting, regardless of whether it’s outside of the graphic novel form. Do the same in the author’s note, if there is one.

The acknowledgements is also an underrated place to do detective work. We have a wildly pervasive idea that writing is done alone. The best books you’ve ever read were created in community, and that’s a fact. Good authors are surrounded by other writers, researchers and art makers who influence the creation of their work. You are absolutely going to find a section of art makers in the acknowledgements whose works are probably very similar in theme/form/style to the work of the creators’. Google the names you come up with and see what books come up for them.

Something similar is true of editors. Editors tend to acquire books that talk to each other. Their own personal canon of projects they’ve edit will likely tell a cohesive story. So if you’re looking for more immigration coming-of-age graphic memoirs, it may be worth seeing if the editor who worked on the book you’re currently looking at edited anything similar. (Not always a surefire option, but looking up an editor on Manuscript Wishlist works sometimes, if you don’t have a paid subscription to something like Publishers Marketplace to see what texts a current editor has acquired.)

Identifying Texts, pt. 3

Just doing this initial Googling will get you a fair amount of texts to start with.

There’s so many ways to find more books. Content creators who specialize in the topic you’re interested in or the form maybe a good way to initiate a search. If you find even one book that looks interesting, you can then do a search web like the ones outlined above. Book round up articles are also a good way to initiate a search.

However, academics’ work are a really great way to find texts as well. I know the paywall is a very real thing, but more and more academics are finding ways to share their work with public audiences. For example, if you wanted text inspo for graphic novels/comics/pop culture, I would check sites like The Middle Spaces, Flow Journal and The Vault of Culture. The Mid Theory Collective is a newer site that takes a critical/academic lens to a lot of contemporary cultural moments, so finding a piece that speaks to your interests and seeing what texts those authors cite is also a great way to find more work. And if you want some historical framing for some of this work, Contingent Magazine has been publishing great public facing scholarship for years now.

And once you find an academic who you realize is speaking your language, look them up! See what else they have published on; go to their website! Grab books from the titles of their papers! Have they done any podcast interviews recently? Check the show notes of those episodes in case they drop book recommendations there!

Whew. Is this a lot of work? Yes. But I find reframing it as being a super-sleuth very satisfying.

Organizing your texts.

Okay, so it’s been a while, you’ve been going down rabbit holes for days and you have a ton of potential texts in your spread sheet.

Now what?

You’re going to try to organize it into a reading list. And you can do this however you want, and it depends on what your goal is with this reading.

Is your goal to be able to write your own graphic memoir? Then it behooves you to be pretty well-versed in graphic novels that have sold recently to be able to confidently articulate where your book would fit in the current landscape. I would focus my attention on reading books published in the last 5-10 years, but still make sure I have a good grasp on the books that inspired these texts/made it possible for them to exist.

Is your goal to understand a problem? Then it might make sense to select texts to read that span a longer period of time. Go back a few decades. Longer if you want.

Be realistic about what you can accomplish. The fastest way to get discouraged is to assign yourself way more than you can reasonably do.

One way to think about this: The average college semester is about 14 weeks, which is roughly one quarter of the year. Commit to studying from your list for a quarter of the year. A senior seminar literature class covers about one book a week for that time, sometimes with a holiday break, and often saving the last week for a review. That’s still about 12 books in 14 weeks, which might be aggressive/daunting, especially if you’re reading alone. Maybe instead, to test the water, you decide to focus on one book per two weeks, which is about seven books to start. If you read quickly, up it to 10.

Create a new document with the start of the week for 14 weeks. Next to each date, decide which book(s) you’re going to read on each of those weeks from your spreadsheet database. Remember, think through what’s going to serve you best toward your goals as you’re selecting your texts.

Et voilá. You’ve just created the infrastructure for a self-guided study.*

*This is in no way definitive! You can do whatever you want! These are just some strategies for how I’ve created my own self-guided studies!

If you’re interested, I can do more on this. I can imagine folks would be interested in how I would parcel out reading to make sure I stick to my plan. How I find supplemental sources and materials to enrich my study. How I note take for self-guided study/what kinds of things you can look for. Let me know what would be useful!

Honestly, one of my biggest recommendations is to do study with your friends. I know it’s hard to manage, but we’re in a moment when arming ourselves with knowledge is becoming imperative. Build community around study, if you can.

In fact, I may have to see if anyone’s interested in building some reading groups with me as soon as I finish this post.

I hope this was useful. And I hope you are well.

P.S. A note on access: I meant to write about how to get a hold of books but tapped out. You can buy of course but please use your public library. What they don’t have, they can often get for you either by purchasing or asking about their Inter-Library Loan service. Share and trade books with friends. If you find yourself looking at an academic article that’s paywalled, it’s worth emailing the author to see if they would send you a copy. They will probably do that. If you have other suggestions for accessing texts, please sound off in my comments!