Hi everyone and welcome, or welcome back! Today I’m delighted to host a guest post by Allison Tyra on her research and writing process.
Allison’s debut, Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked Misattributed & Stolen Work, will be published in May 2025 with Rising Action Publishing, a woman-owned and operated publishing house.
Uncredited combines research and statistics with the stories of more than 600 women to explore why women have not been properly acknowledged for their accomplishments, both historically and today. It promises to be a fascinating (and frustrating!) read!
You can check out the book on Goodreads, and it is also available for pre-orders.
Please join me in thanking Allison for sharing her thoughts and experience with us today, and congratulating her on her debut!
Over to you, Allison!
How do you set out to research when your topic is hidden stories? Especially when you’re not just looking in one specific field or time or location, but trying to explain how and why those stories are hidden in the first place?
Unfortunately, I don’t actually have an answer to that, even though I’ve written a book on this very topic. Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work combines more than 600 stories encompassing thousands of women, with research studies, statistics and other data, all to answer the question: we know women are as good as men, so why haven’t I heard of more women? It’s a topic that I’m genuinely not sure someone could actively set out to research, and in fact I didn’t. That’s where Infinite Women comes in.
Launched in 2020, Infinite Women is an online database of biographies – as I write this, it includes over 5,300 and growing. And when you read that many people’s stories, you start noticing the patterns and, at least in my case, you start making notes. Call it passive or incidental research. Or, if you’re a writer (even if you haven’t published anything yet), call it inspiration. How many of us have ideas for a book, and then either forget about them or decide we’re too busy or think maybe it’s not that great an idea after all? Make a note and come back to it later!
I have a folder full of writing projects and ideas, fiction and nonfiction alike, with not just manuscripts in progress, but also scripts and novellas and short stories – I even went Weird Al on opera!
My writing is a great example of my AuDHD (autism + ADHD) in action: women’s history is my autistic special interest, while bouncing around from one thing to another is classic ADHD. Some of them I’ve finished, some I haven’t and some I’ll never finish – and that’s OK. Some have made it to the public and some haven’t, and may not – also OK. I know what it’s like to want and need the external validation of someone else saying your work is “good enough,” but at least for me, it’s a lot healthier to find satisfaction in the writing itself.
If you do want to pursue publication, remember that you can get 100 nos, but you only need one yes – as long as it’s the right yes. That’s not an exaggeration, I did look at over 100 agents and publishers, many of whom wouldn’t even look at an “unsolicited manuscript” (including a feminist publishing house!). I received plenty of rejections, which is still better than the ones that don’t even bother to tell you “no thanks.” And the first publisher that offered me a contract was definitely not a good fit for me or my book. But dealing with them motivated me to keep looking rather than settle, and I ended up with an editor I adore, and couldn’t ask for a stronger advocate for my work. In fact, I now have a contract for three more books.
The end result is that if someone does want to set out to actively research women’s hidden histories, they can read my book (and I hope they do!). Fair warning, though – once you start, it can be hard to stop! I have now passed the point where my lovely editor has said, “no, you really do need to stop adding” and so I have around four pages of more things to add. Maybe my publisher will let me do an expanded edition down the road, but this is exactly why I called my project Infinite Women: there are always more stories to find.
About the author
Allison Tyra is the creator and manager of Infinite Women, an ever-expanding encyclopaedia of women, and host of the weekly podcast. After reading the stories of tens of thousands of women and wondering why she’d never heard of many of them, she began compiling notes for what would become her debut book, Uncredited. Although most of Allison’s creative projects have been performance-based, Uncredited is a return to her journalistic roots. An American ex-pat, Allison lives in regional Australia with her husband and what he says are far too many cats and she feels are not enough.
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