Chapter 2 surveys current practices. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? How does the process of research unfold? How often does research end up in the dustbin (“file-drawer”)? What different intellectual trajectories are exemplified by the careers of social scientists? Using surveys and interviews, this chapter maps the lay of the land.

Chapter 4 discusses general strategies for finding a topic. This includes (a) finding your passion, (b) the life of the mind, (c) reading the secondary literature, (d) appraising the state of the world, (e) the familiar and the unfamiliar, (f) specializing and generalizing, and (g) the old and the new.

Chapter 5 offers a variety of heuristics for discovery. This includes (a) turning answers into questions, (b) play, (c) skepticism towards words and numbers, (d) error and anomaly, (e) analogies, (f) intellectual arbitrage, (g) thought experiments, (h) processes and variables, (i) hermeneutics, (j) abstraction, and (k) failure.

Via the first volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Karen Kukil traces the key themes and concerns that preoccupy the writer, providing an intellectual, cultural and personal biography. Thereby, Kukil establishes the key contexts out of which Plath’s poetry and fiction emerge. After the well-documented deletions in Letters Home, and the dissatisfaction many readers felt at a selection that depicted Plath as ceaselessly happy, Kukil views the full and unabridged letters as akin to a full-length colour film after a black and white short.