Tales from the DPhil, Part Two: Writing the Thesis Like a Novel

Welcome to Part Two of this upstart series, Tales from the DPhil.  Today is the juicy stuff - writing tips!

Last term, I discovered that the single biggest stress- and anxiety-causing aspect of my doctoral experience was my approach to writing the darned thing.

In undergrad and my Master's, I did quite well writing essays by researching a lot up front, creating detailed outlines, and then racing through a draft with a quick polish at the end.  Because I always had hard deadlines, I always made them, even if this required some crazy writing days.

This is by no means an ideal writing strategy for a doctoral thesis.  A term paper can (but probably shouldn't) be a sprint.  A thesis is a marathon.  A three-year marathon.  A thesis also demands consideration, the evolution and testing of ideas and arguments, the honing of sentences.  I was trying to write chapters in big bursts (which didn't work) and then had no time for proper revision.  I became anxious about writing and avoided it.

So, I decided I had to make writing much less daunting.  I decided to write my thesis as if it were a novel.  I'm quite proud of this revelation.

I've been writing novelish fiction since I was fourteen.  I know how to write a big, multi-part project and just needed to apply the same strategies to my thesis.  I know from experience that I need to write every day, preferably to a very manageable word goal.

Principles that Have Vastly Improved My Thesis-Writing Experience

1.  Come up with a manageable word count and stick to it every day.  I've chosen 500 words, which I think is approximately an hour's writing, but it varies a lot.  It amounts to 2ish sides of A4 or about 3-4 pages in my Moleskine journal or 2-3 paragraphs.  It is extremely doable and non-threatening because it seems like so little.  Also, the more regularly you write, the more natural it becomes.  As a bonus, on the days I force myself to write, I usually end up over-shooting this word goal and write closer to 600 words.  But no matter what, something is better than nothing.  Progress is better than standing still.  And, if you write 500 words a day for one work week, you suddenly have 2500 words.  That's almost a conference paper.

2.  Write first thing every day.  Because I know that if I put off my writing, it probably won't get done and I likely will not get much research done either, out of a general sense of anxiety and procrastination.  Also, writing is always the hardest part of my day.  Everything after it seems easier and more enjoyable.  And, once you've met your word count for the day, you've met a mini-goal, which feels great.  Plus, you don't have to worry about writing any more until the next day.

3.  Don't start with a blank page.  What I've been doing is writing longhand rough words one day and then revising while typing them the next.  This allows me to a do a first pass of revision and gets my writing brain working before I have to tackle fresh writing, which in turns makes tackling the new words less frightening.  In an ideal world, I would also take notes and write down ideas for the next day's rough words - that can be a big help to getting started.

4.  Don't worry if the words are rough/awful.  Once you have words, you can fix them!  If you don't have any words to play with, you can't do anything at all.  It's taken me a long time to come around to revising my academic and creative writing and to find strategies to help me do it.  Sometimes having a pile of messy, meandering words is a gift because it's often so easy to see how they could be improved.  A nicely proofread piece of work can be harder to take apart and put back together again because of its shiny surface.

5.  Realise that words/writing time are not an end but a process.  This is another realisation that made me feel better about my messy, daily words.  I'm not writing just to meet a word count - I'm writing because writing allows me to think through the issues I'm dealing with in a way that research or even outlining can't.  Sometimes I have little revelations while writing.  I realise what my argument is, or discover something new about a text.  I've realised that I need to spend a good portion of every day interacting with my words on the page, whether writing or revising.  If you leave a project for a few days, it's much harder to get back into it and pick up the flow of ideas again.  (Noveling is the exact same in this regard).

I hope these principles might be helpful to any grad school brethren who may be reading this.  Do you have any tips in turn?  (They are always much appreciated - it's very easy to slack off when it comes to writing discipline.)

Tales from the DPhil, Part One: Tips for Better Living and Working

Hello blog,

Last term, I somehow made the leap from Second-Year Slump levels of motivation and high levels of procrastination, stress, and anxiety (chiefly centred on writing) to high levels of motivation and writing.  Hence, I thought I'd write a bit about the life, working, and writing strategies that helped me out in the hope that perhaps they might help you, too.

This is Part One: Living and Working.  Tomorrow: Part Two: Writing the Thesis Like a Novel.


1.  Get a good night's sleep.  I suffered from some terribly off-kilter sleeping patterns over the Christmas vacation.  There were a few mornings I didn't get to sleep until 7 am.  This was not good for my productivity.

When I finally forced myself to wake up at 6:45 am, I discovered I was much more productive.  The days seemed so full of possibilities and I really got excited about tackling my work.  It's much better to find yourself at lunchtime with a few hours' of work under your belt than to have nothing at all.  Also, I quite like working on my novel over breakfast and coffee for my first working hour of the day.  This allows me to dedicate time to my novel revisions without feeling like I'm stealing time from my thesis.  If I put the novel off, I know I probably won't work on it later in the day.

2.  Find or create the conditions that will allow you to be productive.  I've realised over the past year or so that working at home isn't actually the best for me.  There are so many possibilities for distraction.  The internet.  The dishes.  A nap?  Last term, I discovered three ways to make my working day much more productive.

a)  I solved the internet problem (mostly) by using the Firefox add-on Leechblock, in which you can list the URLs of sites that you know you waste time on and block yourself from accessing them at certain times.  At the moment, I'm not allowing myself access to any social media, the Guardian website, YouTube, or my favourite blogs between 8:30 am and 5:30 pm on week days.  I've also prevented myself from accessing the settings in a way which I don't (yet) know how to disable.  (I could, of course, still go on Twitter on Tim's computer or my phone, but that would require more effort.)

b)  I found a great place at school to work.  The English Faculty has a newish graduate work space which is perfect - just tables in a light, bright room and an almost non-existent wireless signal.  Also, often other graduate students are working in there, which allows for much needed human interaction.  And, because it is purely a space in which to do work, my perception of my work day is much different.  At home, it can be a struggle to log the hours I'm aiming for, especially with the temptation to take breaks or a nap.  At school, however, I can be happy working away for hours with minimal breaks because that's precisely what I'm there to do.  I don't even watch the clock that much.  I work until 5:30 or 6 and then I go home.

c)  I can do this because this is a space I can work in while snacking.  I used to work at home more because I wanted access to food and drink (there is no eating in Oxford libraries).  I can snack away or eat lunch in this work room, however, and it's changed my working experience hugely.  Before, if I sat down to work in a library, I would often almost instantly become hungry, which was incredibly distracting.  I've cut many a work day short in order to go home to eat something. Not a problem when I can eat while working.

3.  Allow yourself guilt-free time off.  When I was struggling (and failing) to meet the hours quota I set myself each day/week, I felt like I was always potentially supposed to be working (unless I was on an actual vacation).  This is stressful!  You (and I) need breaks that don't involve the thesis perpetually nudging your subconscious.  Since Tim has a regular, full-time job now, I also felt it would be really nice if I also had (mostly) work-free evenings and weekend.  After a vacation slump (due to the disappearance of the term schedule), I'm back to full productivity levels, which means that I can actually have evenings to myself, guilt-free.  (Confession: sometimes I'll have half an hour or hour of work to do, but since that often involves reading Victorian novels, that's fine).  It's actually strange not to need to work.  I find I don't quite know what to do with myself.

Tomorrow, I will share with you the secret of Writing the Thesis Like a Novel.  It involves word counts.  And happier thesis writing and revision.

Reader, if you are in a commenting mood, how, when, and where do you best work?

Still Alive!

Hello, I'm still here.

The last couple weeks have been rather busy, as my parents have been visiting from Canada (which involved much visiting and touring about - including an afternoon at Blenheim Palace and a run up to London!).  I've also been working on revisions for my first chapter, which I need to submit at the end of next week for my transfer of status to the DPhil...

So...  More blogging to come in the near future, once I come out the other end of my transfer of status submission.

Chapter-Writing Survival Kit: Chapter One Edition

1. Coffee - with caffeine, not from instant crystals.  Preferably fresh Tim Hortons (what I am drinking right now)
2. Tea, preferably chai
3. Hot chocolate
4. Real chocolate
5. Laptop + narrow gauge lined paper
6. Black Bic pens + red and blue gel pens
7. Sympathetic partner for back rubs and for keeping ethernet cable away from me
8. Healthy snacks: fruit and yogurt
9. Mind-clearing walks
10. iPod loaded with music to distract me from the agony of the writing process

When Is It Time to Start Writing?

As I embark on actually getting the words down for the first chapter of my doctoral thesis (on heroes and hero-worship in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte’s early early writings), I’ve been thinking a bit about taking the leap from research and planning to actually writing.  I’ve realized that my process for academic writing is in many ways similar to my creative writing and since I suspect some other grad student and writerly types may be reading this, I thought I would attempt to explain how this works for me.  As with everything concerning the writing process, this is highly individual.

Before I start writing, I need to know where I’m going.  If I start in on an essay or a novel without having worked out what my end goal is and, at least in general, how I’m going to get there, I flail around hopelessly.  I'm totally lost in the woods.  Generally, I just don’t go in to a piece of writing until I know my major road markers, unless I’m trying to write an abstract or a proposal, when getting my ideas down messily and then shaping and cutting for word count after seems to work quite well.

I know some writers can go into a book and not know what’s hiding behind each corner (I’m thinking about fiction writers particularly here, but I know students who write this way too – it boggles my mind).  But then they go back and revise and work their book, essay etc. into a workable shape after the fact.

For whatever reason, I can’t do this.  For essays, I need to know each major point I’m trying to make before I start.  I need to see the shape of the argument in my head.  I also know it’s time to start writing when the essay, in a sense, begins writing itself, when I hear random sentences in my head that belong in the essay, when I come up with a way to describe something I’m trying to prove.

I used to plan out my essays in great detail, writing down every point and every quotation and page reference in a gigantic outline, then typing everything onto the computer.  That way I got to put off the actual writing for as long as possible. I think I’m better at embracing a bit of mess now, and have found that roughing out a paragraph or a section on paper and then typing and refining seems to work quite well.

I seem to need less detail going forward on a novel, but like an academic paper, a novel also needs to have enough complexity in the ideas and plot to move it forward.  Now that I am hopefully coming toward the end of revisions on my current novel, I’ve begun thinking about what the next one might be like.  Over the last couple years, I’ve had about three reasonably novel-like ideas, but none of them is tugging at me, shouting at me to write them now.  I suspect they are rather half-baked.  I don’t think there is enough imaginative force there to propel me through an entire novel.  I started, and even finished, so many longer stories that were really just dead inside as a teenager and discovered in the process that novels need a critical mass of ideas, so that a chain reaction occurs and ideas spark new ideas and pull up old ideas and rework them for the new context.  I think that’s what I’m waiting for at the moment.

And even then, when will I know when to start writing?  Well, I’ll need an idea of the plot structure and my end point.  And, as occurred with this novel, I’ll know it’s time to start when it begins writing itself in my head.

I remember this quite clearly.  I’d had the original idea for this novel back in March of 2006, and then on August 17^th, after I had just finished a summer Latin class and put another old (and frankly not very good) novel to bed, I was sitting on my bed, eating strawberries, listening to CBC radio, and reading Wuthering Heights, and I think the cadences at Emily Bronte’s language set something going in my mind and the book began writing itself.

At that point, you really do just need to start.

Televisual Escapades: The 1970s (ish)

Tim and I have begun a strange trend in our TV watching lately.  We've been catching up on TV from around the 1970s, primarily British and primarily documentaries.  In theory, these are all shows our parents might have been watching, if they had aired in Canada.

1)  The Civil War (1990)
This is of course the massive and spectacular Ken Burns documentary, spread over 10 parts, and it began our documentary craze.  We both watched documentaries on TV from time to time and the odd feature-length documentary, but we are now gobbling up huge multi-parters.  We actually started watching this back home, but had a bit of a hiatus, because, both in Saskatoon and here, I kept falling asleep during the Gettysburg episode.  Shame on me.  However, once I managed to stay awake through Gettysburg, we really enjoyed the rest of the series.  We will definitely be tracking down his The War, which I saw parts of when it originally aired on PBS.

2)  The World at War (1972)
This gigantic and very famous World War II documentary was our next foray into the world of documentaries.  Wow.  We recently finished this one (it took awhile - it has 26 episodes!) and it was wonderful.  For one thing, it's narrated by an aging but still beautifully voiced Laurence Olivier.  For another, it's amazing the events they have footage of, and often colour footage too.  It's amazing how much more real and recent World War II looks if you have colour film of it, even if the colour isn't very good.  I learned so much more about the Pacific, Eastern, and African fronts, as well as the Japanese home front.  We put off watching the episode on the Holocaust for awhile, until we were in the right mood for it, but the film makers handled the material really well, with first-person accounts from victims, Germans who were involved, Germans who hid Jews in their homes.  Anyway, it's a massive documentary, but it's a really fantastic account of the war, with a great variety of witnesses looking back at the events of 30 years before.

3)  Connections (1978)
This is a ten-episode series on the history of science and change, hosted by the inimitable James Burke.  One small change or invention in the distant past is tracked through many evolutions down the ages until something important to our daily lives is reached: the atom bomb, the telephone, the fighter plane.  The various historical connections are fascinating (Burke is, at bottom, a great storyteller), unpredictable, sometimes dizzying to follow.

4)  Cosmos (1980)
Tim had previously listened to Carl Sagan's 13-part documentary on, well, the cosmos, our world and its place within the solar system, galaxy, and universe as a whole.  What's interesting about watching this documentary now is learning that so much of what we take for granted about space - that Jupiter has rings, the details of of Jupiter's moons - had only recently been discovered at that time by the Voyager missions.  Also, they had only just figured out that the mass dinosaur extinction had been caused by a meteor.  The accompanying background music for the series ranges from wonderful classical, like Holst's The Planets, to gratingly synthetic.  But, it was the 80s after all.

5)  Fawlty Towers
This is of course not a documentary, but it is from the 70s and I had never seen it before.  No, not even the "Don't mention the war" episode.  Tsk, tsk.  John Cleese and company are hilarious and without fail, every episode had me cringing delightedly as Basil Fawlty's schemes spiralled out of control.  Also, I think Prunella Scales' "BASIL!" will forever be imprinted on my mind.

6) Civilisation (1968)
For one thing, this show is a joy to watch because it lingers lovingly on great art and architecture in colour and, as of recently, HD.  Because the picture quality is so good, in many respects this does not look like a show that was made in the 60s.  In fact, it was one of the first big colour productions of the BBC.  It follows western civilization through its art.  I find Kenneth Clarke may be reading a bit too much into changes in art and he has some things to say about civilization and history that strike me as being slightly wrongheaded now (also, in the first episode anyway, there were a number of slightly off-putting references to "barbarism"), but the series is really very interesting.  We're just about to enter onto the Renaissance episodes now.

If you happen to be looking for good TV, you can't do much better than many of this classic series.  How I wish more huge documentary series were being made today.  (Maybe they are and I just don't know about them.  Recommendations?)

Tricking Myself Into Writing: 5 Strategies

This post is brought to you by ... Procrastination!

Well, here I am.  Tomorrow, I have to turn in a conference paper to my supervisor, which is great, because that means I'll have the rest of the week to tweak and improve.  However, this also means I have to finish the darn thing in the next 24 hours.  (I'm sitting at 3 pages at the moment.  I have at least 7 to go).

In the old days, by which I mean, undergrad, I would think and plan and collect primary source quotations and usually write papers in the last day, maybe two before they were due.  They were always done on time, but they were also usually completed at a bit of a sprint, over the course of a few very painful days.

Toward the end of my Master's thesis, a much longer and more involved process, I began to come up with some strategies to help myself approach writing, an activity that I love and hate, that is easy and brain-achingly hard, and that I will apparently avoid at all costs.

1. I figured out that if I could convince myself to refine and enlarge my outline enough times, I would end up accidentally starting a draft.  That draft would also be relatively easy, because I would have laid out all my points and page references and quotations ahead of time.

2.  A bit later, I discovered that writing longhand, especially at the beginning of the paper worked well.  I couldn't obsess over word count; the white page seemed less foreboding that the flickering white screen.

3.  A bit later, I learned the trick of "messiness".  This works especially well if I'm writing to a constrictive word count for a proposal or abstract.  I tell myself, well, I'll just get my ideas down first, and then I can shape the proposal later, even if my sentences don't make sense or are hugely wordy.  If I start on paper, I can easily refine as I type everything up.

4.  Cannibalize from other documents.  Starting an a paper is hard.  If I can steal an opening paragraph from a related essay (even if I have to change it around a fair bit later), I can skip the difficulty of opening and play around with tweaking and shaping raw material instead.  Afterwards, continuing is much less difficult.

5.  Rewriting.  I discovered today, yet again, how hard transitioning from one part of a paper to another can be.  Answer?  Rewrite the previous paragraph or section and then write what comes next.  I know that once I get back into the flow of writing, words/ideas will probably show up in my head without too much more effort.  Rereading previous material can also serve the same purpose, and is something that has worked well in the past for novel-writing too.

I'm actually feeling pretty good about this paper (on male homosocial bonds and sibling rivalry in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte's early writing).  It feels like the ideas are snapping and sparking against each other.  I've got primary and secondary sources ready to be referred to; I'm surrounded by my books and papers; I actually have a firm argument (hurrah!).  So... now I guess I really just need to get back to it.