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.)

Third Draft!

This afternoon, I finished the longhand version of the third draft of my WIP novel.  Now I just need to type it up, making more changes as I go.  Then, I need to do a pretty hardcore line-by-line edit (in which I hack and slash out every unnecessary adverb), and then press-gang some family and friends into reading the thing and giving me feedback (that's right, Tim, I'm looking at you).

And then, I think it might be time to start working on that query letter and synopsis.

So far, looking at this draft, it feels yet tighter and more polished than the second draft was, though the big changes were made in that draft.  I didn't make any plot changes this time.  Except for a section in the middle of the novel that was restructured and had a chunk of plot substituted in, I was always pretty happy with the novel structurally.  I'm a big planner and outliner, so I tend to figure plot structure out rather earlier than some writers, perhaps.  I'm like this with my academic writing, too.  I can't really start until I actually know where I'm going and what I want to say.  Otherwise, I'm hopelessly lost.

The other interesting thing I noticed this time around was that toward the end of working on the end of the second draft, I was seriously considering changing the ending.  It felt uncomfortable for me and I even tried rewriting the last chapter.  But I stopped halfway through.  It didn't feel right to change it.  And this time, no qualms.  The ending the novel has always had felt perfectly right and it stayed, with very few changes.  Go figure.

Londonbound!; Northbound!; and Revision

I'm heading down to London today to take in a one-day (free!) conference on Reimagining the Brontes.  My supervisor and another Oxford English professor will be speaking, along with a number of other Bronte academics, some of whom I've read articles from in the past.  My lovely friend at LSE has kindly said I can bunk at her flat, which is great.

I'm also rather excited, as, I realized yesterday, this will be the first train trip in Britain I've tackled on my own and my first time propelling myself around the great metropolis by myself.  I've always been travelling with someone else when I've been in London previously.  I have this grand vision of myself roaming around the streets and parks solo.

I don't think I'll have a lot of time for roaming however, as the conference will take up almost all my Saturday.  But Tim's coming down on Sunday so we can do some sight-seeing.  There's a special John Martin exhibit on at the Tate Britain which I would like to see, as I know the Brontes were big fans of his apocalyptic paintings and engravings.

Also on the travel front, Tim and I have booked a little trip up north for our anniversary (our 10th!  Yikes!).  We're going to stay one night in York and three in Edinburgh.  We're hoping we can also pop into Durham to see the Cathedral and the Castle, but we'll see.  It will depend on train schedules and how much baggage we're hauling around.  I'm quite excited.  I really love both cities and Tim's never been to York.  Also, I will have fond literary memories of York, having now read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which begins there and involves magic being done to the Minster itself.

Also, on the revision front (and now this post and really jumping all over the place), my longhand third draft is now well over half done.  I'm getting very close to the exciting bits of the story, which may speed my pace up a bit.  However, except for when I was in a fog of writing and writing preparation the week last week, I've been really good about putting in my one hour a day of working on the book.  It's amazing how much you can get accomplished if you can just force yourself to put in some time every single day.

The Fruits of Revision

Before we moved, I finally finished going through the entire manuscript of my work in progress and doing a complete revision.  I've never been a good reviser, though I trust I'm getting better with age.

Once here and mostly settled, I finished typing up that new draft and then went through the end product, making notes, correcting typos, and outlining, chapter by chapter, to see if there were any structural problems.  And all in all, I'm really pleased with what the second draft (that took about four years to complete - ouch!).  I made some major changes in the middle - changed up characters, delved further into backstory, restructured three chapters - and they've worked a great improvement on the novel as a whole.  Of course, now all the new material needs a layer of polish, which is partly what Draft #3, which I began two days ago, will hopefully accomplish.

But I was also really pleased to see that chapters where I thought I'd made very few changes - pruning here, making description a bit more original there - were actually much stronger than they had been before.

All those small changes (and big ones), I think, have added up to a much stronger book, one that I really enjoyed reading again.  So, once Draft #3 is done (and I do have a couple ideas for some more substantive changes there too), perhaps I will have to begin researching literary agents and such.  I guess we'll see.