I always thought that my working style on my PhD was to write up as I go along. Since my superviser suggested a few weeks ago that I should put a temporary freeze on new reading and produce my first chapter, a theoretical framework, I have realised that making notes and playing around with ideas is not the same as writing up.
I know that writing a thesis is not about the number of words. But having 80,000 words cited in the university documents was overwhelming. Indeed, even having my supervisor mention 20,000 words or so for a chapter still seemed quite a lot. Then I read a blog post on how writing a thesis is a bit like losing weight – instead of kilograms counting, you are word counting. (I am sure it was The Thesis Whisperer but I can’t find the actual post. It’s possible it was tweeted.)
With losing weight, trying to go from, say, 87kg to 60kg is an unsurmountable task. But celebrating every time you lose 1kg makes losing weight so much more motivating. Instead of thinking “still got some way to go”, you think “I’ve done well”. But the important thing is not to think about losing weight, just live, get on with what you have to do and don’t eat too much.
So, with writing up, I didn’t think about trying to get to 20,000 words. I just wrote what I could. Before long, I got to almost 2,000 words. After that, I noticed that I was going over the 1,000 barrier every day – 2,000, then 3,000, then 4,000 and so on. So I made that my daily goal. That means that I can write 20,0000 in 20 days. That’s less than a month. All of sudden, it seems very doable.
Let’s just hope, by the end of the month, I will have lost enough weight to fit my first chapter under my belt.
Doe, a deer: the beginning according to Julie Andrews
I should add that the other challenge I found was knowing where to start. So I followed Julie Andrew
s’ advice that she gave to the Von Trapp children when teaching them to sing: “Let’s start at the very beginning, the very best place to start.”
I have also found that the act of writing isn’t necessarily linear. I have gone back and forth, fleshing out thoughts here and moving paragraphs around there. And, maybe this isn’t the right way to go about it, but while I have put a freeze on new reading in general, it doesn’t mean that I don’t actually do any new reading. In many ways, writing up gives a direction to my research that perhaps wasn’t there before.
