A few years ago when I was thinking about what doing my PhD would be like, the writing up process seemed to me to involve hours of staring at a computer screen and wearing my typing fingers down to the bone to produce thousands upon thousands of thesis words to power me towards that 100,000 target.
The reality, as it turns out, is somewhat different. In fact, almost the complete opposite!
Part of what makes the reality less frantic than what I had imagined is to my credit. So I got plenty of writing done in my first three years so have some pretty robust drafts of chapters already. That does take the pressure off and if I were to do a word count right now with what I have I would probably not be far off where I should be. But drafts in hand does not make for a complete thesis, so a significant amount of work is still required.
Now a ‘good’ day of writing in my fourth year would go something like this… I read through a draft and because I have had time to reflect on it I am somehow able to make the links between sections and organise the words so that they now fit in a better order, adding some new material which says a lot about where I am coming from as a researcher – gradually turning a literature review of who wrote what to I think this about that because. When these good days happen they propel me forward quite dramatically. The best thing about these good days, and this is another thing which contradicts my original thinking, is that I already have the words down in a previous draft, so all I am doing in actuality is editing, updating and clarifying what is already written, essentially a glorified copy and paste job!
If each day was as productive as the one I have just described, then I would have submitted my thesis some weeks ago. The reality is that there is something inside me, and so I am told everyone who does a PhD, that compels me to avoid such days and to be unable to concentrate on the matter in hand.
Another misconception I had was about writer’s block. I always envisaged writer’s block as being the frustration of staring at a blank page and not knowing how to get started and not finding yourself in the zone where words just seem to flow effortlessly. The reality is that it is possible to have thousands of words in front of you and for your brain to be so scrambled that you cannot get anything done with them. But the truth is that editing is a stop-start process, it is precisely the opposite of getting into that elusive writing flow. But for obvious reasons, you can see why in a ‘writing up’ year that finding yourself unable to do any writing when you actually want to and have no other distractions is at best a little disconcerting, but truthfully, is the most frustrating time of your life!
Difficult things in life are difficult, and we recognise them as such. Rewriting a theoretical framework chapter is a very difficult task to have to undertake, no question. For that reason alone a little procrastination is understandable and even to a certain degree expected. But in this case there is a little more to it than simply avoiding doing something which strains the brain.
What above all else does the ‘writing up’ year signify? Not, as I thought, that it would be a year where you would do lots of (endless, frantic, burning the midnight oil) writing. Instead, it signifies the end of a very significant chapter in my life. It means the end of a PhD and the end of my time in Newcastle, a city I first arrived in as a fresher nearly a whole decade ago. Given the current situation in the job market and the reality that there are no other degrees left to do (not that I would want to), it means that hanging onto the PhD offers me a little bit of security in my life. So long as I still have a PhD thesis which remains unfinished or in the processes of being written up, then I still have a meaningful purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But if only it were that simple, just get up in the morning and write up my PhD, there’s a lot to be said for prolonging the agony. The misery continues, but only because I love it so!