the going is slow

Well, I think I’m something like five days into my dissertation-writing phase, and I don’t know whether I have a lot or a little to show for it. When I started putting stuff on paper a couple of days ago (at least I think it was Wednesday), all I managed to accomplish was to scratch out an overview of what chapters I wanted, then gave the chapters creative titles. It took a whopping twenty minutes of effort (much of which was simply typing up my longhand scribbles into a computer outline), and it didn’t represent much beyond putting to paper the very skeletal (no more than a table of contents) ideas I’ve been kicking around mentally for most of the past year or more.

Since then,  I’ve made good faith efforts to progress deeper. I spent yesterday beginning to flesh out my outline into something with a bit more substance. I dug out my notebook and started scratching out the things I want to put in my introduction, with some rough subheads (still without witty titles) and some bullet-point notes for each subsection of the chapter.

It’s a little challenging at this stage, because I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to tackle the much more daunting task of going back through my massive body of notes to figure out what all I’m actually going to put in the dissertation, what specifically I want to argue based on that, and how I want to organize all that information. And I’m fully intending to put that off as long as I reasonably can. But I’m also faced with the challenge of having thought of lots of stuff I want to say or argue over the past year or more, but never having recorded it in a systematic way. Sure, I’ve made some notes here or there in the moleskine journal I decided to use finally for dissertation brainstorming. And I elaborated on some of this in my monthly progress reports I’ve been e-mailing my adviser. But there’s probably still stuff that’s fallen between the cracks, and even the things I did log in some form aren’t recorded in any systematic manner — the challenge I face now.

Today I sat down at the computer for a few hours and started creating an outline for the introductory chapter. Again, this was largely a case of me typing up the notes I had written out longhand yesterday. But I did move some things around, and I fleshed out a lot of the ideas at greater length. I even made it all the way to the end, so I can feel good about having something like a rudimentary outline for that chapter, which allows me to move on.

But for all that progress, I know that what I have now isn’t going to cut the mustard and will have to be hacked up, reworked and expanded in the future. I think the way I’m going to proceed with the outlining phase of my dissertation is to keep along the path I’ve already begun. Basically, I started with a bare-bones, table-of-contents chapter outline. Now I’ve proceeded to creating more substantive outlines for each component chapter. I’ll stick with this until I make it to the end of all seven chapters. And hopefully at that point I’ll muster the energy to begin reading back through my notes to see what I might have missed and where I might need to change my argument or shuffle the organization.

But then there’s the issue of going through all the notes and making the requisite changes to the outline, which could render the outline for my dissertation fairly obsolete. Or at least, it could require major revision. I suppose this is why I’ve heard other grad students and academics say time and again to save the introduction (and conclusion) for last, since you really can’t frame your dissertation until you know what comes between it. However, I’ve always felt like I need to have a clear sense of what I want to argue and how I want to frame the issue before I start writing, and I’ve just always written in a very mechanical front-to-back sort of way. Maybe this explains why I write well in general, because I go from beginning to end with a clear-cut sense of direction, I know what I want to argue, and I have a good idea of how I plan for the argument to unfold. In college, and at least in my early years of graduate school, I would build on this by rewriting drafts of papers anew, basically printing out the first draft, creating a new file in Word, and hammering out the whole thing again, only this time with the big ideas and arguments implanted more prominently in my mind. I’ve shied away from this approach since my first year of grad school, mostly because I’ve had to write much longer papers, or I’ve had less time to write, so it’s not practical. But if I have the time, I’d probably do the same with my dissertation (it seems like the best way of incorporating feedback and making changes so the thing works as an organic whole).

Anyway, all that is a way of saying that my writing process tends to be very labor intensive. I don’t always rely on outlines, especially for relatively short papers. And a lot of times I’ll start outlining something at length, then, once I’ve made it halfway or two-thirds of the way through creating the outline, I’ll finally get impatient, reason that I have enough to know where it’s going and how it will end, and follow from there. I’m not sure that’s the best approach, and I don’t know that I always write the best conclusions, but it’s how I work.

And I feel like if I can maintain the discipline and focus to endure this arduous process of outlining, it might not take me all that long to write the actual dissertation. I figure once I get through this round of fleshing out ideas for each chapter, then I can sift through my notes and make changes as needed. And from there I can make a new, very detailed outline, including source notes and argument points and topic sentences and everything else. A lot of these outlines, at least the ones I’ve written before, wind up being comprised of fully constructed sentences, with thought given to how the prose will flow from paragraph to paragraph, and even between sentences within each paragraph. It’s a really labor- and time-intensive process, but when I see it through, it always makes the actual writing breeze. I followed this model for the seminar paper I wrote last winter, creating an outline that was probably eighteen or twenty pages single spaced, and it allowed me to write something like thirty-two pages in eight hours before my hard drive up and died on me. I lost everything I had written (and wound up buying a new laptop ahead of schedule), but because I had printed out my outline earlier in the day, I was able to tackle the paper again later in the week with a loaner laptop, and I cranked out a long version of the paper, something like fifty-seven pages, over two days and about eighteen hours or so.

So you can see why I really want to get my outline down well. Even if my dissertation runs something like 400 or 500 pages, it’s not unrealistic to think I can write a full draft of it in a couple of months if I have the detailed outline to work from (though it might well bog down on having to look up citations, check my translations, and other mundane and banal aspects of writing). It’d be fantastic if I can actually pull that off, since it’d leave me lots of time to revise and rewrite, plus I’d be able to deliver something substantial if I apply for jobs and get asked for more than the original writing sample (probably one chapter or the equivalent). I keep thinking I can finish in one year, but it’s hard to know, especially knowing that I’ll be teaching my own courses in the winter and spring, which will suck up a lot of my time (even in the fall), and there are the other parts of life that tend to intercede. But here’s hoping.