Writer's block - a trip down memory lane

Some of the comments on my last post got me thinking about the bout of writer's block I suffered during grad school, while writing (or not) my dissertation. God, did that suck! I decided to write a little bit about it, because clearly I haven't quite got over it or realized that yes, this was years ago now. Hopefully writing about it will both exorcise it from my past, and maybe offer some advice (or possibly comfort) to those who might be going through the same thing now.

So, this is a rough timeline of my dissertation years and what I was doing during them:

1995-6 (year .5): I became a Ph.D. Candidate with the calendar year, so let's count the dissertation as starting officially in 1996. I think I spent this year reading a lot of stuff. And I got ready to go to Europe to do research. I had an administrative RA with my advisor.

Summer of 1996: I did research in Europe. I had no idea what I was doing, and my paleography sucked. Thank God I looked at pretty easy documents, as medieval documents go. I did get work done, though, by virtue of going to the archive every day and sitting there with documents in front of me. Enforced structure. It's a good thing.

1996-97 (year .5-1.5): Hmmm. Well, I TAed in the fall, had a fellowship in the winter, and was a lecturer in the spring (taught my own course).

1997-98 (year 1.5-2.5): I had another fellowship in the fall, then I taught my own course in the winter and in the spring.

1998-99 (year 2.5-3.5): Had an administrative position at my grad school. I know I was part of a dissertation writing group, and I know I submitted one chapter to them, so I must have been doing something. I think this was the chapter I kept polishing and polishing and polishing. Boy, that chapter was great. The rest of the dissertation kind of sucked, though. I know I went on the market this year, too, and spent a lot of time on my materials, and then didn't get anything, which sent me into something of a block.

1999-2000 (year 3.5-4.5): Worked as an adjunct; the first semester I taught one class, and the second I taught four. I spent the first semester finishing a draft of my dissertation, which I defended right before the second semester began. (It was a CRAPPY draft and a fairly unimpressive defense - all praise my wonderful committee who were willing to pass me on the strength of what they knew I could do. Although I'm sorry to have made such a less-than-glorious impression on them.) That fall semester was really productive for me, but I don't think I accomplished a hell of a lot during the spring - I was teaching 4 classes (3 new preps) and on the market, which took up PLENTY of time. I did manage to write a conference paper, though. And then that summer I taught a course and moved to Rural Utopia.

2000-01 (year 4.5-5.5) (the year I finished): Started my tenure-track job at Rural Utopia. So I was working full-time, but it was a 2/2 load that year. During that  time, I rewrote the entire second half of my dissertation and finally submitted it just before classes ended. Or just after. I forget. (Who cares, it's done!)

Okay, we're not going to continue to trace my productivity through to today, because this is about my DISSERTATION writer's block. And really, I still can't remember exactly what I did/didn't do, and when, and how. I do remember being in the  office where I worked in my last year on campus, and that writing group was a huge boon. I also remember spending the two quarters I was on fellowship (in 1996 and 1997) MISERABLE. I got NOTHING done. You know what I remember from my fellowship quarters? Days that pretty much looked like this:

Getting up in the morning.

Saying to myself, "Right, today I am going to write ALL DAY."

Then all of a sudden it was lunchtime, and I hadn't done anything. Well, one has to eat lunch, right? So I'd eat lunch.

Then all of sudden it was about 2 or 2:30, and I hadn't done anything. Well, that's okay, there's still plenty of time left in the day, right?

And then all of sudden it was about 4:30 or 5, and I'd accomplished nothing, and there wasn't enough time left in the day to do what I'd planned.

It must not be my day. There's no point in trying to work now - the time isn't right - I'll start again tomorrow.    

And the next morning I'd wake up and say to myself, "Right, today I REALLY DO HAVE TO write all day."

And the same schedule would occur.

But I'd feel even worse about it, because I had the previous day of no work to make up for.

So the next morning: "I HAVE TO WRITE ALL DAY TODAY!!!"

No dice.

Honestly, I have no idea what I accomplished during those quarters. And I really don't remember much about writing my dissertation, except the time I spent writing while on my adjunct job and then in my first year on the tenure-track.

In any case, if you could excise those periods of writer's block, I'm sure I'd have finished at least a year more quickly.

What lessons have I gleaned from this process? Well, let's see.

1. DO NOT ISOLATE YOURSELF. Seriously. Personally, I got the most done during the times I was teaching or working on campus, and part of a dissertation group, and I got the least done during the quarters I was on fellowship. I got writer's block and I vanished and hid from my advisor and tried never to speak with her about the dissertation. I had no idea how to talk about my work and what I was doing at that point, anyway. It seemed so pointless to walk into her office to say, "Uh, I read some books/documents." I think this was partly because I assumed (actually, pretty much correctly, given this woman's position in the field) that she knew everything that was in those books already, so what was I going to say to her? Now, I realize I totally should have talked to her. But I couldn't at the time. (Partly, of course, because I wasn't reading any books/documents! It was an evil cycle.)
   
   In any case, DON'T HIDE. DON'T DO WHAT I DID. A lot easier said than done, but what happened to me was that my advisor started making stuff up about what I was doing (or not doing). Not that I can blame her - she had no evidence to go on that I was actually doing anything! (Which, much of this time, I wasn't.)
   
   It may feel like you can't possibly face (whoever it is) with as little done as you have. But you know what? NOT facing them, and isolating yourself, and STILL not getting work done, is not going to put you in a better position with this person. Dread is not conducive to productivity. Confessing your sins and moving forward is a much better idea.
   
   Obviously, if you're writing a dissertation, this is much more useful advice than at other points in one's career. A book editor to whom you owe a chapter probably does NOT want chatty reports of what you're up to or a blow-by-blow of your research process (actually, one's advisor may not want that, either, but at least has some context/use for it). But if you're behind on something and you really aren't just about to get it done - you really are going to take a while - it's probably much better to get in touch with the person to whom you owe it to explain yourself and be responsible about it, than just to vanish for months. (I have another story along these lines, but it's probably not worth the energy to write it. Just believe me.)
       
2. DO NOT PLAN TO WRITE IN EIGHT-HOUR MARATHONS.* Honestly, I was never as relieved as I was the day that I read Joan Bolker's words: "There are not a lot of people who can just write - not stare into space, not get up to make five pots of coffee, not talk on the phone, but write continuously - for more than about two hours a day. You can write for a very long time on any given day, but the trouble is, you can't then do it again the next, and again, and again - and writing daily is the pattern that's best suited to finishing a dissertation." (pp. 53-4, if you're curious.) I mean, it made me realize how utterly wrong-minded I'd been with all my plans to write all day long, but it was nice to realize that I couldn't do that because it was an unrealistic goal, not because I was an undisciplined slacker.
   
   *Unless, of course, this is necessary for meeting a specific deadline. I'm all about the 8-hour-writing-days to finish a conference paper or something. But don't plan on this as a regular schedule for writing, even if you are on fellowship or sabbatical or whatever.
         
3. IF YOU DON'T ACCOMPLISH WHAT YOU PLANNED TO ON ANY GIVEN DAY, DON'T BEAT YOURSELF UP OVER IT. LET IT GO. This was probably my biggest, biggest problem in the days I describe above. I reached such a pitch of self-loathing about my inability to get done what I'd (unrealistically) planned that I was good for nothing. NOTHING. Not every day is going to go as well as you'd like. If you blow off a day, you are not an evil, bad, self-indulgent person. Just start again on the next day. And do NOT expect yourself to do more on the next day to make up for it, because that's just setting yourself up for failure. (Y'all do realize I'm talking to myself here, right?)
   
   In a way, the thing that's helpful about working full-time when you're trying to get research done (rather than being on fellowship or something) is that it's hard to reach quite that abyss of self-loathing. If you're working, then you're teaching classes and/or going to meetings/accomplishing other admin/service tasks, as well as probably dealing with independent study students, professional associations, articles for review, etc. etc. There's always more that needs to be done; but at least you're doing SOMETHING. And it's hard to feel so bad about yourself if you're running around getting classes taught and meetings held and so on. Sure, it's not research productivity, but it is productivity. Being on fellowship/leave (or even just off teaching for the summer) is, for me, an irresistible temptation to work out, clean the apartment, go shopping, and watch TV - none of which are remotely productive. So I end up feeling much, much worse than I do during the school year.   

Okay, thus endeth my sermon for the day. I have to laugh, in light of my last post about feeling slow - I suppose it's better to figure this all out five years after the fact than never! Someday perhaps I will actually leave grad school/the dissertation process behind me... (Actually, I mostly have, but I guess I was feeling nostalgic today.)

Comments

[Dr. Crazy]

This is a great post, NK. I feel like these timeline posts really give a sense of how long it takes to do what we do, which in some ways is the very thing that makes it so draining, I think. (Aside from the drain of thinking, that is :) )

Let me add some things that got me through to the end of my dissertation:

1) Have a routine. I wrote 2/3 of my initial draft of my dissertation in a coffee shop between the hours of 1PM and 5PM over a 3 month period. The benefits of this were a) not being isolated in my house with distractions and a place for sleeping b) I would only bring what I had to work on and my writing journal with me, and so even if I futzed around for half of the time, I did ultimately write because, well, I had nothing else to do.

2) Don't obsess over details when you're trying to get an initial draft done because your director or readers will often tell you that you need to revamp or scrap the whole section anyway and so just getting the ideas down and worrying about the small stuff after you've got feedback is much more efficient. This isn't to say that turning crap in to committee members is the way to go, but it is to say that freaking out over a phrase here or there or a particular word that just "feels" off is a waste of time. I feel like this is also true with writing for peer-reviewed journals.

Again, thanks for a great post. And yes, that Joan Bolker book is fantastic - I even have gone back to it now to get myself inspired for writing and to make writing seem doable.

[What Now?]

I love your sermon at the end! I like Joan Bolker's book as well, although my own dissertation-writing bible was Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. She argues very strongly about the necessity of "shitty first drafts," which made a HUGE difference for me. And Lamott keeps a 1" x 1" picture frame on her desk, to remind herself that all she has to do on any given day is write that tiny bit of the whole picture.

Also, I'm with you in that I got much more accomplished when I was teaching, because I had that structure and felt much more confident on any given day that I had done something useful, which made it easier to write without the accompanying angst. Looking forward to the summer ahead, perhaps I'll adopt Dr. Crazy's approach of taking myself away from the house and only bringing what I want to work on for that day.

[redzils]

Bless you for putting this on the interweb. I am in the trenches - rewriting my thesis proposal in preparation for defending the whole shebang (since my project changed about 150% since the proposal defense) - and it makes me feel a lot better to realize that my "useless" days are the norm rather than a symptom of my unique failings.

[Caleb]

Great post!

I also had a long period of writer's blockage last summer, when I basically spun my wheels, over and over, in the muddy ditch of one chapter. I think your advice for getting stuck is right on, and I also want to second Dr. Crazy's point about not getting mired in details (which is precisely what I was doing during the Dark Age).

A friend of mine shared a motto with me that really helped me in the final laps: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." It's also the enemy of the "done."

[Derrick]

As a regular lurker on your blog, I can't commend you enough for posting this reflection on the dissertation process. I am halfway through my own dissertation and last year developed a significant writer's block. Mostly, this block formed because I had isolated myself over time, then sat down to write a chapter and realized I had no idea what one looked like and *felt* like I had no one I could ask. I was lucky enough to have friends stage an intervention and prompt me to find solutions to this block. Over time, I discovered the points you made in your post to be crucial to "dissertating." I found it helpful to ask my committee what they were willing to do regarding drafts/discussion of material. One member doesn't care to read work in progress; the other two are more than willing. With that in mind, I knew whose office I could land in with thoughts for discussion or zero drafts to consider. Plus, peers are invaluable--it is crucial, in my opinion, to have one or two other people in the same process so you can mutually gripe/reflect on work or committee behavior.

The funny thing I realized about the marathon writing--which I tried to do early on--is that is how I coped with couple of years of coursework in my program. I would take four classes per term so in the last month of the term I would go into a frenzy of research and writing for each paper. When I reached the point of dissertating, I assumed I could take this model of binge writing into the dissertation. As you point out, this notion is not helpful; it doesn't provide a realistic picture of the writing process for most student or professors.

As you can tell, I can't say enough about how important these nuggets of wisdom are. And now, I must turn back to the chapter I am working on ...

[bitchphd]

Yes yes and yes again. This is why I often tell people that having PK was what helped me get the diss done--I could only afford about 3 hours of nanny care/day, which defined my "work time" and, best of all, meant that when I wasn't working I had a "good excuse," i.e., I was being a mommy, so I didn't feel guilty. Somehow the diss that had taken years up til that point all fell together within nine months. Funny, that.

[Laura (geekymom)]

I'm finding it much easier to work this go around than before. Before I had three whole days to myself. And I never quite knew what to do with them. In the 9 months or so that I had all that time, I only wrote about 40 pages. I've already written twice that much, working 2-3 hours/day plus a little more on the weekends. I also give myself days off. I don't work on Fridays and often a weekend day will slide away too. And I don't worry about it. There's no deadline here. I can extend it if I need to. In my program, we have a couple of people who were pushing 12 years. I'm just going to be at 7 in January. That's not bad. Like Dr. B. said, when you only have that short amount of time to work, you just do it.

I also am lucky to have a committee that's willing to look at rougher stuff than my previous committee and to have some friends both locally and online who are reading and commenting and supporting me. It's really key.

My boss asked me if it was the kids who prevented me from being able to finish my Ph.D. And I said, no, it was the lack of support. Because Mr. Geeky was in the midst of the tenure push, he couldn't do any more than his 50% and what I needed was more like 60 or 75% of his time. Plus, I knew no one here and I hadn't found the blogosphere yet. I was floundering and isolated.

I'm glad you posted this--and it was good to hear others' experiences.

[Philosophy Factory]

Thank you sooooo much for this post. I've got my first summer off this summer and a dissertation that is about 20 crappy pages long. My goal is to get a good start at the draft done over the summer. I teach at a CC as well as coach debate. Both of those things mean that actual writing time is pretty limited (5 courses + debate travel on weekends).

My biggest fear is that I'll end up with the same crappy 20 pages in August that I have now. I saw hubby have a couple of non-productive summers, and I can't afford to have one next summer.

I'm going to try the coffee shop method as well. I'm going to pick one without wireless access, as I'll do more reading of blogs about writing dissertations than I actually write :).

[mmf!]

this post was really helpful. i'm on a fellowship writing my dissertation right now.

besides feeling like i should be doing much more than i actually am, i also feel like a parasite on society -- how is what i'm doing helping anyone at all in any productive way? remembering that i have taught and will very soon teach again cures it, somewhat.

[Holly]

I also loved the Joan Bolker book--it helped me no end--but I have to be the dissenter here and say that what helped me finish was a summer in which I scarcely left my house and sometimes wrote for 10 to 14 hours a day. It was kind of gross, and kind of wonderful. There were days when the only living creature I interacted with was my beloved cat, who, in a cruel twist of fate, was run over by a car the day after I printed out the first complete draft (400 pages--yeah, I know, it didn't REALLY have to be so long) and had it copied for both my advisors.

What really upset me (aside from the death of my cat) in the entire process was how bereft I felt after the diss was done and I defended. My PhD took me 7.5 years, and the week after my (very pleasant and successful) defense was truly terrible. The fact that the defense was all so pleasant and easy at the very end was, weirdly enough, part of the problem. "What the hell was I thinking?" I kept asking myself. "All those years of study and months of solitary writing and I get a little two-hour conversation and some energetic handshakes and that's it, that's the end? Is it possible I have wasted some of the prime years of my life on something that isn't even going to get me a friggin' job?"

And I continued to feel that way until I went through the graduation ceremony--I had my parents fly out; I wanted them to know I hadn't been making up all this business about how I was in grad school--and then I felt really great. "This university has given me a PhD," I would say to myself and smile, "and they can't take it back!"

[Ancarett]

I took five years to finish my doctorate, much to the sneering disdain of the graduate chair who signed off on my paper in disappointment that I hadn't made the four year target he preferred (hint: nobody finished in four!).

What jumpstarted my writing was a NACBS dissertation fellowship that sent me for consecutive months to the Huntington Library and the BL/PRO. Being someplace new with a lot of my research done and the rest of the material mostly at hand meant I could spend mornings writing and afternoons researching.

Plus, I really feel that giving myself permission not to start at the beginning, but instead with chapter three, was what made it possible to get writing at all. The introduction and chapter one were, actually, the last things I wrote. But I obsessed about them for months, delaying the start of any real writing, until I moved past them.

Most of us tend to think that we're just supposed to have this wealth of knowledge sufficient to write it all at one go -- but, in my experience, any academic writing is full of stops and starts as you write, pause to research an aspect, write some more, check out a citation and so on. Not knowing that you can do that makes the dissertation a fair more daunting prospect than it ought to be!

[styleygeek]

Thank you, New Kid. That is a truly helpful post.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Thanks for your comments, everyone! Glad to hear that this post strikes a chord with people. I completely agree with Dr. Crazy's addenda, too - and Caleb, I'm VERY fond of the phrase "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

And Ancarett, I agree about the stops and starts. I will say that something I forgot to mention is that while working in stops and starts, or out of order, is fine, I wish I had tried to get a whole draft of the diss done before I did substantial revising of the rest. In that respect, I did way too MUCH stopping and starting; there was little point in revising what I'd written without knowing what the rest of the diss was trying to say, but revising what I already had was so much more SATISFYING that writing new stuff...

Anyway, I'm glad to hear I wasn't alone! What I wonder is how much disciplinary variation there is. I'm wondering if the experience of being in a lab makes a difference for science students or not (I know NOTHING about working in a lab, so this is an honest question).

[Erica]

This was an incredibly honest and helpful post for me to read, as I finished my master's thesis last semester and am starting the long process of dissertating this summer. Our university has what some have called a "Draconian" 7-year time limit from start to finish for a Ph.D., so I've got 4 years left... 4 years in which I also plan to have at least my first kid. So it's going to be an interesting process, and reading your advice, as well as the comments of your readers who have been through the same thing, has really helped put me in the right mindset. I've always known that *I* wasn't the type who could blitz-write for 8 hours a day, but hearing that that's actually a characteristic of normal people helps me a great deal in thinking about how I'm going to schedule my writing time. =) Thanks for your post!

[aurix]

Thank you for your post, very interesting. Unlike most people here I'm actuallly an undergrad in my third year, and I've been thinking about graduate school for a while. I don't think I'll have the energy/determination to finish a dissertation, though.

[Miranda]

This is great--it's like you've described my own dissertation. What helped me also was having one of the junior faculty tell me that you really needed to spend about one year staring at the wall, letting the ideas ferment. While the year of wall-staring and no writing was torture, my ideas really did change and mature and the diss was a ton better for it.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Thanks! I needed this. Now, to finish the grading and stop faffing around with the paper.

[abd anonymous]

I'm just starting on my dissertation, so getting this advice early on is great. I really appreciate your post, as well as the advice from those who commented!

[ottavina]

Thank you. It is a relief to hear that someone has gone through the same thing I have regarding advisor avoidance, newbie problems doing the reseach in Europe, etc. The differences are that I am just at the point of showing my core work to my advisor >shudder< and I am finding it difficult to work on things in my field that matter because I am working a full time office job to pay the bills (and couldn't get a good position in my field at the time of returning to the US). Although I have made some mistakes already in the diss process, I appreciate this helpful post.