Thoughts on Writing

Now that I"m on a solid 18 months of full time dissertation writing, I've learned a few things:

1. Writing, when it's flowing, is actually quite easy. Analysis is a breeze for me, so much so that I can get lost in it. Thinking is hard, but once I figure out my argument I can generally produce a lot of material very quickly.

2. When I'm writing, I'm sure that what I'm writing is brilliant.

3. When I'm writing, what I'm writing is never brilliant. I always hope and pray that my first draft will be close to my final draft. I am always wrong. My first (and second, and third, and fourth) drafts are rough, sometimes much rougher than I'm willing to admit to myself.

4. Writing takes time. Not because the act of writing takes time but because of the truth in statement #3. I need several weeks and preferably months in between drafts in order to get the distance necessary to recognize that my brilliant first draft is in fact a few glimmering sparks in a mound of shite, buried even further under run on sentences.

5. Editing is hard. Not typo fixing, but real editing and fundamental re-writing. It's hard because you have to 1) re-read the crap-you-thought-was-brilliant (see steps 1-3), 2) figure out whether there's material worth saving, and 3) then figure out to make material you previously thought was brilliant into material that is basically comprehensible to a reader other than yourself.

6. It takes a lot of writing and re-writing, but incremental progress is being made.