Writing Realities

With the dissertation completed, I’m going to wind up the blog with some posts looking back and reflecting on the ABD journey. I’m starting this last leg with a systematic re-counting of what the timeline for writing the dissertation looked like. This isn’t a how-to post, but I’ll include some general observations at the end that might be helpful especially for early-stage students thinking about what the process might look like.

I’m going to move chronologically through the chapters as I wrote them, and, rather than numbering the chapters as they appear in the dissertation, I’ll designate them A, B, C, etc. according to the order in which I wrote them. (If you’re familiar enough with the project, I don’t mind you guessing/knowing which chapter is which, but I’d rather not saddle potential dissertation or future book readers with that knowledge.)

This post is a bit longer than usual. I’m going to start with the introduction, conclusion and epilogue. If you’re short on time or bored, you can, like any good graduate student, just read these parts and come away with a pretty good sense of the major themes. I won’t talk very much about revisions, which I did throughout the process and at the end.

Of the introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, the epilogue was actually the first thing I started writing. I wrote an early version of it for a conference in China in Fall 2016. I revisited this conference paper in spring of 2019 when I was revising it for publication (translated into Chinese). I didn’t come back to it for the dissertation, though, until the very end of the writing process. That was partly because I wanted to focus on the parts of the dissertation I hadn’t written yet and partly because I really did want to limit myself to treating this as an epilogue, as something that would tie together and complement the parts of the dissertation leading up to it. And to do that, I first needed to write the rest of the dissertation.

I had a general idea of what I wanted the conclusion to do for quite a while, but, unlike the epilogue, I didn’t have an early draft version of it. Instead, I wrote the conclusion relatively late, which worked for me because, again, I wanted it to cap off the chapters that preceded it and because I didn’t want or need it to be very long.

The introduction was a bit more complicated. I initially planned to leave it until relatively late in the writing process. However, on November 6, 2018 I received a request for additional materials for a job application, including a draft of my introduction. The deadline was November 20. The real trick was that at the time I received the request my daughter was due to be born any day, and she arrived on the 11th. I was also teaching my first class at that time, so I couldn’t exactly set aside everything else to throw together an introduction. In any case, I managed to produce a 44-page draft introduction to send in. (My adviser graciously gave me comments on the parts of it I was able to send him ahead of time.) It was decent but not great, relied heavily on material from my proposal, and probably didn’t increase my chances at getting that job. But I’d be hard-pressed to pick out a more impressive accomplishment from my time as a PhD student, given the circumstances.

Anyway, I made some revisions shortly after the deadline and sent the slightly improved draft to my adviser but then tucked it away for a while. I came back to the introduction in summer 2019, since by that time I was a bit further along in the writing process and was gearing up for the job market and (a) wanted to be ready in case a request for an introduction came in again (it didn’t) and (b) figured it might help with working out how to frame my project for job documents. I talked it over with my adviser and, off-and-on started making revisions. This continued throughout the fall and into early winter, which is when I sent a revised version to the rest of my committee that was pretty close to the final version.

Even that small selection should give a sense of the unevenness of the writing process and the weird set of opportunities and constraints that shaped it. Now on to the meat of the dissertation.

For the beginning of the writing process proper, we’ll have to zoom back to Fall 2017 when I was “unpacking” after a year of research in China. My plan was for my dissertation to have six chapters, and, for the first few chapters, I wanted to work on two at once. My thinking was that I had written preliminary papers that corresponded pretty neatly to two of the chapters I wanted to write, so I could work on revising one of those while starting on a from-scratch chapter. In retrospect, wanting to avoid tunnel vision during the writing process and create outlets for myself to write about something other than a single chapter at any given time was wise. But for a variety of reasons, this specific strategy didn’t come off. Instead, I more or less worked on one chapter at a time.

I started then, with chapter A, which was mostly a new chapter that required me to use a challenging range of sources but was also pretty exciting. I decided to start here because I had heard from others that the first chapter would take a disproportionately long time no matter what. I figured, then, that it would be beneficial to get the particular challenges of this chapter out of the way and banked on my enthusiasm to help push me through. I also signed up to present a draft of the chapter at a workshop in February, which gave me a deadline to work towards. This part of the writing process basically went according to plan: I had a full draft of the chapter to send to my adviser by the end of February. That was about five months after I had begun working on it in earnest—yes, a relatively long time, but not really beyond what I had anticipated.

Things got a bit messier after that, though. My goal was to get four chapters of my dissertation done by the next fall, when I planned to start applying for jobs. That was a tall task, but two of those chapters were ones that I already had a good start on. I figured if I could knock those out, then I could build some momentum for finishing off the fourth in relatively quick order.

I started on chapter B, then, early in spring 2018. The paper on which this chapter was based was in relatively good shape. I had gathered some sources related to it in China, though, and there were also two other significant sources I felt I needed to read and then work into the research I had already done. I realized relatively quickly that doing this was going to be more time-consuming than I anticipated but also that this additional reading wasn’t a corner I could cut.

By May, I realized I was going to be pretty far off-schedule. To recoup at least some psychological capital, I decided to temporarily set aside chapter B in favor of the other chapter that was based on a paper I had previously written. Unlike chapter B, I didn’t need to read any more sources for chapter C, and I had already put quite a bit of thought into it for presenting it at a conference and submitting a version of it for publication. It took me only a couple of weeks to turn what I had into a pretty decent chapter, making it much more of a “success” than chapter B.

Over the summer, I plugged away on chapter B (while preparing job document materials and a syllabus for the class I was teaching in the Fall). Again, I had a workshop lined up for October to provide a bit of a hard deadline for having a draft done, and, sure enough, I sent a draft to my adviser in October. I was behind but halfway there, which wasn’t too bad.

I had started shifting gears to chapter D by the time things started getting crazy in November 2018, as I described above. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly how this chapter happened. I think I must have started making some significant strides towards it before I finished up chapter B. (There were also some parts I had written about in an independent study paper before I left to do research, so it wasn’t entirely from scratch.) The anxiety of being behind and the adrenaline of having just written an introduction in two weeks and having a new baby might have pushed me along too. In any case, the dates on my files tell me that I finished a full draft of this chapter on January 29. (Since I’m looking at file dates, I’ll also note that my adviser sent back comments exactly two days later.)

Writing got a bit tougher after that, though, for a variety of reasons. My wife’s maternity leave ended in mid-January and I assumed daytime childcare responsibilities for our daughter, meaning that I simply had less time to write. I wasn’t teaching in the winter, but I was teaching my own course again in the spring, which meant that we got help watching her on the days when I taught, but this didn’t really offset the additional time I was putting into preparing for class, grading, etc.

By winter, it was also becoming clear that my first attempt at the job market wasn’t going to be successful. This wasn’t unexpected, but receiving the rejections (or realizing as time passed that I wasn’t going to get an interview), especially when some of those applications required exceptional effort (see above), was hard to deal with. At the same time, the possibility that an acceptance could come through and force me to finish the dissertation under a very tight timeline was stressful itself. The anxiety of not having a source of income for the next year filled out the picture.

Not everything was dour, and some of these stresses lightened a bit over the coming months. I genuinely enjoyed taking care of my daughter, and having such a pressing reminder of parts of life more important than the dissertation surely did me a lot of good. In the spring, I received a write-up fellowship, which provided a feasible route to finishing. In July, we started sending our daughter to daycare a few days a week, which immediately created more time for me to write. Life being life, there were more challenges along the way: moving in the summer and some very unanticipated personal circumstances in the spring and fall that are still difficult to talk about and have really worn me down.

All this to say, the personal context around writing chapter E was a bit rocky, and this absolutely affected the writing process. Chapter E also proved challenging, in short, because there was a lot—too much, really—to put together and keep together. I’m not sure when I really “started” with the chapter, but I didn’t have a full draft done until mid-December of 2019. It took forever, felt even longer, and seemed that it could go on even longer than that. It just didn’t feel like that it had any momentum of its own, and I was having to push it the whole way. The full draft was long, even by my standards. The quality wasn’t awful, although it’s going to take me some time before I can evaluate this part of the dissertation without the baggage of the writing process. My adviser and I agreed that it would be better to split it into two chapters. By that time, though, I just had to move on to something else and decided to save this re-working until revisions at the end.

Buoyed by the sense that I had, in fact, effectively written six chapters and was now genuinely almost done, I set out on what was now chapter G. I had banked a lot on the final push downhill going quickly, if not smoothly, and this panned out pretty well. Chapter G actually turned out to be pretty long and quite detailed, but it came together quickly, over the span of a few months. To be sure, there were some significant challenges along the way, and there are some parts of it that aren’t as ironed out as they would have been if I had written this chapter first. But writing it last also carried the benefit of better understanding how it fit into the project as a whole.

Between February and the filing deadline (May 11), I made a bunch of edits, submitting a draft to the committee (late March) and triumphing in the defense (late April) along the way. As I mentioned in my last post, the project isn’t “done,” but the dissertation is very much DONE.

With that in mind and with some trepidation, I’ll close with some general observations about the writing process. First, some things went very much according to plan while other things didn’t. If nothing had gone right, I don’t know if I could have finished. At the same time, it was inevitable that things would go off track. If you’re just starting out, don’t count on everything working out the way you plan but take the opportunities you have to make sure that something does.

I’m also struck by how the set of challenges I faced was personal, even if not unique. Some things weren’t a problem for me. For example, I never faced significant health issues, and I never had to work without any funding. By the same token, not everyone has a child in the middle of writing a dissertation, and not everyone will make the childcare decisions we did. (And we might not have under different circumstances.) And despite taking on significant child care responsibilities, which definitely slowed down the writing process, I would have faced a very different set of challenges if I were a woman. (And I would get far less social credit for my parenting labor.)

On the one hand, the fact that we all face apples-and-oranges challenges in writing a dissertation highlights the need to focus more on solidarity than comparing ourselves to others. On the other hand, we should also recognize where structural inequities and exceptional circumstances—like the current pandemic has created for current graduate students—create obstacles that we shouldn’t dismiss by telling ourselves that everyone has a tough time anyway so the particular challenges some people face can’t be so bad.

Finally, I think that momentum really does matter. There aren’t shortcuts to the writing process and extra time spent on seemingly fruitless tasks can pay unexpected dividends. But there’s a difference between becoming engrossed in something interesting and getting stuck on one part of the project that feels like it will never end. Deadlines, either with your adviser/committee or with workshop/conference presentations, can help, but there’s still a game you have to play within your own mind. Planning your work—and adapting those plans—in a way that will help you work well and be healthy isn’t gaming the system but the game itself. Building momentum isn’t just inside your head, though. Writing is a social process. Some people actively write in groups, which isn’t really my thing. However, throughout the process I benefited from workshops and conferences, which both provided feedback on my work and helped me set deadlines to get writing done. My adviser gave me generous and timely comments on my drafts, but he was also flexible about my writing timeline. I found, then, that momentum for writing came from both my personal habits and the networks of relationships in which I was embedded.

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