What Nobody Told Me

Consider this a standard-issue "what I learned" reflection on the process of writing a dissertation. Consider this wrapped in a bundle of disclaimers. Learn from it at your own peril.

What they told me: Writing a dissertation is a marathon, not a sprint!
What they didn't tell me: Marathons and dissertations are profoundly satisfying!

This is a personal annoyance: Academics make glib references to marathon running, probably because one big task is like another big task by virtue of mutual bigness. But few academics have actually run marathons while writing the dissertation. I did!

I ran marathons while I was dissertating, and incidentally I would recommend taking up running if you're post-candidacy. I might not have finished my dissertation if it weren't for the self-esteem I developed by running a marathon. By running a lot, I developed a lot of attention to the limits of my body: not only in mileage, but also in the umpteen small injuries that a normal marathoner accumulates. As I paid attention to your body, I found a lot of situations in which I became stronger and outpaced my old limits. Mind you, I didn't express this to myself in the form of pinterest-worthy crossfit slogans: it's something that I never really articulated to myself before now. So running confers a kind of lived, bodily resilience that abides deeply throughout the rest of the dissertating process. 

Marathon running is nearly the perfect antidote to the dissertator's lifestyle: there is no sitting; there are no screens; you will become too exhausted to worry about stuff. Most importantly, if you are training specifically for a marathon then you will have a specific, actionable goal, independent of your academic life, that requires you to set aside your working life for a few hours a week. In short, the marathon obliges you to step away from the computer.

But there is some truth underneath the glibness: a marathon is indeed like a dissertation, but not for the reasons you're thinking.

1. Both running and writing can deeply enrich your appreciation of your self and your abilities. Again, I can't really confer in words the profound satisfaction that came to me during some runs as I crested a hill at mile 10 and saw a beautiful dawn spread out before me: but the closest comparison I can give you would be the deep satisfaction I felt at the office in the early morning, after I had been writing for a few hours, then sat back to watch the sun rise. Both kinds of achievement are deeply satisfying.
2. Throughout both marathon writing and dissertating, I had to develop an informed sensibility about working through discomfort. I've already expressed the running side of this, so let me elaborate on the writing side. The first two miles of a run always felt like crap for me; the first two hours of writing often felt the same. Running taught me that initial discomfort was merely a characteristic of "warm-up" to be embraced and outpaced. There were very few days when I felt inspired to write an awesome new idea; and often, those over-caffeinated moments almost always resulted in a bizarre scaffolding of concepts that didn't work in the final edit.
3. There are no gimmicks, or at least the only way to cheat is to cheat yourself. I once read about a guy who "ran" a marathon without any training by (1) sloppily run-walking and (2) stopping every half mile eat banana pieces. I wouldn't recommend this method to anybody, most of all because that weekend warrior might have seriously injured himself. Every technical victory is one technicality away from a substantial failure. Likewise, I've met people who were able to write their entire dissertations in a single fellowship semester--except "dissertation" in this sense means "minimum viable product." Those same people told me that the dissertating process was traumatizing and shameful, and that they had developed counterproductive habits of work that were making further academic life impossible. Now mind you, there's a lot to be said in favor of embracing the difficult path while writing a dissertation. But if you exert yourself so that you ruin your future working ability, that's not good work ethic--that's downright destructive.
4. Both running and dissertating will did weird stuff to my body. Maybe it's age; maybe it's doing too much of one activity at a time: for whatever reason, the long period in which I was unhappy about my progress, I had a small rock physically embedded into the ball of my foot. It was very uncomfortable. Someone I know said that writing a dissertation was harder on the body than carrying a pregnancy to term, and I believe her.
5. Last but not least, both end when you cross a magic line and get celebrated with a fun ornament: one is a medal, the other is a fancy robe. Same same.

What they told me: Set a schedule.
What they didn't tell me: The only schedule that counts is the one you can sustain by force of will.

Dissertators are commonly advised to set a schedule. But how can you set a schedule on authentic discovery and insight? There is a simple, happy--and most of all deceitful--model of an academic's working life: first you do the reading, then you identify a gap in the field, then you organize your notes, then you write about your contribution to the field, and lastly you edit it and submit it to your committee. This tidy, linear process is commonly prescribed with a well-rehearsed naivete, the insincerity of which fills me with rage.

Here are some of the implicit deceptions in the linear work-model I described above:

• There is no established set of texts which you must read to write a dissertation. It does not exist. You can plunder the reading lists of your committee, or of other scholars, but at best this will only make you read what everyone else has already read before you. Your exam reading was modeled to make you think like others in your field; your dissertation reading must make you think unlike others, while also maintaining enough credibility within your field. It is impossible to prescribe a reading list that will make your scholarship respectably unique. The least-bad advice is to read "the top journals in your field" (whatever that means) but that still elides that:
• I knew what I considered to be the top journals, and what I considered to be my field, but there were some very real disagreements about both.
• In some ways, my project might took issue with a fundamental premise beneath existing scholarship, in which case there's not much merit to pursuing more and more sophisticated versions of an idea that you believe is flawed from the outset.
• You may end up chasing fads and trends that were--based on the lifecycle of academic publishing--only in vogue at a few conferences several years ago. And the last thing your committee will be is trend-obsessed. I wasted years trying to justify my work to the wrong people based on trendy, new, exciting ideas in the scholarship. I have since learned to bet that the average committee is more likely to be annoyed by trends than to embrace them.
  (NB: There is a fundamental imbalance between the way that exams teach scholarly trends, and the way that committees ignore them. Remember that any professor who can carry a central argument across multiple long-term projects must be very skilled at reacting against the zillion alternatives that materialize along the way. Any professor with a long-running research agenda has learned how to read umpteen journal articles that challenge the central project, and then creating a satisfying response that leaves their own agenda more or less uncompromised. Thus: The history of academic ideas is revolutionary at the macro-level, and reactionary at the micro-level. Based on exam reading, the growth of academic thought seems to be a triumphant march from one bold idea to an even more sophisticated evolution. This may lead you to think that most people in the field are desperately searching for evocative new ways of approaching the field: they are not, to say the least.)
• What counts as "a gap in the field" is neither obvious nor objective. Presumably by the time that you have advanced past candidacy, a decent committee will have agreed to the basic gap that you have identified: but not all committees are so decent. I've seen some candidates bristle against the inherent conservatism of their committees, but ultimately relent: lazy committees expect a "gap in the field" to be nothing but a re-application of old methods. (See the above note about reactionary committees.) I saw this arrangement weighing heavily on doctoral candidates who slowly had their own approaches drubbed out of them.
  I have nothing but contempt for such incuriosity. This eventually leads to the decay of fields, as conferences receive more and more rote, predictable, papers which are organized around a restrictive set of approaches. That's not discovery, it's performance of a ritual.
• I did not know which notes, or which kinds of notes, counted for much until I was late in my writing process. There are two kinds of deceptive insight that occur during preparatory reading:
• The exam stage prepared me for a very schematic kind of reading. You can learn about it in my notes on this blog. As you can tell, my exam reading was very much organized around coverage and completion. My need for coverage and completion ended at the same time as my candidacy exam.
  By contrast, dissertations are organized around novelty and insight. Nobody cared, at my doctoral defense, if I could name all the characters in "The Changeling." They only cared about the soundness of my insights relative to the most relevant supporting ideas. 
• Anything important I was reading at the candidacy stage was somewhat difficult, and so I felt the "a-ha!" experience as part of the normal course of coming to understand core concepts.
  This is deceptive insofar as the insight that other people provide will directly not lead to an insight that you will, then, provide. It merely happens, by cosmic coincidence, that you are at once the person responsible for understanding past work as well as the person responsible for producing new, original work. The varieties of insight you experience in those two roles are not interchangeable.
• This is all a non-linear process.
  I wrote as I read, I read as I wrote, I edited as I read and wrote, etc. You get the idea; reading, organizing, composing, and revising were looped together for me. But this isn't because I was a disorganized person--I'd say I'm pretty tidy, personally--but because writing is not a container for thought! Or at least, that's not relevant to the kind of thinking that's needed for a dissertation-worthy idea, not a grocery list. The act of writing is a variety of thinking; it is articulated thought, and as such it possesses all of the non-linear, non-additive characteristics of thought itself. Writing, as a variety of thinking, is recursive, associative, and complex in a thousand more ways.

Holy Moses, that's a lot of commentary about academic workflow. But what about the schedule?

Lots of creative writers, artists, designers, et al. have already expressed smart things about the struggle to do creative work on a schedule. I procrastinated many hours while reading them. Here are some of my takeaways:

• I kept a "schedule" only in the sense that I jealously guarded a regular time to sit silently in front of the computer. I have never seen a successful doctoral candidate who did not have some version of this.
  I barely ever had a good writing session shorter than two hours, or longer than five. The upper limit is because there are only so many good ideas during any given day, and burnout is the enemy of progress. The lower limit is because, as I briefly mentioned before, I had to spend about that much time re-familiarizing myself with old ideas and clearing out bad ideas. On rare occasions, I had good, well-fitting ideas earlier than two hours into a session. 
• Some of my most admired writers, however, did stick to exact word counts. Because I view dissertation writing as inherently creative, insightful, and disruptive, I could never convince myself that I would produce some number of good ideas on average each day. But I also understood that I would never write enough if I only ever waited to have good ideas.
  So I set a "word count" for each day only in the sense that I set ambitious, pathetic, and moderate expectations for each writing session. In my mind, I called these "gold, bronze, and silver" goals, respectively. 
• The purpose of the ambitious goal is to inspire you. But if you rely only on ambitious goals, you'll never live up to your own expectations and burn out.
• The purpose of the pathetic goal is to embrace the worst-case scenario. I would think, "Even if everything goes wrong, at least I'll be able to do this much." Of course you won't finish in time at that rate, but at least you won't be stalled. I once heard from a writer who managed to write one paragraph per day, even as his beloved wife was dying (in fact, at her insistence!). This is not an invitation to have some perverse work ethic: rather, it gave me great comfort to know that, on difficult days, I would not be adding to my troubles with a dysfunctional urge to work. I felt a whoosh of relief each time that I passed my pathetic goal for the day.
• Moderate writing expectations, naturally, are somewhere in between. Play it by ear.
  You may simply skip the steps of creating ambitious and pathetic goals so that you can simply use moderate goals. I congratulate you. I am by default a black-and-white thinker, and I needed to explicitly remind myself that there are a range of acceptable outcomes. 
  Before I started setting a range of goals, I was caught in an unhealthy dynamic with my goals. Either I would fall short of a singular goal, which was discouraging, or I would exceed a singular goal, which made me raise my own standards for myself, thereby leading to future failure and discouragement. Perverse, isn't it?

What they told me: Find a writing habit that works for you.
What they didn't tell me: Try a zillion methods, and don't stick to any one for too long.


One of the worst things you can tell yourself during the dissertation process is this: I need to figure out what I'm saying before I start this section. That is counterproductive. You need to write down incomplete ideas in order to develop sophisticated ideas. This is true for three reasons.

1. First of all, if you have an impeccable, or tricky, or challenging line of thinking about something, that needs to be in the writing! That is the substance of your project, not the pre-writing! 
2. Second, as a matter of sheer practicality, you must write down complicated ideas because your brain is not big enough. The "compositor" function in your brain is good for sentence-level articulations, and paragraphs, with some training. Nobody's brain is big enough to hold a dissertation-length idea in all its crystalline complexity. Short-term linguistic memory just doesn't work like that.
3. Third, even if you can hold your entire dissertation "concept" in your mind at once, that is not really a dissertation concept. That thing that you're holding in your mind is either a sketch of the broad argument, or it is too parenthetical to really meet the needs of an academic field. 

Being persistently creative over a long span of time is not something that can be reduced to a formula: by definition, it would cease to be creative and would become familiar, even rote.

You may take exception to the characterization of dissertation writing as creative, but I would counter that people who already know the total contents of their dissertation before they write it are, as a rule, about to be deeply unhappy with the work of writing. If I could express an idea in full with fewer than 200 pages, why would I go through the chore of padding it out to 200 pages? Doctorates are not awarded based on mass and volume.

Likewise, I think that at a meta-level the work of writing a dissertation can become deeply dissatisfying if each sentence, each paragraph forces different ideas through the same cookie-cutter organization, composition, and revision process.

So, instead, write down the good ideas as they develop, and keep surprising yourself!

What they told me: Stay focused on the big picture; but also, everything works out in the end.
What they didn't tell me: 
(A) Long-term planning is important 
but (B) draining, and so try not to think in totalizing terms.

(A)
This section could also be called, "Apologia for Millennials," because it is a metonym of the drama between Millennials and older generations.

Every time I talk to a young person with careerist concerns, the concerns take this shape:

I have multiple viable options. There are pros and cons to each side, and I don't have a clear-cut way of deciding how I weight them. Furthermore, each side has a lot of uncertainty within itself, and I don't know if I feel safe jumping to one side or another without knowing which one will ultimately work out.

And every time I hear a person discussing this, their counsel pulls out this old chestnut:

It will all work out.

And if you have consulted with a person with extraordinary self-awareness, you might even get an answer that fits into this shape:

I had some times when I was very uncertain, and I didn't know how it would work out. I chose one side for reasons that everybody finds trivial because there was no way to make a satisfying choice with the information I had at the time. But now I'm confident that I made the right choice, for equally mystifying reasons.

I have seen this kind of counsel take place many, many times. It is a waste of time primarily because the counselor invalidates the frustration that comes from indecision, and is generally incurious about the decision-making rules that are being applied. A dentist's sticker can tell you "it will all work out," but that doesn't mean that the sticker has an informed opinion on your situation. To hear this advice from many sources is a bit like getting this sticker instead of a counselling appointment: it can be quite flippant and insincere!

If you are reading this, and you are in the situation of the young person with careerist concerns, this is my affirmation to you: Your career decision will matter greatly, and so you should be sensible and perspicacious. I can't speak to the specifics of anyone's situation, because the details are extremely important information when making weighty decisions. The details of any decision give it flavor and texture. Anyone who can give you hard-and-fast rules for making important decisions is like a wine critic who operates only on first principles. Just as a wine critic can only, by first principle, eliminate certain toxicities; likewise, there are some logical fallacies that you might learn, and those can instantly eliminate certain lines of thought, but there are no intrinsically self-validating reasons to choose between two career options.

There is no one else who can make your decision for you. You have to "own" a career decision for good or ill. Therefore I urge you to do the work of learning about each option extensively, conduct informational interviews, and take warning signs with the appropriate weight.

But more optimistically, whenever you have multiple viable options, you should remind yourself that you are in a win-win situation. Every option is in some respects acceptable.

(B)
But don't put every "egg" into the decision "basket."

This is another kind of thinking I've seen a young, career-minded person follow:

How can I focus on writing my dissertation if I don't know whether or not I'm going to be moving to Tennessee at the end of this year. If I move to Tennessee, then I won't have the resources to write my chapter on XYZ so I should start changing my project now; but if I don't move to Tennessee, I really want to write my XYZ chapter because it is the heart of my project. And stalling is not an option, because I'm running out of time to finish my degree. 

I call this backwards-inference: you start with one of a few outcomes, and from that you infer the kinds of steps you need to take to get there. This is a totally valid kind of thinking in some situations, like a chess game. But unlike a chess game, dissertating is filled with infinite choices. There's always trap doors lurking under your next step, for good or ill. I can't tell you how many times I've watched a PhD candidate think themselves into a metaphorical corner, only to discover that one of the earlier options they presumed to be impossible was, in fact, very possible.

The core condition I'm describing is one rife with uncertainty, and that uncertainty can produce extreme outcomes. Feast or famine. Reality follows non-linear, non-additive processes. Trying to think it through in advance, like trying to create a schedule for the rest of your dissertation, is an exercise in futility.

In a phrase: Don't let this choice get in the way of your plan, and don't let your plan get in the way of this choice.

TL;DR

• You have entered into a situation defined by uncertainty.
• If anyone already knew what you were about to discover, then there wouldn't be any point for you to do this.
• The kind of uncertainty expected from outside your project will often be different than the uncertainty inside your project.
• The process of discovery is the art of leveraging uncertainty.
• You can try follow a plan to discover something, and that can help brush off distractions.
• But you can also use things that disrupt your plan as the occasion for deeper discovery.
• You must also self-care.