The PhD dissertation is
a crucial genre in scholarship, in public life and—crucially—in the life
of the individual dissertation writer. Moreover, it is in the clear majority of
cases cases the most daunting writing task the writer in question has ever
faced; and by a broad margin. Thus, writer's block is a both a common
phenomenon and an ever present ghost looming in the background.
So, after well-nigh seven years as the Head of PhD School
for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, do I have any
useful insights into how to overcome writer's block? Some. Here's my nickel's
worth of advise.
Writing is hard, don't be ashamed
The first thing worth noticing—in particular in this
perspective—is that academic writing is hard. Not just sometimes, but almost
always and for almost everyone. This includes people with decades' worth of
academic writing behind them. Why is this worth noticing? Because writer's
block like many other things that ail us mentally speaks to us in our own voice
and personalize the experience. Everybody else seem to be writing just fine,
but me I can't because I am not good enough—or whatever the voice says. So
Writer's Block pile up shame and feelings of worthlessness on top of our actual
problems with finding the right words. Hardly constructive feelings if we
actually want to get words written.
However, since everybody struggles, there is noting to be ashamed of,
and nothing to feel worthless about, just because we struggle to write.
Everybody else struggle too. We only see their finished work—or at worst
detailed drafts—we don't see their struggle. In other words, the problem is not
that the PhD student is stupid, but that the task is hard, and the PhD student
is only just learning it.
Write before you read
There's an age old counter-intuitive piece of advise that
I always try to impress on the minds of new PhD students, but which also has
its uses in case of a writer's block. It is "write before you read".
The point is that reading as such is endless. There is forever 20 more
references to run down, and if nothing else there's always someone in Brazil
who might have done this relevant thing and so we need to learn Portuguese.
And I'm all for learning Portuguese, of course, but it's
not writing.
So, if you want to read "enough" before you
write, "enough" never comes. And since new references appear
incessantly, you move further and further away from having reached this
semi-mythical "enough".
However, what if you've already read "too much"?
Put the whole thing down and write something on your own topic ignoring
everything that you've read. It will get back to you, when you revise, but it
will re-appear in the targeted form described above. Of course, this approach
has the in-built danger of you reproducing something you've read as if it was
your own, so you have to be quite careful to get the references in afterwards.
But if you are a person who over-reads you are not very likely to be a person
who steals peoples' thought without giving credit. I trust your due diligence.
Writing techniques
Both of these thought are on a more overall level. If you
are in the process and you are stuck—possibly stuck for days—what do you
do? Well, the obvious answer is to go to
your supervisor. If your own shame blocks you from going, it's either a
psychological challenge you have (see above), or it's a problem with your
supervisor - and that's a whole different kettle of fish. But beyond that there are at least two basic techniques worth trying. One is the "writing
burst" (for lack of a better name) and the other is "writing
something else". I'll go through them in turn.
Writing burst. You set aside a concentrated amount of
time, I'd suggest 20 minutes, but anything up to an hour is feasible depending
on how your mind works. Mine can´t take more than 20, but (in this and this
alone) I have a weak mind. Within this short period of time you can only write
forward. You cannot re-read, you cannot revise, you cannot proof-read, and you
most definitely cannot criticize. You can only write on. Finish one sentence, move
on to the next, finish that one—etc ad lib.
If a sentence gets stuck—leave it hanging and move on. Always forward. The
point is that since you are actually worth something as a writer—that's why
more experienced researchers chose you in the first place—what you write will
invariably be of a fair quality. So, when the time is done you have a
draft—even if a very basic one—of a passage, and then, when you run out of
time, you can return to it and revise what needs revising (it will be a lot)
and do the proofs (there will be many). But you will have text to work on. And
text is the abhorrence of writer's block.
Write something else. "But I write all the time, I
just can't write this. Look I'm a brilliant tweeter, for instance!" I hear
you cry. Ah, but I did not specify what "something else" was. By
"something else" I mean something else that will eventually go into
your dissertation. If you are stuck you are usually just stuck on one point in
your text. So, instead you move sideways within the dissertation.
- Stuck in the data-analysis? Well do a part of it from a different angle.
- Stuck there too? Well, there was that literature review (remember all that reading?).
- Stuck there too? Well, there's a chapter on methods to be written.
- Are you even stuck there? Well, there must be someone who has written something about this topic which hugely annoys you. Write a three page polemic about it. It may end up relegated to a footnote and subdued to a whisper, but it's text. And—yes—writer's block abhors text.
- Etc ad lib.
Oh, and writer's block has given rise to one of the
finest pieces of non-writing, I've ever seen. Reproduced below. Enjoy.
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