Honestly, I do not even remember the last time I wrote a blog post. I could go online and look, of course, but that would cut into my 20 minutes of writing.
You see, I have an idea that I have been thinking about implementing for months and am finally trying to start: write for at least 20 minutes a day. Why?
The primary hope is that it will improve progress on my dissertation. Yes, I am still writing that dissertation. Yes, I feel like the eternal graduate student. Yes, it’s a little embarrassing. But, yes, I still hope to finish.
The good news is that I have made more progress in the last year than in the two years before. When I passed my exams in 2013, I had a spurt of confidence, but it petered out as I struggled to come up with a good proposal. Then, once the proposal was finally done, I was mired in too much research and not enough writing. I finally got my first chapter draft done late last year, and this year, I have thoroughly revised that work and written a draft of a second chapter, which came along much faster than the first.
The bad news is that I am still not up to the kind of pace I would like to have. I originally hoped to finish my dissertation this coming May, allowing me to look for jobs as Corin starts Kindergarten. That is definitely not going to happen now. I will need his Kindergarten year to keep writing. Preschool only gives me 12 hours of work time a week, and that is really only about 10 when you subtract driving time. Elementary school, however, is 35 hours per week, even counting driving or walking time. It will be a huge work upgrade.
But just adding hours is not enough. I need to make more of the hours I have. Odd though it may sound, I think that I have become a progressively slower writer over the course of my education. I barely remember how I wrote as a public school student, but I know that as an undergraduate, I regularly wrote papers overnight and turned them in the next morning. I hardly ever made a second pass at anything. In the master’s degree phase of graduate school, I learned to take a few days or maybe even a week or two on a paper. By the doctoral phase, taking a month on something was becoming a bit more normal. The dissertation, though, is an entirely different beast. Even graduate courses only require a 20-30 page paper most of the time. This is five or six 50 page papers that all interconnect into a coherent whole. So even if I were to extrapolate from my estimate of 25 pages in a month for a graduate paper, this would take me 10-12 months. And yet, I am much slower than that.
Part of the reason is that a dissertation chapter, though only about twice the length of a course paper, is much more complex than that. Another part is, as I said, I am writing more slowly. I used to not revise at all. Then I learned to write multiple drafts. Now, I write multiple drafts and revise as I am writing. (For example, just now, I typed a partial version of this sentence, deleted some, and then kept typing. Twice.) You can imagine my writing process as one of those download progress bars that you see on your favorite device, but instead of moving in a linear fashion from empty to full, mine moves a little to the right, then back to the left a bit, then a little more to the right, then back, and so on. My skills as a writer have improved, certainly, but so have my standards and my self-consciousness. I do not want to write anything that is not written well: cleanly punctuated, soundly researched, and smoothly styled, and I am constantly evaluating all of these things while I am in the process of composing sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes, I will spend an entire morning (anywhere from 2-4 hours worth of work) on a single paragraph, which will ultimately end up revised again on a later day.
This sort of thing does, I hope, lead to some high-quality work, but it is simply not fast enough for that work to get me to graduation.
This is where those 20 minute come in. If an athlete wants to improve in a sport, she might lift weights. All of that repetitive motion is not the same as playing in the big game, but it provides strength and conditioning to improve that play when it comes. Or, if a young student wants to improve his math grade, he might practice his times tables. Those exact problems might not be on the big exam at the end of the week, but by going through the motions over and over, he is more familiar with them when tested.
I do not plan to write my dissertation itself in 20 minute chunks. Indeed, another part of my problem is that my work schedule is so fragmented and frequently interrupted that I lose even more time to trying to pick up the pieces at the beginning of each work window. Instead, I just want to write for at least 20 minutes solid. Every day. Blogging will be my default, but other forms of writing can count, too: personal emails, letters, a personal journal, children’s stories, or even fiction. The idea is just to write, without interruption, and with minimal back-spacing. At the very least, it should jog my mind, so to speak, and loosen up the parts of my brain that handle writing so that I can get in form more quickly when I have a chance to work on school. At best, perhaps it will chip away at the mental dam I feel that I have sometimes. One short session at a time, it will dislodge pebbles or small stones until the thoughts behind begin to flow more freely. Maybe, they will even cascade out in a rush of productivity now and then.
In a way, I want to get back to the ridiculous output I had as an undergraduate writing through the night. Was I a comparably ignorant and laughably self-assured little chump at the time? Oh yeah. I was. But there is still a certain beauty in just sitting down to get a job done and doing it: not worrying “have I read enough articles to make this claim yet?” or “is this really the absolute best way to say this?” Of course, I want my dissertation to reflect the nuance and perspective I have gained in 9 years of collegiate coursework, and I have no intention of sending my advisor what I write in one sitting alone. But if I could figure out a way to infuse my current work with something of the unhesitating drive of my early years, that would be something.
So, 20 minutes. This little piece has already carried over to 33 minutes, 50 seconds. Corin has probably had enough iPad time now.
You see, I have an idea that I have been thinking about implementing for months and am finally trying to start: write for at least 20 minutes a day. Why?
The primary hope is that it will improve progress on my dissertation. Yes, I am still writing that dissertation. Yes, I feel like the eternal graduate student. Yes, it’s a little embarrassing. But, yes, I still hope to finish.
The good news is that I have made more progress in the last year than in the two years before. When I passed my exams in 2013, I had a spurt of confidence, but it petered out as I struggled to come up with a good proposal. Then, once the proposal was finally done, I was mired in too much research and not enough writing. I finally got my first chapter draft done late last year, and this year, I have thoroughly revised that work and written a draft of a second chapter, which came along much faster than the first.
The bad news is that I am still not up to the kind of pace I would like to have. I originally hoped to finish my dissertation this coming May, allowing me to look for jobs as Corin starts Kindergarten. That is definitely not going to happen now. I will need his Kindergarten year to keep writing. Preschool only gives me 12 hours of work time a week, and that is really only about 10 when you subtract driving time. Elementary school, however, is 35 hours per week, even counting driving or walking time. It will be a huge work upgrade.
But just adding hours is not enough. I need to make more of the hours I have. Odd though it may sound, I think that I have become a progressively slower writer over the course of my education. I barely remember how I wrote as a public school student, but I know that as an undergraduate, I regularly wrote papers overnight and turned them in the next morning. I hardly ever made a second pass at anything. In the master’s degree phase of graduate school, I learned to take a few days or maybe even a week or two on a paper. By the doctoral phase, taking a month on something was becoming a bit more normal. The dissertation, though, is an entirely different beast. Even graduate courses only require a 20-30 page paper most of the time. This is five or six 50 page papers that all interconnect into a coherent whole. So even if I were to extrapolate from my estimate of 25 pages in a month for a graduate paper, this would take me 10-12 months. And yet, I am much slower than that.
Part of the reason is that a dissertation chapter, though only about twice the length of a course paper, is much more complex than that. Another part is, as I said, I am writing more slowly. I used to not revise at all. Then I learned to write multiple drafts. Now, I write multiple drafts and revise as I am writing. (For example, just now, I typed a partial version of this sentence, deleted some, and then kept typing. Twice.) You can imagine my writing process as one of those download progress bars that you see on your favorite device, but instead of moving in a linear fashion from empty to full, mine moves a little to the right, then back to the left a bit, then a little more to the right, then back, and so on. My skills as a writer have improved, certainly, but so have my standards and my self-consciousness. I do not want to write anything that is not written well: cleanly punctuated, soundly researched, and smoothly styled, and I am constantly evaluating all of these things while I am in the process of composing sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes, I will spend an entire morning (anywhere from 2-4 hours worth of work) on a single paragraph, which will ultimately end up revised again on a later day.
This sort of thing does, I hope, lead to some high-quality work, but it is simply not fast enough for that work to get me to graduation.
This is where those 20 minute come in. If an athlete wants to improve in a sport, she might lift weights. All of that repetitive motion is not the same as playing in the big game, but it provides strength and conditioning to improve that play when it comes. Or, if a young student wants to improve his math grade, he might practice his times tables. Those exact problems might not be on the big exam at the end of the week, but by going through the motions over and over, he is more familiar with them when tested.
I do not plan to write my dissertation itself in 20 minute chunks. Indeed, another part of my problem is that my work schedule is so fragmented and frequently interrupted that I lose even more time to trying to pick up the pieces at the beginning of each work window. Instead, I just want to write for at least 20 minutes solid. Every day. Blogging will be my default, but other forms of writing can count, too: personal emails, letters, a personal journal, children’s stories, or even fiction. The idea is just to write, without interruption, and with minimal back-spacing. At the very least, it should jog my mind, so to speak, and loosen up the parts of my brain that handle writing so that I can get in form more quickly when I have a chance to work on school. At best, perhaps it will chip away at the mental dam I feel that I have sometimes. One short session at a time, it will dislodge pebbles or small stones until the thoughts behind begin to flow more freely. Maybe, they will even cascade out in a rush of productivity now and then.
In a way, I want to get back to the ridiculous output I had as an undergraduate writing through the night. Was I a comparably ignorant and laughably self-assured little chump at the time? Oh yeah. I was. But there is still a certain beauty in just sitting down to get a job done and doing it: not worrying “have I read enough articles to make this claim yet?” or “is this really the absolute best way to say this?” Of course, I want my dissertation to reflect the nuance and perspective I have gained in 9 years of collegiate coursework, and I have no intention of sending my advisor what I write in one sitting alone. But if I could figure out a way to infuse my current work with something of the unhesitating drive of my early years, that would be something.
So, 20 minutes. This little piece has already carried over to 33 minutes, 50 seconds. Corin has probably had enough iPad time now.
Comments
Post a Comment