help, dissertating mamas...what do you do when you get "stuck?"

[readytobedone]

i was making really good progress on chapter 1 ever since i began it in mid-january. and now i'm feeling rather discouraged

DD, DH, and i have all been swapping illnesses for the past month, so i'm out of the groove. i've only written like 5 pages in the past 2 weeks or so. plus i met with my advisor mid-february, and now in trying to reframe what i've written as per our discussion, i'm getting all turned around. does that make sense? i thought i was doing one thing, now i'm doing something slightly different, which means i can salvage most of what i wrote, but it needs to be repackaged in the new argument.

so basically, my shiny neat chapter is now a mess. i have all these disjointed sections and no clear sense of how it really fits together. i'm losing all perspective and starting to despair...

i have a meeting with him on wednesday, but i'm worried if i go in there feeling like this, i'll come out even more disoriented than i already am :

he's a big idea guy, always throwing stuff out there to think about, which is great, but i think i need to start closing some doors, not opening more, kwim??

is it normal to get stuck and confused in the middle of a chapter? what do i do to get myself back on track here? i spent the day outlining what i am now thinking my chapter is, but i'm still not sure it makes sense.

::

all i know right now is i can tell DH really wants me to finish this dissertation and get a job. and i'm only on chapter 1 and already feeling lost :

.

[jgmommo]

I do think that confusion is normal and can be useful for seeing things a little differently. I don't know if things are the same in your subject area as it was in mine but I found it helpful to refer back to my proposal outline. If the new ideas were getting me too far away from what was originally proposed, I had that document to take to my advisor and say, "Great ideas but they seem beyond the scope of what I need to do to finish this."

Hope that helps.

[readytobedone]

Originally Posted by jgmommo

I do think that confusion is normal and can be useful for seeing things a little differently. I don't know if things are the same in your subject area as it was in mine but I found it helpful to refer back to my proposal outline. If the new ideas were getting me too far away from what was originally proposed, I had that document to take to my advisor and say, "Great ideas but they seem beyond the scope of what I need to do to finish this."

Hope that helps.

oooh, good idea. i'll go give that another looksy. i think maybe the new ideas have the capacity to be really useful to the whole project--but i'm not sure yet.

[nabigus]

Sounds totally normal to me. What I've finally had to do is impose a structure on the chapter by writing a "in part 1, I do x, in part 2, I do y" intro, and then go section by section. Otherwise, for me, it's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I can spend weeks just moving pieces around and not actually progressing. (What can I say, it's a gift...) There's a certain amount of messiness involved, but you need to figure out what this chapter needs to do for you, write in on a big sticky, and look at it every time you're tempted to start messing around.

[slsurface]

It sounds completely normal to me. I've been writing and analyzing data for 3 years . I have have many ups and downs in those three years. I finally have all but chapter 9 (conclusions) written :. Every chapter has been rearranged and majorly edited and sometimes even scraped at some point. The hard part is knowing when portions of a chapter can be saved and reworked, or whether it's best to start fresh. I vacillate from excited about my research to completely loathing it...I think that's also a normal part of this long and tortuous process. I only wish I had an adviser that gave me good advice and ideas...mine won't even meet with me, and I'm supposed to be defending this semester :...but that's another thread...

[Carita]

totally normal. as you progress you see new connections and new ways of thinking, and THAT is the major contribution - your assimilation of knowledge and figuring out how things go together or not... I have gone back and looked at my initial proposals and thought - where was I going with this?? And I have re-written so much. But that is the evolution of our training - to get us to that point. We have to stop and look around everyonce in a while at our lives and re-assess the situation. Only then will we make true forward progress.

[Murihiku]

Yep, normal. Indeed, probably essential.

You could leave ch. 1 for a while and start ch. 2 or the intro.

Or you could write a post to mdc explaining what you want to do with ch. 1 and instead of posting it, print it out and go from there. I always find it much easier to write to an internet audience than an academic one!

Good luck!

[DariusMom]

Originally Posted by Carita

totally normal. as you progress you see new connections and new ways of thinking, and THAT is the major contribution - your assimilation of knowledge and figuring out how things go together or not... I have gone back and looked at my initial proposals and thought - where was I going with this?? And I have re-written so much. But that is the evolution of our training - to get us to that point. We have to stop and look around everyonce in a while at our lives and re-assess the situation. Only then will we make true forward progress.

Exactly! This is so true. When I revisit my initial proposal, I want to laugh. However, I had to learn and grow as a scholar via this whole process. and I've not doubt that my published version will be many steps removed from the manuscript I've defended (but I can't think about that now!)

What I have to remember, and I hope you do too, is that nothing else in your career will ever be as hard as this dissertation. We're building the knowledge and skills to be professionals. This includes learning ever more about the field we're in until we have a really good basis, learning how to be more efficient in conducting research, and building our network of peers and colleagues. Using all that stuff we've obtained by doing the diss, we can do future research much more easily and efficiently.

Originally Posted by Murihiku

Yep, normal. Indeed, probably essential.

You could leave ch. 1 for a while and start ch. 2 or the intro.

Or you could write a post to mdc explaining what you want to do with ch. 1 and instead of posting it, print it out and go from there. I always find it much easier to write to an internet audience than an academic one!

Good luck!

I was going to suggest point 1. I found it more efficient and generally easier to move on to another section or chapter if I was stuck rather than agonizing over the part I was stuck in.

Never thought about point two, but possibly worth a try!

hang in there, OP! you'll be ok!

[cyclamen]

I'm only doing my master's so it's not really the same thing, but it's writing nonetheless. For getting unstuck at writing... I trick myself and tell myself things like...

Write crap, just write something.
It doesn't have to be good.
It doesn't have to make sense.
It's okay to be incoherent. (My advisor told me this last week. He said that I can always fix it later, but right now, just write and get the ideas out.)
You just have to produce x pages full of words vaguely relating to your topic.
You just have to come up with x number of questions to investigate next week.
It's okay to repeat yourself.
The only good thesis is a done thesis!
A done thesis just has words!
Your advisor will fix it. (obviously this one is pretend-pretend, but it does work as a spur)

I work in fifteen minute spurts. I also work on micro-topics. In each writing session I try to deal with one little idea or sub-topic. I don't worry about making connections. I leave big gaping holes and markers of questions that need to be answered.

All this allows me to produce some raw material, which I am then able to go back and edit/elaborate into something that I can reasonably hand in. Diligence over brilliance.

Finally... http://bsc.harvard.edu/PDFs/20_Tips.pdf It's for senior thesis writers, but it's generally good writing advice.

[cyclamen]

Also.... have you tried printing out your chapter and cutting it up and reassembling it/grouping it into clumps and topics? It sounds kind of lame, but working with your hands can sometimes help you organize your thoughts better than outlining can.

Or have you tried doing a web/map? Drawing pictures? Sometimes the change of medium is all it takes to click things into place. (I'm full of cheesy writing center tricks because I used to work in one.)

[Realrellim]

Originally Posted by cyclamen

Write crap, just write something.
It doesn't have to be good.
It doesn't have to make sense.
It's okay to be incoherent. (My advisor told me this last week. He said that I can always fix it later, but right now, just write and get the ideas out.).

: For the chapter I found most difficult, I finally set myself a crazy deadline and told myself to just put words on the page. They didn't have to make sense. They didn't have to be grammatical. I had an outline and I wrote to the outline. If I got stuck and couldn't figure out the appropriate word, I'd write something, put (wc) for "word choice" next to it and keep going. After a bit, I started adding bracketed notes all along as I went to remind myself to look up a point or to check a source or that I wasn't sure it belonged there, but it kept me moving forward and I actually finished that chapter in the two-week timeframe.

It needed major editing at that point, but I was surprised (pleasantly) to see that there was lots and lots of usable material. I moved some around, deleted some, rephrased a lot afterward, but it's easier to revise than to write, IMO.

[nnaemeka]

Originally Posted by DariusMom

Exactly! This is so true. When I revisit my initial proposal, I want to laugh. However, I had to learn and grow as a scholar via this whole process. and I've not doubt that my published version will be many steps removed from the manuscript I've defended (but I can't think about that now!)

What I have to remember, and I hope you do too, is that nothing else in your career will ever be as hard as this dissertation. We're building the knowledge and skills to be professionals. This includes learning ever more about the field we're in until we have a really good basis, learning how to be more efficient in conducting research, and building our network of peers and colleagues. Using all that stuff we've obtained by doing the diss, we can do future research much more easily and efficiently.

thanks so much for the reassuring words. i'm just getting started with chapter one and i often feel clueless..

and thanks so much cyclamen for the tips and the link. VERY helpful..

[XanaduMama]

Don't know what your field is, but I sometimes found it helpful at the bunch-of-fragments stage to write a conference paper: 8-10 pages, with a listening audience in mind, and essentially summarizing your argument, with some specifics but not too many. That usually helped me get some perspective on the whole argument.

That said, sometimes it's also helpful to do the opposite: just write about something really specific (in my field--literature--doing a really detailed close reading of the text in question, or one of them) and see what comes out. Too often my problem is actually being stuck trying to figure out the bigger picture, and focusing on the details sometimes helps the bigger picture emerge more organically.

I also like the web/map idea. I do that a lot, when things are getting especially complicated and I have trouble holding it all together.

Have you read "Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day"? It's pretty helpful. John Updike said once that "you can have a pretty good career writing 2 pages a day"...and I think that's true in academia as well. Just write--set yourself a daily page quota, and fill it with whatever you can. It helps those juices flow even when you don't think you have anything to say.

Hang in there! The first chapter's definitely the hardest.