20 to 200 Pages

I find dissertating (I actually kind of hate that word) to be a strange activity.

On the one hand, I know academic writing. I’ve participated in peer review and have been published. I’ve taught in a writing program for several years. I’ve helped train new writing instructors (other grad students). I’ve taken and taught pedagogy classes for teaching writing. I tutor undergraduate writers. Although I love-hate teaching, I really enjoy talking about writing: audience expectation, supporting claims, organizing information according to principles like give-new and end-weight emphasis. I love introducing student writers to the strange new world of revision strategies, such as reverse outlines, cluster diagrams, highlighting, and reading aloud.

And it’s this intimacy with the writing process that often makes my own writing experiences so frustrating. I guess it’s partly the age-old dichotomy invention and execution, but that’s not very satisfactory. To the extent that writing conference and seminar  papers (8-10 and 20-30 pages respectively) doesn’t feel like adequate preparation for planning a book-length study, this could be another example of graduate programs failing to train its students, but that seems reductive as well.

I’ve read books and gleaned tips about managing the research and writing process, and have often found them helpful. (I often recommend The Clockwork Muse as a really practical guide to prioritizing and scheduling research and writing activities.)

But the fact is, I’m just not used to thinking about argumentative claims on such a large scale. And it’s in the moment of writing, siting at my desk, surrounded by open books, notes, outlines, drafts, scissors, tape, stapler, and those little post-it bookmarks, that I struggle most. What do I need to say? And what’s the best way to say it? How do I go from writing 20 pages to 200 (or more)?

What the hell am I doing?

I recently saw Scott McLemee’s post at Inside Higher Ed about Critical Intellectuals on Writing, a collection of interviews with leadings scholars, thinkers, and writers in the humanities. The central focus of each interview is on the process of composition, and the answers vary pretty dramatically: philosopher David Donaldson begins by imagining the first sentence, wonders what comes next, and then begins crafting the paper in his head. When he actually begins writing, he often discards those first few pages.

Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, writes in “abstract units;” each unit develops a line of thought for 3-4 pages, and often corresponds roughly to subsections within a chapter. These units get recombined into larger units — once upon a time with scissors and tape, and now with copy, cut, and paste.

Feminist philosopher Sandra Harding begins by outlining her argument, which is often a critique of a particular claim, and then begins by writing the most difficult section, the “most problematic aspect,” first. She then goes back and forth between sections, “growing them up and keeping them in balance with each other.” She puts the draft aside, comes back, and often starts over — building new drafts from the remains of old ones.

What’s particularly striking about these scenes of writing is how completely nonlinear they are. Of course, the nonlinearity of the writing process is something I know and emphasize repeatedly while teaching and tutoring. I know that writing is not just a product, but a process of discovery. But teaching the messy, scary, unpredictable process of discovery, is obviously not the same as living it.

And that’s what I need to learn.