S. Worthen | Weblog

Last night, I counted: I've written an astonishing 45 pages of decent writing in the past week or so. That's more academic-style writing than I needed to produce in a month during the largest series of deadlines in other degrees. If only any of it were intended directly for a dissertation chapter, I could be done by July at this rate. Alas, this is the sort of writing I can only do when I already know my material well through having already written about it. I don't need to track down most of the footnotes and I already have copies of nearly all the material I need to reference. I've already hashed through my arguments by writing flailing chapter drafts which are still in dire need of correction and revision. At this rate, I'll have better chapters if I cannibalize my writing from what I've written in the last week and readapt it back into being a chapter.

I realize now that the reason those chapters flail so much is because I didn't have any sustained argument in them. They are collections of interesting and useful information on their respective subjects, they occasionally drift into brief arguments of a trivial sort, and collectively they provide the background material which will make the real argument in my last chapter possible. These article deadlines have given me a major incentive to work through all that material and find my arguments. It's all to the good.

I think I can have the current article in reasonable shape by this weekend. One way or another, I have to have it sent off by Wednesday, since I'm heading out of town then for a week and a half and won't be able to work on it; anyways, it's already technically overdue. When I come back, at the end of June, I hope to fend off the vortext of lassitude* and be productive despite the lack of these immediate deadlines which drive me to productivity.

* Credit to haggisthesecond for coining this phrase.