Authoring a PhD

Louis Pasteur
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Creativity takes time.
T. Z. Tardif and Robert Sternberg
39
It may help your thinking also to formalize and even verbal-
ize alternative interpretations of your problems and findings,
and to express them as a debate between different positions.
Lewis Minkin recommends adopting different roles or voices
for short times as a useful device in interpretative writing. For
instance, at different times you could try acting as ‘detective’
ferreting out hidden information, or ‘pattern-maker’ trying 
to systematize the information discovered, or ‘juggler’ trying 
to make apparently conflicting patterns fit together. The idea
here is not to let your inner tensions and contradictions about
your progress remain latent.
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Instead try to surface explana-
tory problems more explicitly and it may help you to decide
what weight to put on each interpretation. Minkin also men-
tions other possible positions. For instance, a fatalistic or ‘awk-
ward sod’ view might be that events cannot be satisfactorily or
plausibly explained. This position can function a little like 
a null hypothesis position (‘there’s nothing to find out here,
only random connections’), and it may serve as a corrective to
overelaborate explanation in some circumstances.
The depth to which a sense of the difficulty, of the
problem, sinks, determines the quality of the
thinking which follows. Sometimes slowness and
depth of response are connected [in] getting to the
roots of the matter.
John Dewey
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Being puzzled, being unsure, being mistaken, and
changing tack through trial and error, seem to be
both integral and conducive to creative research.
Lewis Minkin
42
As your writings grow so many new issues will automatically
arise. How can my theme or my findings in this chapter be dove-
tailed with those of another? If they seem distinct, can they be
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connected more strongly? Are they consistent, or conflicting, or
simply at a tangent from each other? If they seem inconsistent,
can they be reconciled? Academic value-added is mostly gener-
ated by two factors here. The first is being able to see clearly 
that these questions have arisen, which is determined partly by
your own skill as a writer, codifier and communicator of ideas
(to yourself as well as to everyone else). The second influence is
your having the psychological courage and ingenuity to try and
answer questions or tackle conflicts, rather than following a nat-
ural initial instinct to evade, suppress or disguise problems from
readers. The most original people ‘keep the faith’ with uncom-
fortable research findings or disconcerting implications of their
arguments, rather than just backing off from them or conclud-
ing that they must be wrong. Then they try to work these trou-
bling findings back into a revised or adjusted framework of their
intellectual commitments in some satisfactory way.
Conclusions
Karl Marx once remarked, ‘Beginnings are difficult in all the 
sciences’.
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For PhD students your first year or 18 months is
always an acutely taxing time, involving multiple decisions and
transitions. You are simultaneously setting out on an extended
life-project, choosing and committing to an intellectual topic
and an approach, which you then have to live with, and
upgrading your normal work outputs to doctoral level. But the
problems of defining what your dissertation argument is cen-
trally about, and doing original and substantive work, are not
just evanescent ‘first-year PhD blues’. They are instead perma-
nent aspects of becoming and remaining an independent and
committed intellectual, someone who can effectively commu-
nicate her thoughts, and thus do more in the world than cause
a library shelf to bend a little over a period of years.
Things do generally get easier though, as your materials accu-
mulate and chunks of work get completed. How far and how fast
you become more sanguine or assured depends on two things: on
the one hand, the strength and clarity of your central research
questions; and on the other, your ability to structure and organ-
ize the thesis materials as an effective whole, to which I now turn.
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3
Planning an Integrated Thesis:
the Macro-Structure
The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.