Authoring a PhD

Conclusions
Constructing your text crisply and handling your references
competently are small but quite important parts of achieving 
a convincing approach to professional writing. There is no rea-
son to worry overmuch about either aspect. Do not try to
achieve a perfect style by endlessly polishing or tinkering with
your text. And do not get hung up or obsessed about referenc-
ing issues. Once you have achieved a certain level, your sub-
stantive arguments and the quality of your research will be
decisive in shaping readers’ reactions. So these fundamentals
should always get most of your attention. Getting style and 
referencing aspects of your writing right simply helps readers
focus on the substance of your argument and the qualities 
of your research, instead of being distracted, confused or
annoyed by presentational defects. Producing cleanly written,
well-referenced text will also help maintain your morale as an
author. If your text reads well you will be better motivated to
write more and will have a clearer picture of where you are
going. It should give you the confidence to tackle and surmount
some inevitable major difficulties of the writing and revising
process, to which I turn in the next chapter.
W R I T I N G C L E A R LY
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Developing Your Text and
Managing the Writing Process
Never ignore, never refuse to see, what may be
thought against your thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche
1
F
or creative non-fiction the heart of the authoring process is
a person sitting at a desk, surrounded by information, notes,
scribbles and sources, or otherwise jammed with ideas, and strug-
gling to organize their thoughts on a blank screen or sheet of
paper. This particular image is so dominant in our thinking about
authoring because it is so awe-full, so hard to manage your way
through at the time, so difficult to capture what you were doing
afterwards, and so psychologically stressful or unnerving to con-
template at almost any time. In another field, writing novels, its
practitioners’ collective obsession with the angst of an author
imagining something out of nothing has gone even further, as
John Fowles noted ironically:
Serious modern fiction has only one subject, the difficulty
of writing serious modern fiction … . The natural conse-
quence of this is that writing about fiction has become a
far more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s
one of the best ways you can tell a true novelist nowadays.
He’s not going to waste his time over the messy garage-
mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters 
on paper … Yes, all right. Obviously he has at some point
to write something, just to show how irrelevant and
unnecessary the actual writing part of it is. But that’s all.
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Of course, Fowles is pointing out that this degree of navel-gazing
is deeply unhealthy, even disabling for his field. Thankfully,
creative non-fiction is a more prosaic area than novel writing,
an area where well-primed authors generally find it easier (more
routine) to do writing. But most of us encounter some similar
problems in handling the self-exposure involved in authoring,
facing up to our own limited ideas and contribution, and coping
with the inevitable separation between our planned piece of
work and the one that actually materializes on screen or paper.
Three key strategies can help ease the myths and difficulties
surrounding the writing process. One step is to rethink the 
writing process not as a single creative act but instead as a
multi-stage process, where each stage is as important for your
progress as any other. Authoring does not just involve pro-
ducing a first draft. It is just as much about how you reflect on
what you have done, try out the arguments on other people,
replan your text in the light of comments, and implement revi-
sions. Second, where a piece of writing is not working in its
current form, it is useful to have in reserve a specific and reli-
able method for radically remodelling problematic text. A third
strategy is to plan your writing sessions carefully and to review
some detailed suggestions which may help you maintain
progress and avoid running into potential road blocks.
Drafting, upgrading and going public
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.