Getting chapters written

How many drafts to finish? And by finish I mean submission to your supervisor, not submission of your PhD thesis. There will be many drafts of the whole, and multiple drafts of each chapter once you have had feedback from your supervisor. On this course, the individual chapters-in-for-judgment-from-supervisor rule of thumb is 5 drafts to finish.

The purpose of starting with a multiple is to unlock the blank page fever that hits some writers. The reason writers find starting difficult, and procrastination easy is because (a) they don’t schedule (b) they don’t have a clear path of how to finish and what is needed (list) and (c) they imagine the first draft as the final draft, and are thus are frozen in place by perfectionism and imposter syndrome.  

It takes multiple drafts to get to submission stage for a variety of reasons. We are still working out our thoughts as we write ‘thinking on paper’. We are perhaps still missing key pieces of information (that we don’t yet know are key pieces until we write something that needs clarification or substantiation). Papers need to be edited heavily to make them flow, to have ideas connect and make sense to an audience outside your head. This is all perfectly normal, but it is often not discussed amongst academics or between academics and PhD students. Junior faculty are thus under the impression that more experienced writers simply let words uncoil from the keyboard in a perfect first iteration. Clearly false. We all have multiple drafts to finish. As a PhD student this might be your first experience with the notion that 80% of writing is editing, and that multiple drafts are a vital and normal part of all academic writing.

TODAY I WILL…

• Update my task list of what I need to do to complete this chapter;

• Write for 2 hours minimum according to my list;

• Reflect on which drafting stage I tend to get stuck at - blank page, second, third? Is it editing or polishing?