How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis
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The Creative Process <br />
47<br />
you must alter it, or your creative thinking has taken you on a wild-goose chase, in<br />
which case you must cut the irrelevant material out. But you now have both creative<br />
and logical inputs, and can sit in judgment on the outcome.<br />
A common form of writer’s block is the tendency <strong>to</strong> attempt <strong>to</strong> write a sentence<br />
but <strong>to</strong> endlessly be critical of the word choices and sentence structure, and <strong>to</strong> edit<br />
it over and over without moving on; and the longer you spend on one sentence, the<br />
more completely you lose the thread of what you were trying <strong>to</strong> say. This is a direct<br />
example of the creative–critical tension. That is, writer’s block is a particular kind<br />
of failure of the creative process.<br />
My student Theo had a severe case of writer’s block. He would sit at his desk and<br />
type a single word, stare at it for a while, then type another, and then maybe delete<br />
the whole sentence and begin again. We tried several strategies, including writing<br />
first drafts on paper and writing in tiny sentences: ‘We first examined <strong>to</strong>kens. The<br />
set of <strong>to</strong>kens is determined by the text being examined. Parsing identifies the <strong>to</strong>kens<br />
in the text. A minimal structure can then be constructed.’ Yes, this was terrible writing—but<br />
at least it gave him words on the page that he could edit in<strong>to</strong> more mature<br />
text later on. <strong>How</strong>ever, the core problem turned out <strong>to</strong> be deeper. He had been a<br />
part-time student and had lived with his <strong>to</strong>pic for over 6 years, and the ideas had<br />
become so obvious <strong>to</strong> him that he felt his work was trivial (it wasn’t) and that he<br />
nothing <strong>to</strong> say. Theo eventually hit on a strategy that worked: he found a colleague,<br />
a PhD student who was unfamiliar with his area, who agreed <strong>to</strong> meet every day for<br />
a couple of weeks <strong>to</strong> listen <strong>to</strong> Theo explain his work. This process showed <strong>to</strong> Theo<br />
just how interesting and complex his contributions were. Theo wrote down these<br />
explanations, giving him the basis of a couple of chapters, and he gradually gained<br />
confidence in writing.<br />
Joanne had another form of block. She simply couldn’t leave a <strong>to</strong>pic until she<br />
felt that she had completed unders<strong>to</strong>od it, even when it was only of marginal importance—in<br />
some cases, this was rather like refusing <strong>to</strong> ride in a car because of a lack<br />
of understanding of engine mechanics and tyre chemistry. A particularly frustrating<br />
instance was her desire <strong>to</strong> learn advanced statistics (an area she knew nothing about)<br />
because of the analysis in a paper she cited. As a result her thesis stalled while she<br />
tried <strong>to</strong> grasp difficult concepts that were well beyond her expertise, and mine <strong>to</strong>o,<br />
for no obvious gain—in this case, she could reasonably take the analysis on trust.<br />
<strong>How</strong>ever, I gradually realized that <strong>to</strong> some extent this behaviour was because she<br />
didn’t like writing, and her exploration of side <strong>to</strong>pics gave her a reason <strong>to</strong> avoid it.<br />
When I confronted her, she managed <strong>to</strong> return <strong>to</strong> a more focused style of working.<br />
In my own PhD, for many months I agonized over every sentence, struggling<br />
<strong>to</strong> produce even a single brief paragraph in a 2 or 3 hour session. (At that time I<br />
worked with pen and paper.) I then found one day, almost by chance, that I had<br />
suddenly been inspired and had written several pages in less than an hour (in fact<br />
this had happened several times, but I hadn’t reflected on it). I realized that the difference<br />
had been that I had been keen <strong>to</strong> write about a particular observation, and<br />
had simply jotted down the preliminary material as quickly as I could get my hand<br />
<strong>to</strong> move across the page. But this preliminary jotting ended up in my thesis with<br />
almost no edits at all—and it flowed much better than my usual ‘agony’ text. From