Writing diary (#2)

What I learned from my first dissertation chapter

Patti Smith (source unknown)

Foreword

In January, I offered a look at my progress as I embarked on writing the first chapter of my PhD dissertation, Posing Alternatives: Bodily Comportment and the Feminist Imagination. This past week, after numerous drafts, I met with my full supervisory committee to discuss the work. I’ll be implementing some of their feedback in the coming days and then moving on to start drafting chapter 2 (of which I will present a preliminary sketch at a panel I’m co-chairing with

Akosua T. Adasi

at ACLA).

For the second instalment of my dissertation writing diary here, I’m not doing a day-by-day record of my fits and starts, so much as a reflection on what I have learned from this process. Writing is always described a solitary venture, and it’s easy to idealize and become envious about the ways in which others work, or to see our own processes as especially tortured or unique. I hope this demystifies some of the effort and offers strategies for your own writing projects, if you have them.

You can also read more about my project (in its earliest forms) here.

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Scales of argument

One of the most useful things my supervisor told me when she read a draft of the chapter back in February was that my individual focus for this chapter was dominating the focus of the dissertation as a whole. In other words, rather than feeling like a chapter about sexual violence in a project about bodily comportment, it read like a chapter about bodily comportment in a project about sexual violence. To address this, I reframed the introduction around some of the big questions I had about my dissertation topic and how the texts and issues at play in this chapter would answer them. Then in the conclusion, I took time to zoom back out again and establish where, having earned this argument, this leaves us in the scope of the project as a whole. Throughout the chapter, I also added more language and references to this larger argument, so that everything continually served its ends and not the other way around.

Don’t frontload too much research

Everyone told me not to over-read, but I didn’t listen. From June until November, I read 1-2 theory books a week to prep for this chapter, and in the end, I only cited about half of them, I would guess. I still think that knowledge is like an iceberg here though: there is a lot below the surface that goes uncited but still shaped my thinking overall. That said, for chapter 2, my new strategy is to begin by incorporating 15 minutes of writing into my work routine from the beginning. So far, this has offered me clarity about what my most essential questions are and where I’ll need to go looking for answers. I’ve left gaps and markers for places to seek out citations and dig into further, but I won’t spend too much time accumulating random knowledge that would only overstuff, rather than serve, the project.

Write more often, even if it’s less at a time

To that end, yes, I am trying to add about 15-minutes of writing time to my day now, rather than dumping it all into long chunks at the end. I do often like to write in one long burst, it has to be said, but working in this way can make it too frustrating and intimidating to get started.

This strategy is also what I used when doing the R&R on an article I published in Camera Obscura last year and I found it allowed me to really give close attention to individual parts of the project: how is this sentence or paragraph working, for instance? Can I spend all my time today just refining its mechanics, tending to it carefully, rather than spreading myself across different parts?

Manage terminology

I threw around a lot of key terms in this chapter: opacity, uncertainty, ambiguity, unknowability, and yet it wasn’t always clear whether they indexed the same or slightly different things from one another. In later drafts, I worked to be really particular about when and how to use a certain word, and when necessary, tried to define what it is/is not in the scope of the project. For instance, I wanted to untether “uncertainty” from “doubt” in my discussion of sexual violence, such that I was not suggesting that accounts of violence were liable to be false, but rather that we might affirm them despite their saturation by confusion.

Say what you want to say

Maybe it’s obvious, but we often write in circles around what it is we are actually trying to claim, and it can take many drafts and conversations to figure out what this actually is. Once the dust is settled on all of theoretical overviews and close-reading though, it’s time to dig back in and say: ok, what have I actually accomplished here? What should the reader have changed their mind about? What have I changed my own mind about? This is probably why so many meetings that students have with their supervisors begin with being asked to recount, orally, what they are actually wanting to argue. As a writing tutor and Teaching Assistant, I find this is often the first time students come to articulate this. Whatever they say can tend to be more precise and lucid than what is on the page, and so I usually tell them, “if that is what you want to say, say it!” I have to remind myself of this too, though it normally comes together later in the drafting process.

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What I’m Reading

• Torrey Peters, Stag Dance: I didn’t love it as much as Detransition, Baby, and the first story took me a minute to get into (for the first few pages, the style kind of gave fan-fiction?), but I’m now finding lots of the familiar and energizing ways in which Peters gets into her characters’ skins in such a lived-in, empathetic, and clever way. I think the entangled relationship she draws out between gender and sexuality is going to be really interesting (and potentially controversial?).

• Toggling between a few theory texts for my second chapter, but mostly Simone Browne’s Dark Matters and Tina Post’s Deadpan.

What I’m Watching

• I’ll be thinking about this until the day I die: