How To Write A Humanities Dissertation, Part two: The Perfect Plan

Note: Read part one here.

Step 1: The fall semester begins and brings with it fresh pens and notebooks, fresh new clothes to wear, and fresh new resolutions for productivity. You meet with your dissertation supervisor, telling him or her of your ambition to graduate in May (a whole year early). He is encouraging. He says you can do it. He says the hard part of research and analysis is already behind you. Then he quibbles with you over a definition and some word usage in your abstract. You leave feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Step 2: You read the book Write your dissertation in 15 minutes a day.  It encourages you to take small steps every day to achieve your goal. You decide to set a daily word goal that will help you finish your rough draft by the end of the semester. The only problem is, you're not exactly sure how long a humanities dissertation should be. You turn to Google. Answers range from 80 pages to 400 pages. 400 pages sounds, to you, like the 400th level of hell. Since your supervisor has already approved your 6 projected chapters along with introduction and your conclusion, you decide that about 200 pages will do, with around 30 pages per chapter and 10 pages for intro and conclusion. You do the math and discover that if you write 750 words per day, you can finish your rough draft before the end of the semester, with plenty of time to edit it. This, you think, is child's play.

Step 3: You sign up for something called 750words.com in order to help you meet your daily goal. 750words.com gives you some accountability for your writing goals, rewards you with badges, and feeds your narcissism by analyzing each 750-word entry for mood, words-per-minute, and word type. The mood analysis of your first entries looks like this:

"Introvert, Positive, Certain, Thinking:" a healthy mindset for writing.

You decide to write first thing in the morning, when your ideas are fresh. You use your morning cup of coffee as a reward for your labor. There are a couple of flaws in this system, the most obvious of which is writing without coffee. The other is that you will write anything -- anything -- for that little program to triumphantly tell you you've reached 750 words so you can go have your crucial morning joe. Despite those problems, the morning freewrites do help you to get a few ideas out and jump start your work day, so that, by the end of most days you do have 750 usable words.

Step 4: You turn in your introduction to your supervisor. Aside from quibbling over the same definition from your abstract that you thought you'd already taken care of, he wants you to add several things to the introduction that you naively assumed would be going into the body of the dissertation. Doing so will make your introduction considerably longer and your anticipated content for your chapters considerably shorter, leaving you with new space to fill in the body. After initial dismay, however, you return to your plan, confident you can fix this.

Step 5: You replan your plan. For various reasons, such as pictures of cats on the internet, important facebook updates, and all the seasons of Gossip Girl on Netflix, you have not always written your 750 words a day; additionally, you now have revision and reorganizing to do after your advisor meeting. You recalculate and discover that 1,000 words/day will do the trick. You press on.

Step 6: For various reasons, such as pictures of cats on the internet, important facebook updates, and all the seasons of Gossip Girl on Netflix, you have not been completing your 1,000 words everyday. You now realize that you will not finish in time for the end of the semester, but surely you will finish by January... Your 750 words stats now look like this:

"Extrovert, Negative, Uncertain, Feeling." I am not an extrovert. That the stats lean this way shows I've been stuck in my chair too long. The other emotions speak for themselves.

You re-plan. You now realize that expecting to finish the whole project in one school year was silly, and you give yourself another year, now expanding your plan to include additional research and writing. One day in the future, after it's all over, you'll read a genius article from waitbutwhy.com about procrastination and you will understand why you couldn't keep your self-made goals.  But for now, you look at that funny animated cat .gif and you laugh, as your dissertation slides into...part 3: the Messy Middle.