BY NOW YOU’VE WRITTEN a lot of pages, and most of them are a mess. How do you begin to turn what you have written into a true first draft? This is one of the most anxiety-producing stages in the thesis-writing process, second only to beginning. You’ve been writing for quite a while, but it may not be clear that you have anything to say or to show for your effort—just a pile of messy, at times incoherent, writing. This chapter is about how to turn that chaos and mess into a piece of writing that has a shape (although not necessarily a final one) and some semblance of an argument. This is the stage at which you can begin to answer the questions, “What is this material about? What question am I asking? How might I answer it?”
You can think about where you are in your dissertation by considering the definitions of “zero” and “first draft.” I first heard about zero drafts from Lois Bouchard, a talented writer and teacher of writing. What she meant by “zero draft” was this: This is a rich soup, and that’s all. You don’t have to judge it, query it, make much of a fuss about it. It just is, and you can let it be. And you don’t have to show it to anyone. Or this is a starting point, and not defined. Nothing you’ve written here is carved in stone. Nothing is even necessarily usable, but you’ve got something. It’s called a zero draft.
A “zero draft” may or may not really exist, depending on how you write. It can be the name you give your accumulated pages the first time they begin to have any shape at all, although they are still so messy that it would be presumptuous to call them “a first draft,” yet are clearly more organized than pure chaos.
The zero draft is the point where it becomes possible to imagine, or discern, a shape to your material, to see the method in your madness. This draft can take many forms: it can be a very tentative, prose outline, or a declaration of direction: “O.K., I’m beginning to see what this is all about. My question is rising up out of this mess, and I seem to keep coming back to it in many ways . . . . Here are the questions I’m following, and here are some tentative beginnings to answers to these questions (some of them mutually contradictory).”
Or “I’ve written about three different kinds of fictional worlds over and over during the last month, but now I see that there are really only two kinds, that a and b are really part of one kind, that can be described as . . . What I’m going to do now is to set up a chapter structure that compares the two sorts, and read back through this mess, culling useful examples and ideas.”
Or “A month ago I drew up an outline for this chapter, and since then I’ve allowed myself to wander all over the place. Now I think the outline wasn’t quite right, and I need to change it in the following ways: . . . Here’s the sort of shape I want it to have—and now on to the first draft.”
A first draft is your attempt to produce a complete, albeit very imperfect, version of what you’re ultimately going to say. And, unlike the zero draft, it will be subject to your analytical and critical scrutiny. You will ask questions that are out of bounds for the zero draft, such as “Is this right? Do I have any evidence for this statement? Does this argument work?” And you will build from it.
A first draft has both more form and a different feel than your zero draft. You’ll know that you’ve reached it when you see that what you’ve been writing has real content—and perhaps a rudimentary shape—that it has gone from being a mess to being a document. Having a first draft means you don’t have to start from scratch each time you write; you may have several paths, but you’re no longer in uncharted territory. Your first draft is a piece of writing from which you can extract some sort of coherent outline. It begins to answer a question, or questions, and proves that you have made some progress toward defining it, or them. It may have the wrong shape, but it has a shape you can work on.
If you have an accumulation of freewriting or a zero draft, turning out a first draft is a matter of finding ways of building on or fleshing out ideas you have already put down in writing. Here are some strategies for getting started:
• Pick out words, phrases, or sentences in the writing you’ve got that seem interesting, or provocative, or resonant, and try writing beginning with them.
• Ask yourself,
“What stands out for me most in what I’ve written?”
“Is there an argument in this mess?”
“What point do I want to make?”
“Is what I’ve said here true?”
“Do I still believe this?”
• Try writing, repeatedly, in five- or ten-minute spurts of freewriting, an answer to the question “What am I really trying to say in this argument/chapter/section?”
How to get from zero to first draft is intimately connected to how you hone your question. The answer to “What’s my question in this dissertation?” doesn’t get settled for good in your thesis proposal, in your outline, or the first time you begin writing. The most unnerving and exciting part of this next stage of your writing is honing your question or questions.
We ask ourselves questions all the time: “What’s going on here?” “Why am I so confused?” “What did he mean by that?” “How am I going to get from here to there?” You need to take this ability and apply it to working on your dissertation as you learn to carry on an ongoing dialogue with writing, with your reader, and with yourself.
The abilities to ask questions and to learn that the question you ask is at least as important as the answer you get may be the most important skills you can get from a good education. What may be new for you when you write a thesis is that it’s you who’s asking the questions, not others. You should not be concerned about “getting it right.” The kind of questioning you do in order to develop your ideas should open up possibilities, rather than shutting them down.
Being asked questions makes most people feel put on the spot. If you’ve done any teaching, you’ve watched your students dive for cover when you start asking questions. You probably also know from your experience as a student that even at times when you knew the answer, you worried that you had it wrong, or you temporarily forgot it.
So you may need to modify your responses when you actively begin to ask yourself questions. You are in a new position: there is no external audience, and you can try out all sorts of answers; there is no one right answer, and you can even come up with diametrically opposite answers to the same question! Of course, further along you’re going to want to get to some answer that feels more or less right, but the best way to do this is to learn to ask questions that may have expansive, divergent answers. For example, “What happens if I argue the opposite of what I’ve just written down?” “There’s something about this piece I’ve written that’s exciting, but disturbing—what is it?” Or even, “What would happen if I ditched this dissertation right now?” Yet another sort, questions you ask yourself from your reader’s perspective, can be a useful way of beginning a dialogue with that prospective reader: “Why did you say this here? What do you mean by . . . ? I don’t understand.” This sort of question can also open up new lines of thought.
Choose a work style that suits who you are, not who you’d like to be; do not try to create both a dissertation and a new working style at the same time. I have one writing client who is a very organized person by nature; her tolerance for chaos is low, even though she acknowledges the usefulness of the “make a mess” strategy for getting her ideas down on paper. Jean’s solution, when the mess gets to be too much for her and she begins to worry that the forest will never become visible for all the trees, is to generate an outline. She tries to construct the best outline she can at the moment, knowing it’s unlikely to be her last. She uses this process as an opportunity to pose important questions to herself: What is this writing really about? Which are my main points, and which are subordinate ones? If I had to say right now what I think is true about this subject, and why, what would I say?
Jean uses making an outline to force herself to ask clarifying and organizing questions. This method works for a person who begins with theory and then moves to the concrete, someone whose thought structure is highly organized; it helps her to rise above the trees/mess/chaos and get to see the forest/order/pattern in what she has written.
But the way you begin to make order out of chaos depends on who you are. If you are by nature orderly and careful, your process may resemble Jean’s; if you have, as I do, a greater tolerance for messy writing and operate more intuitively, you may let your freewriting guide you to a gradually emerging clarity. If you’re somewhere in between, try alternating freewriting with analytical outlining strategies.
In this essential and anxiety-provoking stage it’s very important to remember that you are not going to be able to arrange a personality transplant: if you always work sloppily and intuitively, don’t try for too careful and orderly a process. Trust that the style that’s gotten you through projects in the past will do so again, perhaps with some thoughtful retooling. Don’t try to turn yourself into someone else.
Similarly, if you are methodical and neat, a New Age or meditative kind of approach may make you anxious. You might want to modify your careful, cautious approach, but you don’t need to turn into a hippy. Your mess may never be as chaotic as the writing of someone of looser temperament. Following are some examples of how people of different sorts manage this stage of writing.
I know a very successful professor and consultant who works in a field that’s both scientific and artistic. Carl likes to read, but he prefers to meet the world directly with his eyes: shapes, forms, and images are both his stock-in-trade and his internal organizing principles. On the side, he’s not only an avid fisherman, but also a talented artist. But he didn’t get to be a tenured full professor at Harvard just by being lively, smart, and artistic; they demanded written work. How does someone whose primary language is not English words but pictures meet such a goal? When I ask him how he thinks one gets from chaos to order, he replies, “I speak my paper into a tape recorder and then have it transcribed. I speak it from the picture I have of it in my head.”
When I ask what it is, exactly, that he dictates, he says, “I can see the outline, the main ideas.” These are often ideas he’s worked on for years and given lectures about. He either reconstructs his ideas from “the memory of the slides” he showed at his lectures, or he uses as anchor points for his major papers a series of one- or two-page “idea papers” that he’s put together quickly in the past, a series of way stations on the road to the larger work. “And what do you do then, after you’ve dictated this longer paper and had it typed?” I ask. Carl calls this typescript a “first draft.” He says that he then reads and edits, shifting paragraphs, changing vocabulary, and deleting unnecessary parts. About 80 percent of his first draft ends up in the final paper. He is one of those people whose writing goes through several drafts in their heads—in his case, visual rather than verbal drafts—before it ever appears on paper. By the time Carl has a hard copy of his paper, he has his penultimate draft.
Peter, who’s in the midst of writing his dissertation, has a different way to get from chaos to draft:
I don’t know whether my procedure for papers will work for chapters, although I suspect it will. Perhaps the word ‘procedure’ implies more planning and organization than actually gets done. My mess stage generally consists of an assortment of notes jotted down here and there, a pile of books full of stickies, many of which have a few notes jotted down on them, and an array of thoughts floating around in my head. Sometimes I make a rough outline to sort out what to present when. Sometimes I structure my first couple of paragraphs in such a way that they provide a roadmap I use for writing. Sometimes I have an idea in my head of the way the paper should progress. Then I sit down and write. Sometimes what I write follows the outline, but often the outline changes as I progress through the paper. I often use quotations or passages that I am analyzing as moorings for my thoughts. When I am writing I also tend to do a fair amount of in-process sentence-level editing. I know that this ‘procedure’ would be a recipe for disaster for certain types of writers, but it seems to work for me.
Here is my process, which is at the messy end of the continuum: I generally begin with totally free writing, holding myself only to five pages a day, which can be about anything. Or everything: my cat’s sore feet, the week’s menus, my offsprings’ vacation plans, my reaction to the morning’s newspaper, a poem, or the germ of an idea for an essay or a book. This method produces a large number of pages very quickly; very few are useful beyond themselves, but they will ultimately lead me forward into a piece of writing that will take me and itself somewhere, develop into something fit for someone else’s eyes. How do I know if I’ve got anything useful in the midst of the mess? Sometimes it sits right up there and waves at me, or I realize, with a shock, that the line I’ve just written has potential. I used to leave it to chance to find it again. Now I put a mark in the margin—an arrow, or a note to myself—and in this way increase the chances that I’ll remember to use it.
Five pages of handwritten freewriting a day doesn’t take very long—somewhere between one and two hours for about 1250 words; sorting and cleaning it up, deciding what’s usable and what’s to be saved, may take considerably longer. Every so often I read through the past few days’ entries, or the past week’s, or two weeks’ worth. If my freewriting is pouring out, day after day, I don’t interrupt it by shifting to the more analytical mode. Sometimes I have a sense of time pressure (wanting to have a draft completed before I go on a vacation, for example) that will move me from freewriting to the next stage. Or I may hit a wall in my writing and decide to deal with it by changing tasks for a while, to see if I can advance on another front (hoping that in rereading I will discover some rough diamonds in what I’ve already done). As I read the mess I’ve written, I repeat a few mantras to myself: “It’s supposed to look like this at this stage,” or “Not every single word of this can be garbage.”
I will sometimes circle around the same idea or theme more than once, rewriting it without paying particular attention to what I’ve already written; surprisingly, these iterations move my thoughts forward. My gradually clearer writing reflects my developing thought; my writing is the form in and into which the thought emerges. This iterative development, while a bit fuzzy at first, results in something that looks suspiciously much like a first draft, with a beginning, a middle, an end, and some sense of coherence.
There are as many ways to negotiate this stage in the development of a dissertation as there are dissertation writers. The examples I’ve given above describe some of the ways that quite diverse people have managed the process. Look at this spectrum to see where you might (or might not) fit; also look at your own style of working, at the ways you’ve done this step before, at what did or didn’t work for you.
You can experiment. Assume that you have created pages and pages of messily written stuff, and now you have very little idea of what to do next. Begin by exploring the mode of organizing your mess that seems most logical to you. Remind yourself that there’s got to be something worth using in all of these pages. Then try the scheme that comes first to your mind—really try it, allowing your panic to peak and subside, giving it several days, knowing that uneven progress is par for the course. Remind yourself that this is not the first piece of writing you’ve ever done. Try your old cut-and-paste method (it doesn’t matter if it’s on the computer or with scissors and tape; it doesn’t matter if people laugh, so long as it works).
What if it doesn’t work? First ask yourself why not. You may discover that you’ve taken on too large a job, attempted too much at once, and scared yourself stupid in the process. If so, try the chunking method: “Today I’ll just read through the whole mess quickly and mark the things that stand out for me as perhaps not totally dumb. Tomorrow I’ll pull them out and see if they have any relation to each other. Wednesday I’ll set up some categories to sort them into, and I’ll go back and see if there are any other pieces I’ve overlooked. Thursday I’ll take a very tentative stab at making an outline.”
What if your old revision process, whatever it was, just no longer suits you? Take a look at the various styles described in this chapter and ask yourself if one of those methods might work better for you. If so, try it, continuing to track your own progress to see what works, what doesn’t, what might. If cutting and pasting no longer feels right to you, try freewriting, writing about what the problem may be. Write about the chaos, asking yourself all the hard questions knowing that this writing isn’t actually going to be part of your dissertation.
What if you discover that you’re having not a writing block, but a thinking block? What’s the difference between the two? You have a thinking block if you’re able to write, but find yourself going around in a seemingly endless series of circles, or if your writing is voluminous but devoid of ideas, or if you do far more writing about trivia and tangents than you do on your dissertation subject. Sometimes you can help yourself through this kind of block by getting tougher, saying, “I can write about any other things for the first five minutes of my writing time, but then I have to hold myself to writing primarily about my subject.”
Or consider the possibility of getting a fresh look at your material by having a conversation with your advisor, or with someone else who can understand your topic; isolation sometimes leads to stagnation. Or try writing about what there might be in the knotty place you’ve reached that’s troublesome to you: Do you worry that your advisor won’t like it? Or are you uncertain if you believe what you’ve argued? Or is there something in the material itself that disturbs you? It’s usually possible to write oneself out of a thinking block. As a final strategy, approach the material again, starting as if you had nothing already written, seeing how fast you can write a really quick version of the chapter. It all came out of your head in the first place, so it’s still there, perhaps just needing to be reorganized.
If you haven’t created a mess, you may now want to try shaking up your neat work, asking yourself, “Have I left out anything that matters? Do I thoroughly believe what I’ve written? Are there any nagging questions? Is this the whole story? Have I suppressed my doubts or any contradictory evidence?” This early stage is a very good time to mess up the neatness, for the sake of making sure that your work is as inclusive, as complicated, and as close to the truth of the matter as you can possibly make it.
Now you’re on your way to a complete first draft. Here is my list of specific strategies for making sure you get there.
• Sit down with all your writing, hold your nose, and read through everything you’ve written several times, looking for different things:
—Read just for material that stands out as interesting.
—Read for dominant themes.
• Read for interesting or annoying questions that occur to you as you go through what you’ve written.
• Read for organizational markers.
• Read in order to organize, marking themes with codes, numbers, letters, or colors.
• Read to extract a provisional outline.
• Read through and put a check in the margin next to anything that’s interesting, or seems like it might have potential, or even seems terribly wrong.
• If you find recognizable paragraphs in the mess, try summarizing each of them in a single sentence. This exercise serves several functions: you find out if your paragraph has a central idea, or if it has too many ideas to be covered in a single paragraph; you also produce a collection of sentences that will make it much easier to see the shape of a possible outline.
• If you already have some idea of what approximate categories or themes you’re going to develop in your chapter, take out your colored markers, assign a color to each of them, and go through what you’ve written, color-coding the pieces. If you’re working on a word processor, move the pieces you’ve marked in different colors on your hard copy into different files, rearranging the text to reflect the categories you’ve defined. You’re now well on your way to producing an outline.
These strategies will help you sift through your zero draft as you transform it into a first draft. Add your own inventions as you go along. You’ll know when you have a recognizable first draft. It won’t necessarily be neat, or elegantly written, or well argued—in fact, it’s unlikely to be any of these things—but it will have at least a rudimentary shape and argument, and some interesting, even if incomplete, or mutually contradictory theories. These are the kernels that will develop into the central ideas of your dissertation. Now you’re ready to move on to learning how to revise further the draft you hold in your hands.