The other day, as I clipped together the pages of an article I had written and sent it off to a journal, I paused to enjoy a sense of, not completion, but contentment. It reminded me of how I felt when I carried the bound copies of my dissertation across the Bloomington campus of Indiana University.
I am in a different place now: I have my Ph.D. in hand, I'm spending this year as a fellow, and will start my first tenure-track job in English in the fall. So the confidence and contentment with which I sealed my journal article into an envelope is very different from the uncertainty that I felt when I began my dissertation. I've come to realize that writing my dissertation is what helped that uncertainty to fade. I'd like to offer some lessons I learned that might be helpful for the many graduate students now struggling to write their own dissertations.
The first chapter was the hardest. Based on my own experience and that of others, I can say that it is not unusual for the first chapter to take a phenomenal amount of time and a greater number of revisions than any other part of the dissertation. Don't let this get you down. You're working in a new form and you don't know what a chapter should be until you've written it. I wish I could say that you'll have smooth sailing once you've mastered the first chapter -- I can't. But here's a tip that might help you maintain an even keel as you navigate your way through later chapters.
Observe the rhythm of your work -- the ups and the downs -- and remind yourself of that pattern when you hit a low point. In writing my dissertation, I went through a mood cycle that was repeated in every
chapter. I loved beginning chapters, because I loved reading sources and learning new things, and I liked thinking, in a very general way, about how I would use those sources and finish my dissertation.
But as I began to write, I would have to face the crisis of each chapter -- the particular challenge that it posed -- and every chapter posed a different challenge. In my first chapter, the problem was how to convey why some frequently ignored texts are interesting. In my second chapter, it was how to find a niche for myself so that I could say something that had not yet been said about George Eliot. In my third chapter, it was how to handle an author whose politics I increasingly disliked, and in my fourth chapter, it was how to craft a coherent narrative from a tangle of archival sources.
