What if you miss a deadline? Follow the rule for what to do if you fall off a horse: get right back on. Make a new, easy, realistic deadline, and get back to work. Don’t waste time crying over lost opportunities, take advantage of new ones.

The question of how long a dissertation is long enough is easy to answer: the shortest one your committee will accept.

ere are some useful questions to ask yourself about the pace and timing of your dissertation work: _____ Are you moving forward? Do you sometimes feel as if you’re going in circles? Do you know when? why? _____ Is your pace accelerating? decelerating? If it’s steady, does it feel like the right pace? _____ What speeds you up? What slows you down? _____ Is your pace one that you can maintain over time? _____ Is it a pace that will allow you to finish on time? _____ Are you undoing as much writing as you’re producing? If so, why? _____ Do you know roughly how much you can write in a certain period of time? _____ Have you thought about, and discussed with your advisor, how large your project must be, how small it can be and still be acceptable, and how long you have? That is, have you calibrated the process? _____ Have you made a tentative timetable?

Spend some time looking at your work process: at how much time you’re spending on your dissertation and when, at exactly how you’re writing. (Are you trying for a final draft each time you sit down? Is it working?) Look at whether the process feels efficient. Particularly examine how much you’re reading. It’s more common for the students I’ve worked with to read too much than to read too little. They use reading as a distraction, or as a way to avoid having to think their own thoughts, or as a magic charm: “If I read everything in the field, then I’ll be able to write and be sure I haven’t missed anything.” Relax. You’re sure to miss something, and it’s very unlikely to matter much. It may make you fell very rigorous and virtuous to have read every article ever published on your topic, as well as related ones, but it won’t help you finish your dissertation. Bite the bullet and get back to your own writing, and your own thinking.

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.”

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.

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?”

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.

“Write first.” By this she meant, make writing the highest priority in your life. But she also meant those words literally; that is, write before you do anything else in your day.

But here are my last two essential pieces of advice, as you sit down and get started writing.

When you’ve hit your natural number of pages, you will experience this sequence: some slowness getting in, for, say, the first page, then the sense that you’ve hit your stride and can just write along for a while, thinking things, following some byways, exploring, maybe even discovering a new idea or two. Then you’ll come to a point at which you start to tire and feel like there’s not much left in your writing reservoir for the day. This is the time to begin to summarize for yourself where you’ve been, to write down your puzzlements or unanswered question

Let me describe the many pages method in a bit more detail, because I think most people will choose it. First, establish your natural daily number of pages by choosing a number arbitrarily, probably somewhere between three and six pages, and then trying to write that number of pages each day for a week.

The advantage to the many pages method is that it rewards fast writing: writing about five pages can take between one and five hours. (I’m not talking about five polished pages, but rather five junk pages, very close to freewriting.)

On the basis of my experience with lots of writers, I think the many pages method works best.

The third, the “many pages method,” is to pick a reasonable number of pages and write that same number every day.

The second method, the inspiration method, is to plan on writing each day until you come up with one or two decent ideas.

There are three ways to do this, and all three work, although not equally well.

What you need to decide next is how you’re going to set your daily writing goal.

Now it is time to work toward slightly more focused, less free writing that nevertheless moves along quickly, taps into the underground streams of your thought, and moves by rapid association to open up new ideas and new directions. The aim of not-quite-so-free writing is to use a bit more of your rational mind. You do this by setting yourself a somewhat more focused task at the outset, not “write about anything for ten minutes,” but “write as fast as I can for the next ten minutes about one novel by Trollope, trying to focus on its politics,”

Obviously, even ten minutes of wonderful freewriting every day won’t quite get you to where you want to go, so you need to learn how to increase your writing production. But you only need to think about taking further steps once freewriting has become a familiar, comfortable, and self-reinforcing process for you.

Don’t stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing. If you can’t think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle or else write, ‘I can’t think of it.’ . . . The easiest thing is just to put down whatever is in your mind. If you get stuck it’s fine to write ‘I can’t think what to say, I can’t think what to say’ as many times as you want; . . . The only requirement is that you never stop.

So you need to begin to experiment with cultivating a writing addiction, with establishing patterns and changing them if they don’t work. Even if you’re terribly neurotic, and even if you never do become a true “writing addict,” behavioral methods can still help you write. It is not necessary to feel joyous about writing in order to produce a good dissertation, or even to enjoy part of its creation. Try writing while you’re working on your neuroses—and should you choose not to work on them, you will probably still feel a bit better if you get some work done.

The only way to run or to write regularly is to make a rule for yourself that you allow yourself to break only rarely.

Write even if you feel sluggish, even if you feel lousy, even if you feel like you have nothing to say. You can still begin to get a process started, and to learn about your writing rhythm. Days when you’re productive and the writing feels like it writes itself will most likely alternate with others, when it feels like you’ve never written anything worthwhile and never will.

The main goal for this first stage of writing is to keep it going, to keep the interesting and alive associations in your brain sparking.

The writing process I have in mind has two parts to it, a first, “cooking,” making-a-mess part; and a second, compulsive, clean-up-the-mess part.

When you sit down to begin a piece of writing, your first aim ought to be to make a mess—to say anything that comes to your mind, on the subject or off it, not to worry at all about whether your stuff is connected logically, to play with your subject the way you used to build mud pies, to do no fine detail work, to spell poorly if that’s your natural inclination, and to generally forget about standards altogether

reading Bishop’s drafts is that her first draft looks nearly as awful as my own first-draft poems do; it’s what Bishop does after that-—and how many times she does it—that makes all the difference.

the single most useful piece of equipment for a writer was a bucket of glue. First you spread some on your chair, and then you sit down.