Anti-Climacus

HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR DISSERTATION, PART I:

"There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless"
-Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menand, Author of the Quixote"

(These considerations are largely technical, and so apply more to political theorists, and perhaps the humanities in general, than others:)

1. Finish. The only important virtue of a dissertation is that it be completed. Elaborated at slightly more length: it should get from point A to point B in more than 200 pages but less than 400, and contain an appropriate number of footnotes. The tendency of grad students (abetted by the structure of grad school) is to treat the dissertation as the culmination of the work of many years. In reality, a completed dissertation is nothing more than a book manuscript in process, and probably one that will require substantial changes. By all means be zealous to produce a good product, but even the best books have lacunae, and you will have time after the defense to address them. Learn to recognize when the investment of more time is not worth the marginal benefit at this stage.

2. A dissertation is like a machine. When I was junior high or so, I went with my father to buy a new stereo for our house. While we were talking with the salesperson, he gave us the advice to avoid units that had lots of buttons or moving parts: the more moving parts, the more places where the whole thing can break. I think this is by far the most helpful metaphor for the beginning of dissertation work. The tendency is to think that you can manage more than is actually possible: the first sketch of my dissertation project included Suarez, Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, and the whole history of thinking about international law. That's too much. A dissertation should cover one theorist or conceptual problem, and add other material only inasmuch as it is necessary to illuminate the theorist or conceptual problem. Strip out anything unnecessary to that goal (and file it away for future research).

3. Definitely not 15 minutes a day. Probably not 15 hours a day, either. As I was beginning my dissertation, I happened across some books that collected The Paris Review interviews with famous writers, and the part of each interview that fascinated me most was where each author would describe their working habits. The modal answer was T.S. Eliot's: he wrote for about three hours a day, every day (of writing, not reading-thinking-writing). Times and circumstances differed across writers, whether the morning or evening worked best for them, etc, but that amount of time kept reappearing. Now, I've tried writing three hours every day, and find that it does not work for me. I need a good solid map of what I'm intending to write, and if I try to write without a thorough plan, the quality of work I produce declines noticeably. Instead, I would break each section of my dissertation into a three-day plan of work: one day to review the important literature for that section, one day to make a plan of attack (including citations), and one day to write. Unusual, yes, but successful in producing 20 to 30 pages a week that required minimal further revision, and meeting Eliot's three-hours-a-day in the aggregate, if not on a daily basis. In this sense, I think it reaches the important requirements of a working schedule: infinitely repeatable (so long as I know what the next section is), and able to be compressed or extended depending on my needs.

4. Don't start with the hardest stuff. In addition to the difficulties of mastering your particular subject matter, a dissertation requires the ability to think in a significantly longer scope than you ever have before. Do not underestimate the technical and stylistic difficulties of writing. It's best to begin with a relatively straightforward chapter-length task--the interpretation of a text, or case, or thinker--and then move onto more complicated chapters. Had I begun where I believed myself to have a most pressing need--natural law--I would have tied myself into knots. As it happened, I wrote the other chapters first and, not surprisingly, my view of the importance of natural law changed several times. If I had begun there, I would have driven myself crazy revising those sections as my thinking about them changed. If you're doing an interpretive dissertation (even, to a certain extent, a normative dissertation), some of this will fall out as you work. Don't assume your theory needs to be complete before beginning. By all means have a working theory about the problem or the solution, but be flexible if your reading indicates that part of your theory is wrong.

5. Cut your losses. I came up with a brilliant framing device for one of my chapters. It was pithy and memorable, and would make for a good article spun out of the dissertation, or a good job talk. As I continued working on the chapter, it became clear that the framing device actually took away from the substantive points I needed to make in my dissertation, so it had to go. Goodbye 20 pages and lost time thinking of a new framing device (Fitzgerald writes in one of his essays how hard it is to remove a character from a novel, even when it's necessary. It's the same feeling). But it wasn't going to work unless I put more time into it than I could afford. So now it'll be another paper at some point down the line. With a month or so left I discovered that Grotius was covered with a piece of terminology that is only associated with much later thinkers: footnote, and will come back to it later. A book I read suggested a connection that would be novel but would destroy the balance of a chapter: footnote. The only virtue of a dissertation is that it's done, and this means at some point you'll have to be mercenary about what allows you to finish.