Hello friends, apparently it has been a little while since I did a blog post! It’s been quite a busy summer, so I’ll do my best to fill you in. Last post I talked about the presentation I gave in New Perlican at the end of May, about my fieldwork and that portion of my dissertation research to the community, and we had a lovely time! Since then it has been a whorl wind of activity! My brother and sibling-in-law visited, my husband’s parents came out to visit, my parents were here visiting, and between everyone in our families being in the house, we did a lot of fieldwork for Black Cat, and even managed to squeeze in a little camping trip to Terra Nova National Park with some of our friends, which was a lovely break! Also of course, there was a lot of writing happening in there too, which is mostly what I’d like to chat about today.

Firstly, the news: I’ve finished the first draft of my doctoral dissertation! (insert cheering)

That’s huge, and while I know there is a lot of editing and refining in my near future, as well as the whole review process, the defence, and corrections in the next year, I feel like getting to this point was the biggest hurdle and I’m really pleased to have my beast of a draft done and in metaphorical piles around me (because it’s digital). My ultimate goal at the moment is to complete my PhD within the 4-year timeframe where they provide funding for the program, because I cannot afford to do school longer than that, and because I really don’t wan’t to drag out my program for years and get distracted with work and other things. I think if I have to go into the fall 2024 semester for final edits, that would be fine, but I’m really aiming to be at the October 2024 convocation!

Something that friends I’ve been chatting to who are also in the program have asked me is basically how did I write a 72k word diss draft in 10 months. Even writing that down to explain looks daunting! The short answer is that I really love writing, and getting my thoughts about my project onto paper that have been swirling around in my head for the last 3 years was something I was really looking forward to and something that I think I excel at. I’ll dive a bit into how I planned and approached my writing, but please know that everyone works differently, and how I did my writing might not work for you at all!

How I approached writing my dissertation (& other large things)

Step 1: Get your outline ready.
I prepared the estimated chapter breakdown with some bullets about what I wanted to be in each chapter, and discussed the layout with my supervisors. Once they were happy and I was happy that everything was included (did I totally forget my methods section on the first draft there? yes), we were off! I then expanded that outline to have a little more detail to guide me in my writing, more detail on the bullet points, a bit more about what I wanted in each section of each chapter, which I find really vital to helping me get going at any given point. Without a good framework, I will just stare at Word and wonder what I’ve even been researching.

Step 2: Plan your approach
The framework also involves estimating around how long you’d like your overall final product to be, and what an average length your chapters would be. For me that meant deciding I’d like my dissertation to be between 60-80k words in length, with an average of 7500 words per chapter, about 8 chapters. This means that some chapters will be longer and some shorter, but that gives me an idea of where to start, instead of looking at the grand total. I don’t like to write a lot in one day, I find that tires me out pretty quickly and leads to several days of good writing and then a week of nothing, so I find breaking it up into 500~ words/day is a good grounds for me to start with. I don’t work on weekends, despite what academia might tell you, unless the week was other activities, so I usually plan for 4-5 work days in a given week. For my dissertation, I aimed for 500 words/day, or 2500/week, so a chapter could be done in under 4 weeks. Some might take longer or shorter, but you get the idea!

Step 3: Start with a chapter you want to write!
For me, this is an important part of the process (from a dissertation standpoint, and for writing books as well)! My supervisor said you should never start with the intro chapter, and in fact that part should be done last, and I’ve found that really helped! I like to start with a chapter or section that I definitely have all the information for, and that I’m actually excited to talk about! For both my Masters and my PhD that meant starting with the fieldwork. It’s way more fun that way, and definitely gets you in the groove of writing. My least favourite chapter was Theory and Methods for my project, so I left that to near the end. It doesn’t matter if you jump around, as long as you have your outline to keep you on track. My team and I decided that writing the chapters individually rather than in a huge doc would be easier, because then I could send them over as completed for review. It will save everyone time in the end!

Step 4: Be gentle to yourself
Doing a PhD is frigging hard. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t meet a word/page goal at the end of a week. Sometimes things are going on, like other projects or work, family and friends, or you’re just exhausted from the state of the world and trying to do a doctorate in it anyways! There is loads of time.

Step 5: Adjust and Keep Writing
Because of all the things we had going on this summer, my original timeline got a little skewed. Originally, my goal that I’d discussed with my supervisors was to have my entire draft finished by the end of August, but with so many visitors and other fieldwork going on, I realized partway through the summer that this wasn’t going to be a realistic deadline, so I decided to have the body of my dissertation completed by the end of August, and leave the intro and conclusion chapters for the fall. This is exactly what I ended up doing! I’ve just emailed my introductory chapter off to my supervisors for review, and will be getting into my edits of chapters that they’ve already looked at.

And there you have it, that is basically my whole approach to writing my dissertation, and also the same thing I do for book projects! I will say though, I wrote my second book way more haphazardly than this (don’t tell my editors), and really jumped around between sections and chapters based on what I was feeling like writing in a given moment. It all gets done in the end though!

My next steps look like this: I’ll be editing the three chapters I have back from my supervisors with comments already, while they look at the last three I’ve sent in! That means there are already two that they’ve looked through and I’ve already completed the edits on, waiting for the rest of the chapters to join them over in Draft 2. I’m expecting those edits to take me into early next year, at which point I guess we start putting together my committee and getting ready to send it out! I’m not totally clear on the timeline for that process, but I’ll be looking into that in the coming weeks as well. The defence will be next year, and I’m trying my very very hardest to complete this degree in 4 years, because that it how long the funding runs for, and I want to walk the convocation stage in Oct 2024! So hold me accountable, friends!