On the Dissertation: You Don’t Have to Write It in Order

The artist Stephen Wiltshire specializes in panoramic cityscapes. After being commissioned, Wiltshire will view a city during a brief helicopter flight. Then, working entirely from memory, he will fill a room with a meticulously detailed drawing. Because his creation is often filmed in process, it also becomes a kind of performance art. He works from one side of the room to the other, drawing without sketching first, as if he were a living computer printer. Wiltshire can do this because his brain works atypically. (He was diagnosed with autism at age 3.)

Now imagine writing the way Wiltshire draws, starting with the opening sentence of a manuscript and working your way sequentially to the end. To do that, you would have to see everything in your head beforehand. Most people don’t think or write that way. And most people can’t — especially when it comes to large writing projects like a dissertation.

Yet so many academic writers still try. Some never stop themselves from lining up at the start of a draft and pushing through to the end. Every year I see doctoral students compose that way. And always, I see them struggle. Just recently I talked with a graduate student about a seminar paper he’s planning this spring. He feels guilty, he confessed, that he doesn’t have “the perfect paper in my head” when he sits down to write. “My writing comes out messy,” he said, “and I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

So far in the “On the Dissertation” series, I’ve focused on how to find a research topic and how to write the introduction. Now here’s some advice on writing the full manuscript.

Much like that struggling graduate student, I used to write in a linear style when I was in college. I composed longhand in those days, and labored mightily over my opening. As I wrote, I would constantly double back to add and subtract things. My manuscripts would end up so cluttered and complicated that I was the only one who could decipher them to type them.

My repeated returns to insert and delete show that, despite my efforts, I actually could not compose from beginning to end. In fact, I was revising as I went along because things kept occurring to me. My writing process unfolded that way because for me — and for most people — writing is thinking, not just a record of your thoughts. Only by actually writing do you figure out what you want to say, and how you should say it.

Writers confront that truth sooner or later. “I have to write to discover what I am doing,” Flannery O’Connor once said in a letter to her literary agent. “ ... I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.” O’Connor understood that writing and revision intertwine in a continuous thinking process. That process is not necessarily linear.

Unless you can think like Stephen Wiltshire, it follows that you should usually avoid a start-to-finish approach to dissertation writing. To compose a compelling introduction, you need to be able to see the manuscript as a whole and reflect on it. But you can’t see it whole until it’s got a beginning, middle, and end. When you get to that vantage point, it will prove much easier to write the introduction, and that intro will probably be less prosaic than if you’re trying to summarize a manuscript before you’ve actually written it.

I keep returning to motifs of sight because it helps you as a writer to see your work before you. One way to do that is to design a procedure that will allow you to alternate short and long views of it. Ernest Hemingway advised that “The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along.” Of course he was talking about fiction, but his advice applies readily to writing of all kinds. When your work gets too long for you to read in full daily, Hemingway suggested that you go back part way each day (“two or three chapters”) and give it a full read-through each week. “Thatʼs how you make it all of one piece,” he said.

Another way to see your work is to literally lay it out in front of you. Working on a long essay years before the internet, a young John McPhee encountered difficulty moving from his copious notes to actually writing the thing. Then he balanced a 32-foot-long plank across two sawhorses. He arranged his notecards on top of it and moved them around until he found a good order for them. In an essay called “Structure” that he published decades later at the age of 81, McPhee recalled that “Nothing in that arrangement changed across the many months of writing.”

McPhee’s experience shows how helpful it can be to see the whole of your work at once. Unfortunately, computers only display a screen’s worth at a time. So here’s a tip: Find your own equivalent to what McPhee did. You probably don’t have a 32-foot space to lay out a plank (and I find myself wondering where McPhee found one), but you can print out your draft, or outline it on a white board, or find your own technology to allow you to see everything all together. Stay open to possibility.

Exactly how might you write a long paper — or dissertation chapter, or dissertation — out of order?

Here’s a compositional tip: After you outline or otherwise get a sense of your overall task, start writing at the point where you’re most confident of what you want to say. Continue writing from that point until you’re less sure, or you reach a natural resting point. Then look for another point where you feel secure about your ideas, and write from there. Keep creating chunks of exposition in this way. After you have a few, you’ll start to see how they fit together.

Sometimes you’ll create a chunk that doesn’t belong with what you’re doing right then. Maybe you were working on one dissertation chapter and you got an idea that belongs to another. Write that idea out anyway and store it in a file without worrying about exactly where it’ll go. The material you’ve set aside can prove a frugal source later on. When you finish your main task, return to that file. You may just find that most of your introduction lies there in pieces, waiting to be stitched together.

My own writing got faster and better when I started working out of order instead of trying to push straight through. My essays (like this one) have benefited from a more flexible approach. Writing from the middle also helped me work through longer projects — including my dissertation, which I did not write in order.

In essence, I’m suggesting that you allow your thoughts to flow before you lock down the structure that will best express them.

“The argument comes in the act of the performance and not prior to it,” Elisa Tamarkin, an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a recent Chronicle Review roundtable discussion on literary criticism. Your thinking is that performance — so give it free space, not a confined one in which you must march from beginning to end. Then watch your ideas — and with them, your scholarly arguments — grow in wondrous directions.